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Showing posts with label Universe of Knowledge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Universe of Knowledge. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

What about data?


Data is a buzzword today but it can mean many different things, writes Michael Clarke
There is a lot of excitement about data at the moment in STM publishing but when people talk about it they can mean many different things.
First and foremost there is research data itself. A lot of discussion is currently underway to make research data more accessible and to make sure it is properly archived. There is a need for more data repositories that can handle the diverse array of researcher data and maintain it over time.
There are some interesting data archives springing up that are very specialised. The geneticists are way out in front on this with Flybase and Wormbase and the like. But the notion is spreading. Archaeologists recently launched one called tDAR. DataONE is under development to archive ecological and environmental data. Dryad is providing archiving of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Given the myriad data repositories, a lot of work is being done on making these data sets linked and interoperable so they can be interrogated and mined. This is one of the goals for the semantic web championed by Tim Berners-Lee and others.
Second there is there is the publishing of research data – or of linking to it from journal articles. There are questions here about what is appropriate to publish and what sort of demand you can place on peer reviewers. Publishing supplementary data is becoming more and more common, however, and as more and more data is being generated. I was glad to see NISO get involved recently and begin to recommend some standards around this.
Third you have publication metrics. There is a lot of experimentation today around article-level metrics and alternatives to the impact factor, or altmetrics. These include looking at citations to articles independent of the journal they appear in. This makes a lot of sense as, even in the best journals, there are some duds. Similarly, in the second- and third-tier journals there are some gems. Public Library of Science (PLoS), with its open-access mega journal PLoS ONE is a particular champion of article-level metrics as one way to help user navigate through the wealth of content published in the title. 
PLoS is also experimenting with a number of altmetrics that, at the moment, are of questionable value. For example, usage and coverage in social media probably tells us more about the size of the author’s research field and his or her ability to network than they do about the underlying science. The number of people who have bookmarked a paper in Mendeley is interesting but again biases towards large fields (and, of course, to the subset of scientists that use Mendeley). But still, the experimentation is interesting and welcome despite its limitations.
A fourth kind of data is usage data and some really interesting things are happening around the intersection of semantic metadata (really metadata of all kinds) and usage data. Publishers are beginning to cross-tabulate usage data with data about content to ask interesting questions. What kinds of content are different user groups interacting with? When members of a user group begin to look at a certain paper or set of papers outside their field, is that a signal of an interdisciplinary breakthrough? Are there ways to leverage these dynamic communities of interest to help readers find information more efficiently and to find information of relevance that they might have missed? And, of course, publishers are exploring how they can build on this information to generate revenue via product upsells and targeted advertising.
This is the kind of user interaction that Amazon and others have been using for a long time and but is just starting to make inroads in STM. In some ways it is more interesting in STM than in consumer sectors because of the vast quantity of information; the goal is not simply to sell more saucepans to people that bought the ‘Joy of Cooking’ but rather to better understand how very smart people are using very complex information.
Michael Clarke is executive vice president for product and market development at Silverchair Information Systems. Look out for more of his thoughts in the interview in the June/July 2012 issue of Research Information magazine

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Dewey Decimal Classification - Making it easy for you and for me



Did you know that the Dewey decimal classification makes it easy for you to access books in a library?
Ever imagined how impossible it would have been to manage knowledge and arrange books, documents in a logical sequence, group and order in a library without a knowledge classification system? And do you know it is the contribution of a young student assistant in the Library of Amherst College that revolutionised the library science and the profession of librarianship by evolving a classification system for organising information related to various fields and their retrieval in the conventional library?
The code
Well, it is Melvil Dewey, hailing from a poor family in a small town in Upper New York State, who devised the monumental Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system or the number building theory when he was 21 years old. The first edition of DDC was published in 1876. Thanks to DDC, the librarianship changed from a vocation to the present knowledge management profession. Even now the DDC rolls on with upgraded editions, its 22nd edition has four volumes and the Web Dewey and its online services are under OCLC, an organisation striving for spread of knowledge without commercial temptations. DDC has remained the popular and foremost classification system even today. But what is this DDC ? It is a hierarchical classification system that divides all knowledge into 10 main classes and numbers them 0 to 9 and a decimal at the end of the 3rd digit. The digit `0' is used to fill in the missing digits in the main class numbers.The following are main class numbers:000 : Computers, information and general reference
100: Philosophy and Psychology
200: Religion
300: Social Sciences
400: Languages
500: Sciences
600: Technology
700: Arts and Recreation
800: Literature
900: History and GeographyDewey was also the key personality in establishing the American Library Association in 1876 and was the co-founder and editor of Library Journal. He was the founder of world's first Library School in 1887. He passed away at the age of 80 on December 26, 1931.