i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Sarah Palin's Book, Going Rogue, came out last week but the blogosphere quickly noticed one missing element: an index. Not willing to give up a golden opportunity to carefully evaluate the content of Ms. Palin's, several blogs/pubs created their own indexes for Mrs. Palin's masterpiece, including Huffington Post, The New Republic, and Slate.

Hakia is a company that uses semantic search, taking into account word context and a hiearchy of categories that a search term might fall into.  Supposedly Microsoft's Bing's category designations are based on Hakia.  The company also recently (about a month ago) came out with a commercial ontology product called Contexa to help advertisers better connect with relavent web content.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/business/11unboxed.html

I found a number of open source ontologies that are being developed.  I wanted to get a feel for how far the idea has come.  This one stood out -- I stopped reviewing it after the browser had loaded over 500k lines.

It begs the question - how big is too big when it comes to the useability of an Ontology? 

Warning - this link may freeze your browser - http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/diseaseontology/trunk/HumanDO.obo?view...

 According to this article, it looks like there is some movement on creating a semantic web search, though the article writer seems a bit skeptical of its ability to deliver. T2 (a new project by the makers of Twine), which may come out by the end of the year, is hoping to index the top few dozen sites in major categories. Interestingly, T2 will be adding the semantic tags, not the owners of the sites themselves.

Wish I'd known about this taxonomy when I was teaching critical thinking. It really would have provided a good guide for structuring lessons.

Think I'm flopping towards the "Application" level with mixed success right now, with occassional backsliding. How about all of you? And do you think conceptualizing the learning process this way is useful for you as students? As teachers?

(The longer linked piece is even more acerbic, but worth a look if you have the time.)

As with just about everything for which one would create an ontology, the beer ontology could have been done a few different ways, but I actually think having fermentation style on the first level works well and seems logical (to me, anyway, as someone who has a few batches of homebrew under my belt). However, there are a few picky points of contention. "Bitter" doesn't really belong in its own alongside those styles because a bitter beer is usually a heavily hopped pale ale, and since you include pale ale as its own term, then bitter could spring from that.

CNN article: English getting its millionth word [...]

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One million words! Wow. Since English is not my native language, having to catch up with roughly 995.000 more words is not really good news for me. But then, how do you count the words that comprise a language? How do you define "a word"? What is "a word"?

According to the article, linguists state that

Most of us have heard of service dogs — but what about service horses, chimpanzees, or parrots? Should they be treated the same way under the Americans with Disabilities Act that more "typical" or "expected" service animals are? Or should there be different categories within the designation of "service animal" to determine which companions are allowed in which public places? That's the subject of this December 31, 2008 New York Times Magazine story.