TaxonomicSoftware

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[edit] software choices for taxonomic study

http://chinabone.lth.bclub.org.uk/albums/things/scat_dice.thumb.jpg

(link list and reviews please)

[edit] unwritten:

[edit] drafted:

1). http://del.icio.us - by Joshua Shachter

A 'social bookmarks manager'. This tool enables us to keep bookmarks on a website, accessible from any computer connected to the Internet. The links are published blog style, in a temporal list, but also syndicatable via RSS, so it's relatively easy to build them into other websites and software tools. The most interesting part of this project, taxonomically speaking, is the ability to 'tag' links - associate links and groups of links by giving them arbitrary text strings as instant categories. For example I choose to label each of my links to the Uo's sister universities, and related texts/links with the tag 'self-institutions' (see http://del.icio.us/saul/self-institutions). These appear under my name (as in the link above) and are syndicatable also. But, if someone sees me categorising these things and is interested, not only can they 'subscribe' to my new 'self-institutions' feed, they can add to it. If they start using the same tag-space then at http://del.icio.us/tag/self-institutions, a merge of both of our lists of links will emerge. This happens regularly - people collaborate on sharing tag-space resulting in emergent taxonomies. The 'geo' tag is a good example of this group use of tagspace (see http://del.icio.us/tag/geo). A related project is the Internet Topic Exchange - a blog-conversation tracker: http://topicexchange.com/

In fact, please consider this an invitation to use the 'taxonomy' tag on del.icio.us (see http://del.icio.us/tag/taxonomy) to collaborate on producing a link-list at the Faculty of Taxonomy.

2). http://audioscrobbler.com / http://last.fm

These two software projects (now with a unified development team) both do musical taste 'profiling'. Last.fm feeds each user an individual stream from their vast mp3 collection, and the user is allowed to fast forward or listen to tracks, or press the 'I love this' button. These three simple choices, over time form a musical profile for each listener. These profiles are then associated and cross-referenced to build up maps of affiliated tastes, and to some extent predict what music users might like, although they may never have heard of it - but (like the amazon feature) people who liked listening to Bad Manners also listen to these other four obscure punk ska bands you've never heard of. You may also choose to listen to music that, statistically speaking according to your profile, you are least likely to enjoy listening to. Audioscrobbler works in a similar way - and profiles are shared between the projects, but Audioscrobbler is a plugin for most media players - so you download and install a plugin for winamp, or xmms, or whatever, and it reports back to audioscrobbler on what you're listening to and adds it to your profile. This project does work brilliantly, and potentially re-wires the a-priori categories of musical taste. However, taking the same idea and applying it elsewhere (to subjects other than music) might not work so easily. The problem I see is that being a 'user' - being 'profiled' is easy (you don't need to do any work to participate) but is a passive process, where intentional and considered taxonomies are not privileged. Perhaps for music it's necessary though - as the commercial categories for music production are so powerfully reinforced by the record industry that taxonomies would too easily revert to their standard structures.

3). http://dlpdev.theps.net / http://dlp.theps.net

How often do you actually use the books on your bookshelf? Maybe 0.1% of the time? And do you realise that your collection, the interconnections and paths through the knowledge contained in the books is a hugely valuable resource in itself. And do you remember who you lend books to, and don't you wish you could so they would give them back?

The Distributed Library project sets out to deal with these questions, it is a shared library catalogue where each person can nominate their collection of books as a library, and themselves as a librarian, sharing the physical paper resources, but also making public their own unique collections and categorisation systems for their books. It even provides an electronic library card system so you can keep track of who has your books.

You can use the DLP by finding your local node in this page of worldwide dlp nodes: http://dlpdev.theps.net/ListOfExistingDlpNodes or download the software and install your own.

Actually, the Distributed Library Project software as it stands does not do much

  • f anything interesting with taxonomies, but this is certainly the plan. The software

is just a part of it, however, development of existing physical shared libraries, and shelfmarking systems etc. is being concentrated on at the moment, until we can get our act together and do some more serious programming on the taxonomy sharing bit.


__4). Ontomatic - by Jo Walsh (University of Openess) / Schuyler Erle (O'Reilly Inc.)__

It's difficult to describe this piece of software, which does actually exist, but has receeded into mythological status at the moment while Jo and Schuyler work on http://indyvoter.org. It's a collaborative ontology constructor for the Semantic Web. It defies short description, but is one of the major bases for much of this text, and this entire area of research at the Uo.

In fact, the best thing would be for you to read their paper: "The Epistomat: Generating Consensus About RDF Ontologies and Rules" http://frot.org/epistomat.html

And, a text on 'ontomation' - describing it in some technical detail: http://mutemap.openmute.org/doc/ontomation-paper.html

A related paper on the 'infomesh' And, http://mutemap.openmute.org/doc/infomesh-paper.html

And 'a deeper attempt to explain the workings of the ontomatic using graphs' http://mutemap.openmute.org/doc/onto_bg.html

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