i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I think that San Francisco's current system of regulating street food vendors is an example of a classification problem. Personally, I think that street food should be classified under activity that the health deparment regulates because I think food service is related to public health. But that's not how it is in San Francisco.

Published Monday, the NYT wrote about the Never-Ending Language Learning system (NELL). This article touches upon many topics from recent lectures!

One interesting service that provides an ontology for common things is Freebase (which is now part of Google). You can look for a concept/person/place and Freebase will tell you different domains in which the concept is used. For example, if you look for Berkeley, you can refine your search for Berkeley (USA), Berkeley (UK), or Berkeley (University). You can go crazy and see that all the information that Freebase has about Berkeley is available as an RDF file.

http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

I dug up this almost year old op-ed published in The Chronicle of higher education because it highlights some of the most challenging problems associated with metadata, classification and describing collections.

Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain and his team showcased Collage at the Berkman Center today. What's Collage? It's a tool that facilitates the creation of "an online casebook that's free, remixable and that can be used not just for a specific class, but for instructors" in law schools.

In the age of information huge datasets aren't hard to come by. Everyone is trying to make sense of the rampant information made available to them. One of the largest (at least in terms of potential size) datasets to be analyzed is — somewhat ironically — the universe. It's big. 

Last week, NYT featured Julius Eulberg, a German who loves collecting antiques, especially porcelain birds. This piece made me think of Kimra's chapter-- especially the part about retrieving the chair. Can you imagine having to fetch one of his 300 + birds? How would he describe it in order for you know which porcelain bird he was talking about?

NPR recently featured a story on religiously-specific search engines. These search engines filter all results based on specific religious beliefs. There are currently separate search engines for Muslims, Christians and Jews. Besides the controversy over it being considered censorship, these search engines raise questions on how the returned results are being selected; particularly who is doing the filtering and what criteria is being used.

This blog would like to explore two different Identification / Organization approaches to explore value in their retrieval results.