The 2010 Global Information Policy Leaders conference held on January 12- 16, 2010 in Singapore gathered the best and the brightest in technology leaders, policy makers, regulators and entrepreneurs. How this taxonomist managed an invite can only be attributed to sheer luck and moxie. As I sat in the room with thirty tech titans, I remembered the wise words of my father: “It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

Participants included Eli Noam, Professor of Economics and Finance at the Columbia Business School; Cory Ondrejka, Co-founder of Second Life; Joichi Ito, CEO Creative Commons; Joseph H. Alhadeff, Vice President for Global Public Policy / Chief Privacy Officer, Oracle Corporation; Susan Crawford, Professor / former Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy to the Obama administration; Nicklas Lundblad, SVP Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, to name a few. The conference was founded by the formidable brain, Lewis Branscomb whose titles and accomplishments too numerous to mention, and facilitated by the acutely perspicacious Viktor Mayer-Schoenbergerm author of Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in a Digital Age. A correspondent for The Economist, Kenneth Cukier will publish an article inspired by the conference on Feb 28.

Is there such a thing as anonymous data any more? Is an IP address personal information? With the proliferation of new meta-information systems capturing online behavior, how does one protect privacy without squelching innovation? At the end of the five day conference, more questions remained. Inspired by the creation and governance of Creative Commons, a Privacy Commons was deliberated but only about half the room agreed to this recourse. Some believed that the protection of PII would require more than a few nice graphical icons representing opt out rules created by a small group of “technology elites.” A more serious approach of policy, regulatory audits and laws were articulated by others to protect world citizens from exploitation.

My take away: your metadata is the new business model.

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…and riding Segways with the technorati around Sentosa island is fun

Read more from Cory Ondrejka on his blog.

Note to self: read The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, by Jonathan Zittrain (Penguin), and Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting.

At the ISKO UK event on Information Retrieval held last week at University College L,ondon, Ian Rowlands announced the result of his research project. To a large crowd of librarians, information architects and knowledge managers, he concluded that the Google Generation was a myth; that the behaviour of this younger generation was really no different than any other generation that preceded them. While technologies and tools have changed, our reactions to them and our basic behaviour has not. Access to an unprecedented amount of information has not intrinsically changed our expectations of the world.

Yet we continue to believe that books and information have been so dumbed down that anything of value has been sacrificed to deliver the ever popular sound byte. We believe that when our children use the internet as a research tool they accept any answer for THE answer and never think to validate their references. We convince ourselves that information that hasn’t been discovered over hours of pouring through card catalogues, micro fiche, and obscure rare book repositories lack depth and authority.

The truth is that information is still the same. There is the good and the bad, the subjective and reactionary, the obscure and popular. It is simply our access to it that has changed and that directly affects the professional information or knowledge worker. Sadly, our days may be numbered.

This month’s cover story for Wired Magazine, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, touches on the changes the petabyte generation will have.

Here, an excerpt from Chris Anderson:

“This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”

The generation, Google or otherwise, shall prevail, as they should do.

Theresa Regli’s opening session on the Vendor-neutral Approach to Selecting the Right DAM was standing room only. CMS Watch has published its Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008 which can be purchased for the large sum of $1900. An interesting debate followed in a panel session regarding its perceived value. A self proclaimed “world-class thought leader and strategist in social media” challenged the need to purchase such reports when the same information could be found on networks and online reviews for free. Theresa responded that since so much information existed on the web today, the value in her report was in the time saved sifting through a plethora of noise to get to the facts needed to make sound business decisions.

Noise was prevalent at this year’s London conference. It took a disciplined ear to mute the proclamations of the evangelists to get to the meat of any given topic. And please, can we stop evangelizing and start achieving?

Here’s hoping that next conference I feel more inspired and encouraged rather than exhausted from enduring so many lectures.

Don’t confuse the taxonomy with cataloging.

This is one of the easiest mistakes to make. As you begin to understand how a taxonomy works, it’s common to try and express everything in a taxonomic structure.

A taxonomy never takes the place of cataloging or indexing at the object level. A taxonomy never describes an object, it houses the controlled vocabularies that are used to describe the object.

Huh?

I may use a geographic locations taxonomy to find the term to catalogue a photograph of an old power station in London, but I would not use the geographic taxonomy to describe my photograph.

From a meat-and-potatoes (a delicious meal) introduction to taxonomies (from the indefatigable Seth Earley) to BBC’s proof-of-concept demonstration of harvesting Wikipedia’s structured URL’s to import as controlled vocabularies, to analysis of auto-categorization and auto-classification tools available on the market, the conference covered a wide swath. An archive panel even delved into the challenges of raising money for digitisation projects which, while not exactly a metadata or taxonomy topic, resonated as a common ROI dilemma.

It was my first time chairing a conference and I enjoyed myself much more than I thought. Mostly because it was an absolute joy to be in a room with information architects, taxonomists, library scientists, information technologists, XML specialists, and knowledge organizers with such keen and sustained focus. There in the middle of the room were Leonard and Sheena Will, who have been doing information management and thesaurus work since way before the first publication of Wired. Next to them was Stella Dextre-Clarke, the award-winning information consultant who is currently advising the Bridgeman Art Library. Yeah, you heard me right. There are awards for information retrieval!

Unlike other conferences dedicated to taxonomy or search, this small and intimate gathering felt more like a professional association that allowed non-members in for the sake of edification. Even the obligatory vendor presentations were low key and casual.

Here’s what others are saying:

The importance of Taxonomy and Metadata

Semantic Revolution

Patrick Walker, Head of Content Partnerships, EMEA/Google, was the keynote speaker.  Another American living abroad, his opening remarks focused mainly on YouTube and its social impact on the new order. Creating content is out; hosting content is in.  Funny, he did not mention the recent announcement that Google and IBM are planning to join forces and build a huge data center over the next two years to enable cloud computing (30 acres outside of Dallas, Texas, where all broadband pipes lead apparently, is the site of their next venture).  Instead, he presented the archivists with views into the wacky world of Chris Cocker (“Leave Britney alone!”) and some very amusing parodies that have been posted, and finally, portions of the BBC news archive.  Shocking!  The crowd was stunned.

In all their efforts to raise funds and to justify digitization, business partnerships have eluded many archives.  If Google/YouTube is looking for content, then our news and television archives are an oasis.  More and more people are hanging around in hammocks, waiting.

I had lunch with Pam Fisher of Moving Image Research the other day and she told me was willing to digitize hours of video content for free in return for a percentage of the revenue she is certain it will generate.  There, I said it.  Someone should call her and offer up just a small portion of their archives as a safe experiment.  I think you’ll find that small wins will justify the digitization of your entire collection.

I am in Framingham working with the Bose Company and SEW Consulting discussing the role of metadata and taxonomy in managing their advertising and marketing content. And I cannot help but make correlations with their noise reduction headphones and content management.

The wave technology developed by Dr. Bose is based on a principle that mere mortals such as myself (not those super audiophiles that tend to flame Bose), can only perceive sound on a fairly limited basis. By focusing on that very narrow margin, his technology eliminates the noise waves of what is superfluous to our ears and delivers an enhanced audio experience through his headphones.

Not surprising, the biggest complaint I am hearing from the company is data overload. No conventions, no metadata, no taxonomy and just an overall mess of digital assets in a folder structure (at best).

Taxonomy and metadata strategies work on the same principle: eliminate the data that is superfluous and manage the data that is within our narrow margin of comprehension. How best to proceed with data reduction? Through collection management, metadata standardization, and a polyhierarchical faceted classification; streamline workflows and allow for electronic annotations to alleviate the cumbersome email approval process. Did you know that Dr. Bose has sole ownership of the company? 100% ownership. It is a unique cultural environment.