Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Metadata Symposium

I just finished moderating the Digital Motion Picture Metadata Symposium at AMPAS.  The day covered all aspects of metadata from pre-production through production, post, distribution and archiving.
We had presenters from Pixar, Sony Pictures, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Marvel Studios,  Warner Brothers, CNRI, Gracenote and the Library of Congress.
We saw examples from productions including [...]

Collaboration, Groove and SharePoint – History Repeating Itself?

I just read that Groove is being renamed as SharePoint Workspace 2010.  For those of you who are not familiar with Groove or its history, I’ll take you back to the early 80’s. 
Ray Ozzie is the visionary behind Groove and currently the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft (a role he took over from Bill Gates).  At University of [...]

The Fractal Nature of Knowledge

Here is the question posed by Arnold King (http://arnoldkling.com)
I am interested in the phenomenon of knowledge specialization.For example, in medicine, there are many more specialties and sub-specialties than there were 30 years ago. My guess is that if libraries are still using classification systems, there should be a lot more categories. My guess is that [...]

Good Facets Gone Bad

I recently met with a client who said “no one uses facets for searching…”  I expressed surprise at this comment and probed a bit as to why they thought so.  We opened their home page and I soon surmised why.  The facets they had did not seem to be very useful.  No one had tested [...]

Relating Different Lists of Terms

There are three different types of relationships in taxonomies: 
Equivalent (Synonyms: “International Business Machines = IBM”)
Hierarchical (Parent/Child : “Computer Manufacturers => IBM”)
Associative (Concept/Concept: “Software Group – Software”)
Heather Hedden’s presentation on taxonomy powered discovery for a recent Boston KM Forum contained an interesting set of examples for how to organize the last type of conceptually related term [...]