Give me all your bookmarks…

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or Adventures with Firefox 3, Del.icio.us toolbars, and Wordle

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a while for work and find it a really good way to keep track of stuff. Although to be honest I find it most useful as an ability to keep track of other people’s stuff. I spend a few minutes each morning looking at what my network has been bookmarking or things that have surfaced through my subscribed tags. A little collective intelligence goes a long way and I’ve also found it a good way to share relevant resources with colleagues as I find them.

this week has been an interesting one for my del.icio.us account for two reasons – Wordle and Firefox3

I think I just about made it into the launch day download for Firefox 3 but was disheartened to find that some of my favourite add-ons have died. tinyurl; morning coffee; and the del.icio.us plugin.

A quick check today showed that although it wasn’t showing up as an update del.icio.us  have a new toolbar plugin – so uninstall the old one (how archaic :) ) and load the new one… easy…

well not quite – the new one comes with a wizard… and like most Wizards (or other mysterious characters at the beginning of a game or story)  this one offers a choice and not an especially pleasant one. Enter the wonderful new world of Firefox 3 with a del.icio.us toolbar to make life easy and either – upload all your existing offline bookmarks or discard them…

The new delicious plugin is designed to replace the browser’s bookmarking functionality. Thankfully there is an option to keep these newly uploaded bookmarks private (so that you’re only sharing them with del.icio.us and Yahoo…) – this means that my network and the wider world will be spared all the out of date trivia in my bookmarks-  for now at least.

As I work through the 600 new bookmarks I have on del.icio.us to see which of them I will usefully make public (lots of good older references),  which I will delete (how many links to old meet-o-matics is it possible to have), which I will keep to myself (do I really need to publicize the login screens for all the work systems I manage or just how long I played Battlefield 2 for…)

I can certainly see why del.icio.us might want to have all this information but I feel it’s a bit sneaky changing a simple tool into a data gathering monster. And that’s without thinking about the chaos when advanced users opt to make all their migrated bookmarks public… what do you have in your bookmark closet?

You might ask why anyone would chose to use this plugin. In short it just makes it easier to use del.icio.us and I now get a little browser email everytime some posts a link for me or a little button which tells my network is active (a button that, I suspect, will never be greyed out). There is something sadly cool about this.

That brings me neatly to why I would want to spend time making bookmarks public and tagging them.  In part this has to do with something resembling my own machinations of knowledge management and in part because sharing knowledge (or at least pointers to knowledge) lets cool things this happen… form the serious to the just plain brilliant (if perhaps not immediately purposeful). Wordle http://wordle.net/ visualises your tag clouds- it’s not a particualrly new idea – it just does it wel. You can give it a textblock or a del.icio.us uesr name and it does this

RJRWordle

These are my tags as of yesterday – once I get all my new links public this may change somewhat but I’ll have to wait and see.

edit (for the gamers): Should really have called this – ‘All your bookmark belong to us’

Upcoming CRIG unConference

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At the end of this week JISC’s Common Repositories Interfaces Group (CRIG) are holding a two day meeting to look at the key scenarios affecting repository interfaces.

Our discussions for the two days are going to build on a series of teleconferences organised by the CRIG support project – WoCRIG which have just been podcast. I’m both excited about this meeting and a little nervous.

I think that the support project are doing a good job of stirring us up to move forward the work of CRIG and helping us engage with and shape the next stages of repository interface interoperability. For the next stage of this work, this meeting, they’ve organised an unConference. Two days of informal thinking, discussing, and getting at the core of the interoperability issues related to repositories. I’m looking forward to it for what I know I’ll learn, for the chance to contribute, and for the chance to actually just have time to sit down and talk about these things.

The nervousness on my part comes from the unknown – I’ve never been to an unConference before and although the idea is good – to have discussions about what people want to talk about and to cut out the fairly predictable presentation part of a meeting and so to get at the eureka moments that usually happen alongside but not actually in conferences – I’m aware of how much, for me, those eureka moments come along because I’ve been sitting for extended periods of time for my mind to go off at tangents while half listening to a presentation which may or may not be relevant to my thoughts.

Anyway I guess it’s a bit like a codebash for ideas – and that’s no bad thing.

Blogging revisited

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Why do people blog? (revisited)
It’s something I thought about a little at the start of this blog and something I return to briefly now. In part because I’m thinking about of some of the triggers for blog posts.

I’m not the most prolific blogger – in part because I find that there are certain types of trigger that seem to go with my blog posts. The recent spate of ecology posts arose from an email discussion and a workshop. Some arise from the latest incredibly cool web app, some from direct requests or reporting on events. Other are driven by much more random factors.

I’ve a number of friends who have started to blog most days this month, one driven by a project to post a picture every day in December, the others by the driver of Advent reflection. All of these encourage me to find space to blog and reflect more, but back random factors and that t-shirt…

Domain models and the ecological approach

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This a more focused brief discussion to follow up my last post about different approaches to modeling. It attempts to understand some of the similarities and differences between a domain modeling approach and an ecological approach.

Thoughts so far:

  1. Like a domain model an ecological view is concerned with more than the technical issues and interfaces
  2. A domain model is usually at a given large scale. In UK terms often the information environment level (parallel to the ecosystem level). An ecological view, on the other hand, can be at different levels. The size of a domain is somewhat arguable but (AFAIK) within the eFramework the domain is taken as the UK (or other given country).
  3. A domain model is more like what Les is getting at in terms of an ontology. It’s trying to agree a set of (abstracted) terms to represent all of the activity in a particular area. An ecological view is looking at a slice of that activity in a particular setting for particular purpose. However, I need to think this through a bit more.
  4. From a project’s point of view. if we treat the project as a book it may be a bit like the difference between classifying it (putting it in a domain model) and writing an abstract of it (creating an ecological model).
  5. From a high level point of view a domain model agrees categories of everything that’s going on; an ecological view (selectively) puts entities, interactions, and influences into a picture/ story.

Recent developments in the repository ecology work

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A brief update on the progress of the repository ecology work. We’ll be revising the draft report shortly but here’s an overview of what else is going on with this work.

ECDL2007 Workshop

We held a workshop in conjunction with this year’s ECDL conference (workshop home page http://tinyurl.com/27jses ). I’ll return to some of the presentations and outcomes of the workshop in another post but, in summary, the workshop went really well. The participants understood the ideas being presented and I think that everyone (whether or not they agreed with the ideas presented) had a thought-provoking day. Thank you to all of the speakers and other participants.

There were some useful critiques of particular aspects of the approach, including: a concern that the distinctions between entities and species were unclear (particularly when mentally translated into other languages); an observation that the approach could complement (rather than conflict) with newer approaches to the development of architectures; and a call to provide some more structured guidance about how to represent ecological views or models.

The workshop affirmed that there is something in this approach and it’s emphasis on articulating messy particularity that isn’t currently being covered by other efforts. It reinforced our feeling that this is more of a communication, planning, and management approach than a more formal (mathematical/systems) modeling approach.

JISCCETIS Conference

Next week, we’re going to be holding a workshop on the repository ecology work at the JISCCETIS conference. The session, being organized by Phil Barker and Lorna Campbell, will complement the ECDL workshop, and further shape the development of this work. http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Learning_Resources_in_the_Ecology_of_Repositories

Spanish Repository Working Group: La ecología de los repositorios institucionales: Interacción entre sociedad, producción científica y acceso a la información

In December, I’ll be presenting at the Spanish Repository Working Group’s conference. They’ve chosen the theme of ecological approaches for their annual meeting this year. I’m not sure how much of the conference I’ll be able to follow at the time, but am looking forward to the opportunity. http://redsicura.iata.csic.es/xarxa/ocs/index.php?cf=6

Ontologies, domain models, use cases, and the ecological approach (part 1)

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Or: a Friday afternoon study of poker.

In an attempt to make some more sense of how the ecological view fits with some other key ideas in the repository space here are some different views on a game of poker. I hope that taking a non-repository related example should force a clearer articulation. When time permits I’ll provide a repository-based example as a precursor to including it in the revised ecology report. This is example is tentative and may not yet be balanced. It’s trying to capture the intent of each of these approaches and is a bit fuzzy in some of the details.

A brief overview of what I think the the relations between the below type of model might be:

An ecological approach in relation to other approaches

An ontology-based model

Purpose of this view.

An ontology is used to describe an event in abstract ‘universal’ terms. This can be at varied levels of detail. Such an approach can support greater machine processing of the event and consequently richer software tools. ‘Weaker’ forms of ontology for human use, as found in classification schemes aim to identify commonalities and fit a particular event or concept into a bigger picture.

Ontological-driven example

An ontology would make statements about the game, locating it within a structured set of information. It would do this to create a universal model of the particular event or to locate the particular event within a larger framework. It might try to make statements to represent the following information.

Type of activity = Social activities > games > card games > multi-player card games > poker > Texas Hold’Em
Occurrence = Friday Repetition = Weekly
Players= Bill, Jake, Jim, Mike
Rules= Texas Hold’Em [number of cards, no of rounds, priority of hands, etc.]

It might add information about the location of the game (location=Mike’s house), the probability of drawing particular cards or hands, the probability of a given player turning up (player participation=0.7). It might be attempting to capture the detail considered necessary to allow a simulation of the game or it might just be attempting to describe in detail an event using agreed terms.

A Use Case model

Purpose of this view.

A Use Case presents a view of an interaction between an actor and a system. Describing how the actor uses the system to accomplish a goal. It is intended to be abstract/ not implementation specific. It is frequently used to support the design of systems or model business processes.

An example use case.

In the poker example, the use case would probably be focused on one player improving their game.

Player A observes the behaviour of Player B, C , and D. Player A tests when the other players bluff or fold. They note which players rarely bluff and who folds frequently. Player A changes their style as a result.

A Scenario-based model

Purpose of this view.

A Scenario is an instantiation of a use case or an aspect of it (conversely a use case is an abstraction of a scenario). Its purpose is to provide a common example to allow discussion of an issue among a varied group of stakeholders.

An example scenario.

Player A wants to win more often at Poker. He observes that player D rarely bluffs. Player A changes his style so that they fold against D unless they have a three of a kind or higher.

A domain model

Purpose of this view

“Domain models bridge the gap between the analysis of requirements (x-ref) and the production of design specifications. A domain model represents the common understanding of a key concept in the organisation.” (http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/creating-an-mle/mle-design/domain-models)

Domain models present an agreed view a domain; this allows specified services to be presented in a way that allows them to be understood across that domain. Currently most domains are articulated at a national / subject level.

An example domain model

This is a trickier example ..

If we regard our game of poker as a service, it might exist as a concept in a domain model which provided a common understanding of Friday night social activities; or within a domain model of card games.

If on the other hand we took the game as the domain, we might begin to approach an ontology through agreeing names for the players, the games, its rules, and location (taking it at this level as a domain raises some granularity issues – but these are paralleled by the issues of trying to create a domain model of a repository).

A Service Usage Model

Purpose of this view

  • SUMs detail combinations of different services required to create applications for institutional use
  • SUMs are blueprints that lead to good practice
  • SUMs link business processes and policies with the technologies required for implementation
  • SUMs are an ideal mechanism by which institutions can publish details of their work to the wider community
  • SUMs demonstrate how other institutions have solved similar problems (http://www.e-framework.org/)

An example SUM

Again not entirely sure about this example and the below is obviously not a SUM (being about 6 pages too short) but an attempt to capture what a SUM would address.

An example SUM might set out the rules of Texas Hold’Em, it might also articulate some of the dynamics of the interactions between the players as part of the the business processes the services (the game rules) support.

An ecological approach

Purpose of this view

An ecological approach provides a selective view or presentation of particular habitat or movement of resources to explain, analyze, or manage that habitat or resource. It aims to

  • Articulate the human alongside the technical
  • Articulate the complexity and messiness
  • Support better communication and management

    • An ecological example

    What makes this game of poker thrive? What would make it better?

    Entities (& Species):

    • Bill, Jake, Jim, Mike (Players/ People)
    • This game of Texas Hold’Em (Poker games/ games of Texas Hold’Em )

    Interactions:

    • between players: conversations; established friendships
    • between players and the game: bluffing, calling, drawing, raising, dealing

    Environmental Factors:

    • Jim’s wife’s health (affects his presence (creates the probability 0.7) – indirectly affects the dynamic of the game)
    • Rules of poker (a change in the global rules would affect the game)
    • popularity of Texas Hold’em on TV (how likely they are to play this type of game; how likely they are to attract other players)

    Habitat issues:

    • background music (does it help/ hinder different players)
    • presence of mirrors in room (their removal reduces the possibility of accidental cheating)

    Resource tracking issues:

    • movement of cards
    • movement of chips

    Friday night poker ecology

    Repository ecology

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    The introductory report is finally done (well the draft anyway).

    I’ll post some more around the topic of an ecological approach to repository and service interaction but in the meantime.

    the draft report is here: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Ecology

    The following blogs have commented on the report (I’ll try to keep this current )

    LibraryThing

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    A quick note that some of you may have noticed I’ve stuck a link to library thing on my blogroll (I’ll try to sort out how the sidebar is arranged eventually). This is the contents of my office bookshelf. a few non-work-related things may creep in (if I leave my Neal Stephenson in the office long-term) but on the whole it’s the books i’ve brought in for work. A del.icio.us button may creep in as well once i figure out how to get it to work.

    Sources of metadata

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    Lorcan Dempsey has an interesting post about sources of metadata. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001351.html

    He gives some brief thoughts that attempt to tease out the different sources of metadata that are commonly in use today, suggesting four key sources: “professional, contributed, programmatically promoted, and intentional”.

    Related posts here: Automatic metadata generation

    Next Generation Environments

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    I was at the JISC Next Generation Environments conference. http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/u-and-i

    Much of the day revolved around how university-based users use tools (in particular social/ web2.0 ish tools) and the challenges that they bring to the environment. A few things that I found interesting during the day:

    Peter Hartley’s articulation of challenge of using web 2.0 tools in learning and teaching looked at the tensions between authority / control and freedom / expression. These tensions were illustrated in the existence of three concurrent learning spaces, for which the following metaphors were suggested:

    • Formal public controlled (the Museum)
    • Collaborative informal exploratory (the Playground)
    • Personal private exclusive (the Refuge)

    These metaphors provided a good discussion point. I like them but I think the playground has too much of an advantage (everyone likes to play…); the museum misses the potential interactivity of formal space (e.g. official fora can be the best place for some types of discussion); and the refuge is too calm/ structured/ isolated to represent private ‘learning’ spaces as such spaces are likely to be tied into wider use of web2.0 tools in other areas of life and anything but a refuge.

    Dave Cormier’s presentation (Edtechtalk http://www.edtechtalk.com/) discussed the University of PEI’s Virtual Research Environment (VRE) development. They developed this in response to the challenge of too much knowledge – information overload effect everyone except über geeks who are also really really organised as well. They are working to create virtual spaces for scientific collaboration – specific environments which aim to be:

    • a sacred, dedicated space
    • supports filtering content for relevance
    • is able to offer security (different levels of publicness)
    • provides space for collaborative efforts

    Two related observations were:

    • Within this environment the library has a key role – when something is stable and worth keeping the library should be given ‘ownership’ of it in the system. Librarians have the skills to make it findable and sustainable it in the longer term, so let them do their job rather than trying to get the scientists to become experts in another field.
    • There is a need to move the functionality users require into the browser – integrate with academic practice (not add new systems to learn).

    An slightly off-topic one: Second life represents the pacman of the virtual environment development

    Linda Creanor and Ross Graham offered some reflections on the learner’s experiences; these tied in with ongoing discussion throughout the day. In brief (and without the references offered):

    • Students want a clear distinction between personal and university space (and are at a stage of life were they can keep this distinct in a way that tutors may not be able to)
    • Students want to choose, and personalise tools (and retain control of them)
    • If the university supporting use of tools in course tutors have to be able to be engaged with those tools
    • How do we prepare and support tutors working in this environment? (and give them the space to use their own tools)
    • Podcasts may be suitable for some types of teaching (e.g. kant 101)