archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’m exploring some blog tools, like blogstreet…

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In the latest issue of ACMQueue, Tim Bray is interviewed about his career path and early involvement with the SGML and XML standards. While recounting, Bray makes four points about the slow pace of adoption for RDF, and reiterates his conviction that the current quality of RDF-based tools is an obstacle to their adoption and the success of the Semantic Web.
Here are Bray’s points, with some commentary based on recent experiences with RDF and OWL based ontology management tools.
1. Motivating people to provide metadata is difficult. Bray says, “If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that there’s no such thing as cheap meta-data.”
This is plainly a problem in spaces much beyond RDF. I hold the concept and the label meta-data itself partly responsible, since the term meta-data explicitly separates the descriptive/referential information from the idea of the data itself. I wager that user adoption of meta-data tools and processes will increase as soon as we stop dissociating a complete package into two distinct things, with different implied levels of effort and value. I’m not sure what a unified label for the base level unit construct made of meta-data and source data would be (an asset maybe?), but the implied devaluation of meta-data as an optional or supplemental element means that the time and effort demands of accurate and comprehensive tagging seem onerous to many users and businesses. Thus the proliferation of automated taxonomy and categorization generation tools…
2. Inference based processing is ineffective. Bray says, “Inferring meta-data doesn’t work… Inferring meta-data by natural language processing has always been expensive and flaky with a poor return on investment.”
I think this isn’t specific enough to agree with without qualification. However, I have seen analysis of a number of inferrencing systems, and they tend to be slow, especially when processing and updating large RDF graphs. I’m not a systems architect or an engineer, but it does seem that none of the various solutions now available directly solves the problem of allowing rapid, real-time inferrencing. This is an issue with structures that change frequently, or during high-intensity periods of the ontology life-cycle, such as initial build and editorial review.
3. Bray says, “To this day, I remain fairly unconvinced of the core Semantic Web proposition. I own the domain name RDF.net. I’ve offered the world the RDF.net challenge, which is that for anybody who can build an actual RDF-based application that I want to use more than once or twice a week, I’ll give them RDF.net. I announced that in May 2003, and nothing has come close.”
Again, I think this needs some clarification, but it brings out a serious potential barrier to the success of RDF and the Semantic Web by showcasing the poor quality of existing tools as a direct negative influencer on user satisfaction. I’ve heard this from users working with both commercial and home-built semantic structure management tools, and at all levels of usage from core to occasional.
To this I would add the idea that RDF was meant for interpretation by machines not people, and as a consequence the basic user experience paradigms for displaying and manipulating large RDF graphs and other semantic constructs remain unresolved. Mozilla and Netscape did wonders to make the WWW apparent in a visceral and tangible fashion; I suspect RDF may need the same to really take off and enter the realm of the less-than-abstruse.
4. RDF was not intended to be a Knowledge Representation language. Bray says, “My original version of RDF was as a general-purpose meta-data interchange facility. I hadn’t seen that it was going to be the basis for a general-purpose KR version of the world.”
This sounds a bit like a warning, or at least a strong admonition against reaching too far. OWL and variants are new (relatively), so it’s too early to tell if Bray is right about the scope and ambition of the Semantic Web effort being too great. But it does point out that the context of the standard bears heavily on its eventual functional achievement when put into effect. If RDF was never meant to bear its current load, then it’s not a surprise that an effective suite of RDF tools remains unavailable.

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Two thumbs up to Anders Ramsay for organizing IA meetups down in NYC. I had the chance to come to one of these regular get-togethers in January, and meet Anders, Lou Rosenfeld, Liz Danzico, Peter Van Dijk, and quite a few others while in town to see clients. After some refreshing beverages at Vig Bar, we moved on to the Mercer Kitchen for a swanky, tasty dinner. Word of mouth has it that the duck at is a religious experience. And it’s always nice to put faces to a great many blog posts.
Anders posted some photos here:
http://ia.meetup.com/14/photos/
I don’t see any of the umbrellas decorating the interior of the main dining area in the photos – but you had to look up to see them hanging from the ceiling in the first place.
Visual Puzzler Challenge: someone in these photos is a System Architect maquerading as an IA – can you spot the imposter?

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Focused dialog between senior practitioners who come together to share experiences, insights, practices, knowledge, and thinking in a face to face forum is one of the critical mechanisms for the healthy evolution and growth of any professional field. Despite the proliferation of venues for advancing the collective knowledge of Information Architects (more than three or four years ago, certainly), the Information Architecture community lacks a forum that mixes teaching, discussion, and exploration of previous experiences amongst a small and focused group of accomplished Information Architects who are together in the same room.
I’m thinking of something like the Master Classes common in music, painting, and some of the other fine arts. An Information Architecture master class would occupy some of the space between the short-form conference session of an hour’s duration, the half-day or one-day workshop on a broad topic (like building a CMS), and the general UX get-togethers of networking, showcasing, or other varieties that we have now.
The benefits and value of a forum like this over a scattershot conference agenda or a one-way workshop presentation structure are substantial when judged against limited training opportunities and budgets. A gathering of senior practitioners with a defined focus, moving beyond the summary or introductory aspects of a topic, offering substantial examples of relevant knowledge and experience, and providing time to cover a subject in depth with discussion would surely attract interest, participation, and likely even payment.
Now for the call to action: It’s time to bring about Master Classes for Information Architecture. Who’s game to work on this?

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In October, I had the chance to attend the UI9 User Interface Conference here in Cambridge. I was registered for the full-day session Deconstructing Web Applications: Learning from the Best Designs, hosted by Hagan Rivers of Two Rivers Consulting. I also listened in on a few minutes of Adaptive Path’s workshop From Construct to Structure: Information Architecture from Mental Models. Recognized, well-informed speakers presented both sessions, and did so capably.
Deconstructing Web Applications opened with a useful theoretical section in which Rivers identified a basic model for defining a web application, continued into a breakdown of the base-level IA of a typical web app as presented to users, and then walked through a number of examples of how widely available web applications adhere to or diverge from this model and structure. The material in each portion of the session was well illustrated with screen shots and examples, and it’s clear that Rivers is a comfortable and experienced presenter who understands her material. I’ve recently made use of her framework for the structure of web applications in a number of my active projects.
The session made five bold statements about what attendees would learn or accomplish. In light of very tall requirements to live up to, Rivers did an admirable job of presenting an overview and introduction to several complex applications in a single day’s time. But I can’t say that I have a sense of the core Information Architecture or structure behind the tools reviewed during the session, or an in-depth understanding of why the design teams responsible for them chose a given form. Deconstruction was a poorly defined academic movement whose virtues and drawbacks still generate vehement debates, but as way of seeking understanding (and a choice for a conference session title), it implies a rigorous level of thoroughness that went unmet.
The emotional response section of the workshop was the least developed of the broad areas. It digresses the most from the focus of the rest of talk in form and content. I suspect it represents an area of current interest for Rivers, who included it in order to supplement the material in her program with a timely topic that carries important implications. Emotional design is certainly a growing area that deserves more investigation, especially in the ways that it’s tenets influence basic design methods and their products. However, in the absence of clearer formulation in the terms of reference from Rivers basic theoretical framework for web applications, this portion of the session felt tacked on to the end.
Of course it’s true that you shouldn’t literally believe what you read in any marketing copy – even if it’s written by User Interface Engineering (or possibly the PR firm hired to create their conference website?). But there are unfortunate consequences in creating infulfilled expectations: when you have to sell attendance at a conference to your management, who then expect you to share comprehensive knowledge with colleagues; when conference attendees make business or design decisions thinking they have the full body of information required when in fact they have only an overview; and when we as consumers of conference content don’t insist on full quality and depth across all of the forums we have for sharing professional knowledge.

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Cen­turies from now, robot arche­ol­o­gists from future soci­eties will dis­cover these acro­bat­i­cally inclined fig­urines made of cir­cuit com­po­nents at a dig site on the loca­tion of a long-forgotten human city, and mis­tak­enly label them as reli­gious fer­til­ity icons cre­ated by early com­puter artists dur­ing the dawn of the new machine age…
Or. in the words of the co-worker who sent me this origin­gally, “And for those who’ve seen Team Amer­ica World Police, this is nuthin’.”

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While looking around inside the Sharepoint documentation, I found this tasty snippet that explains a great deal about the way Microsoft approaches information architecture, probably design and architecture:
“Creating an effective category structure requires planning and some understanding of how others might organize the content.”
Yes, that’s right – you only need SOME understanding of how others MIGHT organize the content. No need to get the right people, even – anyone off the street will do, as long as they are clearly a member of the group ‘others’, so maybe even the neighbor’s kid would be fine.
Besides, I’m sure the inconvenience associated with trying to develop a decent information architecture informed by knowledge of users’ mental models would probably get in the way of all that planning that’s so important to the success of your portal project.

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Here’s a few examples of how Gmail has fared at matching the content of email messages to my Gmail address with advertising content.
A forwarded review of King Arthur gives me “King Arthur Competition” and “King Arthur – Was He Real?” For something this easy and contemporary, I would have expected to see suggestions about movie times and locations, offers to publish my screenplay, and collections of King Arthur collectibles.
An anecdote about Eamon de Valera delivers Shillelagh (sic.), “Irish Clan Aran Sweaters”, and “Classic Irish Imports”. This truly an easy one, since it’s a small pool of similar source terms to sort through. “No, I meant Eamon de Valera, the famous Irish ballet dancer…” Will Gmail suggest links with correct spellings at some future date, or offer correct links to things that you’ve mis-spelled?
A message about another forwarded email sent a few moments before brings “Groupwise email”, “Ecarboncopy.com”, and “Track Email Reading Time”. These are accurate by topic, but not interesting.
A recent email exchange on how to use an excel spreadsheet template card sorting analysis offers four links. Three are sponsored, the other is ‘related’. The sponsored links include “OLAP Excel Browser”, “Microsoft Excel Templates”, and “Analysis Services Guide”. A related link is, “Generating Spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR”. These are simple word matches – none of them really approached the central issue of the conversation, which concerned how to best use automated tools for card sorting.
Last month, in the midst of an exchange about making vacation plans for the 4th of July with family, Gmail offered “Free 4th of July Clip Art”, “Fireworks Weather Forecasts”, and “U.S. Flags and patriotic items for sale”. Given the obvious 4th of July theme, this performance is less impressive, but still solid, offering me a convenience-based service in a timely and topical fashion.
Most interesting of all, a message mentioning a relative of mine named Arena yields links for “Organic Pastas” and “Fine Italian Pasta Makers”. Someone’s doing something right with controlled vocabularies and synonym rings, since it’s clear that Google knows Arena is an Italian surname in this instance and not a large structure for performances: even though it only appeared in the text of the email once, and there was no context to indicate which meaning it carried.
Beyond the obvious – you send me a message, Gmail parses it for terms and phrases that match a list of sponsored links, and I see the message and the links side-by-side – what’s happening here?
Three things:
1. Gmail is product placement for your email. In the same way that the Coke can visible on the kitchen table during a passing shot in the latest romantic comedy from Touchstone pictures is more an advertising message than part of the overall mise en scene, those sponsored links are a commercially driven element of the experience of Gmail that serves a specific agenda exterior to your own.
2. Gmail converts advertisements (sponsored links) into a form of hypertext that should be called advertext. Gmail is creating a new advertext network composed of Google’s sponsored links in companion to your correspondence. Before Gmail, the sponsored links that Google returned in accompaniment to search queries were part of an information space outside your immediate personal universe,
3. Gmail connects vastly different information spaces and realms of thinking. Google’s sponsored links bridge any remaining gap between personal, private, individual conversations, and the commercialized subset of cyberspace that is Google’s ad-verse. You will inevitably come to understand the meaning and content of your messages differently as a result of seeing them presented in a context informed by and composed of advertising.
The implications of the third point are the most dramatic. When all of our personal spaces are fully subject to colonization by the ad-verse, what communication is left that isn’t an act of marketing or advertisement?

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I first saw Edward Tufte deliver his well-known seminar Presenting Data and Information in the heady summer days of ’99. At the time, I was working for a small interactive agency in downtown Boston. I’d heard about Tufte’s seminar from a former colleague, and was eager to learn more about Information Design, user interfaces, and whatever else was relevant to creating user experiences and information spaces. Tufte’s seminars also seemed to tap into some sort of transformational mojo; the person I was working with went in as a Web Developer, and came back a Usability Specialist. The logic of this still escapes me, since I haven’t heard the esteemed Professor mention usability, let alone lecture on it yet: I think it’s more a good lesson in how desperate Seth was to escape writing HTML.
But I’m getting away from the point.
In ’99, Tufte delivered a solid and succinct grounding in Information Design history and principles, supported by frequent references to his gorgeous self-published titles. Bravo.
He promptly followed this with a short segment on “The Web”, which was mostly irrelevant, and wholly behind the times. Professor Tufte’s chief gripes at the time included excessive use of chrome on buttons, bulleted lists, and unformatted tables. He was mired in recounting the failings of HTML 2.0. Outside, it was 1999. But in the lecture hall, it felt more like 1996… I was embarrassed to see an old master dancing poorly to new music.
Forward five years, and now clients are asking me to attend Professor Tufte’s presentation in New York, again in the summer. I expected to be severely disappointed; if Tufte was this far behind when there wasn’t much history in the first place, then it could only have gotten worse.
And so I was pleasantly surprised. The Information Design showcase was like refreshing cool rain after too much time using low-fidelity charting applications. But what really caught my ears was his ready embrace of core Information Architecture language and outlook. Dr. Tufte is hip to IA now. He even gave us some good homework: the session handout lists 11 classics of 20th century Information Architecture – on page 2, right after the day’s agenda.
Yes, his piece on the Web was still a bit behind – static navigation systems and generic corporate marketing site IA aren’t exactly cutting edge topics, and it’s hardly open-minded to say that there’s no reason for having more than a single navigation bar at the top of a page – but at least it was behind in the right direction.
And it was still nice outside.
Kudos to the old master for picking better music.
And for being canny enough to know that it’s good for business to encourage eveyrone to take notes, but not provide note paper in the regstration packet – its for sale of course at the back of the hall…

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From the good peo­ple of the EFF:
Sen­a­tor Orrin Hatch’s new Induc­ing Infringe­ment of Copy­right Act (S.2560, Induce Act) would make it a crime to aid, abet, or induce copy­right infringe­ment. He wants us all to think that the Induce Act is no big deal and that it only tar­gets “the bad guys” while leav­ing “the good guys” alone. He says that it doesn’t change the law; it just clar­i­fies it.
He’s wrong.
Right now, under the Supreme Court’s rul­ing in Sony Corp. v. Uni­ver­sal City Stu­dios, Inc. (the Beta­max VCR case), devices like the iPod and CD burn­ers are 100% legal — not because they aren’t some­times used for infringe­ment, but because they also have legit­i­mate uses. The Court in Sony called these “sub­stan­tial non-infringing uses.” This has been the rule in the tech­nol­ogy sec­tor for the last 20 years. Bil­lions of dol­lars and thou­sands of jobs have depended on it. Indus­tries have blos­somed under it. But the Induce Act would end that era of inno­va­tion. Don’t let this hap­pen on your watch — tell your Sen­a­tors to fight the Induce Act!

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