By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Clay Shirkey: Semi-Structured Meta-Data Has a Posse: A Response to Gene Smith, September 16, 2005

It is tempting to depict Clay Skirkey's defense of tagging as setting up a false dilemma between tagging and classification, but I think his view is more that tagging forms one part of a wider picture. "Full text indexing, link analysis, trust networks, and related techniques now accomplish about 80% of what classification used to do for us." That's an image I can live with more easily than the caricature view that 'tagging will by itself replace classification'. More...

Le portail, mis en oeuvre par Etalab, la mission chargée de l’ouverture et du partage des données publiques du SGMAP (Secrétariat général pour la modernisation de l’action publique), prend une dimension résolument sociale, en accueillant les données et les contributions de la société civile. Plus...

Les systèmes de gestion de bases de données relationnelles (SGBDR), avec des produits phares comme le système commercial Oracle Serveur, ou un open source comme MySQL, font partie des logiciels les plus populaires au monde. Le Mooc "Bases de données relationnelles : comprendre pour maîtriser" ( #BADOR ) a pour ambition d’expliquer comment fonctionnent ces systèmes. Il permettra à leurs utilisateurs de mieux les maîtriser, notamment en comprenant les problèmes de performance que ces systèmes peuvent rencontrer. Plus...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Border Crossings: Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building
Good overview of the challenges inherent in building a metadata standard, and specifically, Dublin Core, in this case by Stuart L. Weibel as he leaves the DCMI management team. A primary challenge is metadata creation itself. "Who wouldn't want to spend an extra few minutes (creating metadata) with so much already invested?" As it turns out, almost nobody. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On Data, Schlock Social Science, and Big Brother
Everybody wants to do tracking and reporting of student activities in an online course. But what are they measuring, exactly. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Metadata
This was intended to be a note to myself, partially to comment on discussion list metadata and partially to frame some throughts for my talk in Colorado in August. But it makes some points that bear wider consideration, and in particular, two principles of metadata: metadata for a given entity should never be stored in more than one place; and metadata for a given entity should not contain metadata for a second entity. By Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, July 7, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...