On Sep 29, 2006, at 12:31 PM, Leonard Mada wrote:
What I want is an amalgam of both, and even more than that. Simple
keywords are to primitive and do not offer the wanted advantages when
you want to search something. e.g. I recently searched for the term
"febrile neutropenia" on Pubmed and retrieved 1883 search results.
This search was not the most sensitive, though. Searching for
"febrile" and "neutropenia" yields 3500 results. Searching for "fever"
and "neutropenia" results in 3283 hits.
Thanks for this practical example Leonard. It's a good one!
As the sensitivity of the search increases, so drops the specificity.
Most of those documents would have been useless for me. And by the
way, "febrile neutropenia" is not such a common term. If you search
for something common, you would have one-two orders of magnitude more
search results.
There is definitively the need for something better, and I believe a
form of hierarchical keywords (or tags) could offer some relief, but
there is definitely need for a more thorough thought on this subject.
Given all the stuff going on with RDF these days, take a look at SKOS:
<http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/06/22/skos.html>
It's basically a hierarchical concept vocabulary. So you define a
controlled taxonomy by creating concepts, and specifying their
relations. To then link into that taxonomy, you just have something
like:
<dc:subject rdf:resource="http://ex.net/joe/concepts/foo"/>
My taxonomy is here (though not very well developed):
<http://www.users.muohio.edu/darcusb/meta/topics>
For software that understands RDF and SKOS, then, it will know that foo
is, say, a more narrow concept of bar. I think that's what we all need.
The trick is how to do this in a GUI, and how to offer users both
useful constraint and flexibility?
I could imagine in, say, a web service environment, users defining
themselves as parts of particular communities, and then having
dedicated taxonomies that could be plugged in, all fairly seamlessly.
So imagine a general taxonomy, maybe hooked into wordnet and linked to
Wikipedia, and then more focused ones for different communities (law,
medicine, philosophy). You add and search by tags using auto-complete.
Also, this way you do not have always to remember every keyword
("tag") that should be included in the tree (the tree is simply there;
no user would create for every new search a new, very different tree;
rather, most trees would be used for a number of searches, and a new
tree would most often be a tweek of a previous tree, not a de novo
invention).
As a user I find this very attractive. The problem is, what happens
when the term you want doesn't exist?
Note, I am explicitly thinking of a multi-user -- internet-scale --
context here. Zotero is going live next week, and these guys are really
going to push innovation in this space. They are adding auto-complete
tags, and will later be adding server functionality and
social-networking/data merging and such. So I think we need to think in
internet-scale terms.
I have over >2500 articles on my PC. They are arranged hierarchically
in subdirectories. The problem is:
- articles may belong to more than one directory (aka category)
-- I would like to have more than one tree for my articles, but you
can't do this on a filesystem
- I need sometime searches on more than one subdirectory from
different directory trees (this is indeed difficult to do on a file
system)
- there are many other limitations, but currently its the best method
to organise so many articles
When you have so many articles, the organization of them becomes a
real nightmare.
I think you'll really appreciated Zotero. It has hierarchical
"collections", which are just virtual folder (though in the current
version, selection a parent collection does not select the children;
hopefully they've fixed that).
So there tags and collections are two different ways to organization
items.
I believe that hierarchical keywords are a good start (!!and I do not
have any better idea right know!!). Therefore, I believe that a little
brainstorming would be quite useful.
Agreed. Take a look at Zotero next week and see what you think. I'm in
touch with the developers, so hopefully we can keep moving towards a
really innovative solution here where we all benefit.
Bruce
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