Category Archives: Work

Writings on being an Enterprise Architect / I.T. Architect in academia.

NMI-EDIT CAMP – Monday 27 June 2005

Keith’s Opening Presentation

Dealing with new hires. Desire to deliver email prior to hire. Getting HR to understand that they are part of a larger flow. The only interest isn’t just in the HR department.

Can’t treat the value of the identity of a “potential student” as equal with a “PI” on campus.

What do you want to do for people? Getting agreement on that on campus is 80% of the work.

We have to create a vision of the better place to be. Then you can talk about the vision for the future and the techniques for getting there

Key functions of the future:

  1. Reflect – track information from key systems. Can’t gather all information from all systems but pick the best source for the population
  2. Join – combine identities from various sources to represent the actual individuals.

Michael Gettes – Credentialing

What are the process (business process) that you have for credentialling?

Search engine optimization and Online marketing: Wondeful RSS Tool- Tagcloud

What is with “Automated Folksonomy”? Oxymoronic at best.

>TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify…

I keep running into the term “Automated Folksonomy tool”. To me, this is like “Fresh Frozen” or “Hand Made by a Robot”. The point of a “Folksonomy” is that there are people – real live human flesh and blood – adding terms which provide social value and content evaluation. Folksonomies aren’t about extracting metadata. Folksonomies are about people, who have similar social knowledge, judging content and adding metadata based on their personal assessment. The term “cool” or “gnarly” or “awesome hack” have social value that is not extractable by a bot crawling RSS feeds. If my friends in my social circle tag something as “cool” or “awesome” then I will want to look at that object. It is their judgement that I value and the tag is a way for them to share their judgement with others.

TagCloud may be “cool” or an “awesome hack” but please spare me on the automated folksonomy stuff. Automated Folksonomy is a pile of Fresh Frozen Hand Made by a Robot stuff.

XFML Core aka version 1.0: exchanging faceted metadata language

XFML Core aka version 1.0: exchanging faceted metadata language

XFML – eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language.

>XFML is a model to express topics, organised in hierarchies or trees within mutually exclusive containers called facets. It also expresses indexing efforts: metadata you have assigned to pages. It lets you publish this information in an open, XML based format. Finally, XFML lets you build connections between different XFML maps, by indicating that a topic in one map is equal to a topic in another map: we call this connecting topics, or that a topic is described on a certain resource (a webpage usually), we call this published subject indicators.

buzztracker – 2005-05-18

buzztracker – 2005-05-18

From the “Interesting Visualization of Information” category:

Buzztracker creates world maps of showing the major locations for the day’s news.

The relative size of the circles on the map indicate the number of news stories about each place (bigger cirlce, more stories). Clicking on the circle for the site, brings up a listing of the news stories about that site – something like a faceted search.

Pretty cool stuff.

{JJP}

Joi Ito’s Web: Ten Million Blogs Tracked

Joi Ito’s Web: Ten Million Blogs Tracked

> This weekend Technorati tracked its 10 Millionth Blog. It is a chinese blog, on mblogger.cn, and it appears to be a blog talking about glassblowing, with some really cool pictures. Unfortunately I don’t read Chinese so I can’t tell…

Just in case you thought blogging was going away soon, Technorati is now tracking 10 Millionth blog. Social Software is off and running folks.

{JJP}

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags
Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

From Clay Shirky’s Blog:

>This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 — one at the O’Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled “Ontology Is OverRated”, and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled “Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification.” The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.

Clay Shirky has posted a new version of his Ontology is Overrated talk.

{JJP}

Headshift protype Tagging for the BBC News Web site

Headshift’s Protytpe of BBC News Tagging

Headshift has set up a prototype which allows users to tag BBC News stories.

{JJP}

Facet-based Information Navigation

Facet-based site navigation systems provide a way of browsing complex data sets without forcing a formal taxonomy onto the data. Facet-Based browsing is different than other methods of crawling information. A common system for navigation is a Taxonomy where you start at the top of the tree and browse your way down to the information that you are looking for. Many different web sites use a taxonomy for browsing information. At ConsumerReports.org, you click on Appliances -> Large Kitchen -> Freezers. Another example would be looking for a MedLine article in a physical library. You find the Journal -> Volume -> Issue -> Pages.

In a facet-based system, you could select one of several facets to crawl the information by: Date, Author, Journal, Keyword. You can click and limit the results by each Facet. Browsing a Facetted system will never lead you to an empty result. You can see a demo at Siderian Software’s Seamark Demo. Siderean Software’s products crawl the repository to create a facet-based information browser. The selections are generated on-the-fly with each sub-selection.

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Why this blog? Folksonomy as integration element

Why did I build this blog now? To demonstrate the power of tagging and of folksonomy as an enterprise collaboration and communication tool. There are several key parts of this integration picture that have finally come together (at least for me).

The first element is the growth of tagging – the ability of users to assign key words to objects that they place in a repository. Tagging allows users to mark URLs in del.icio.us with keywords that describe those URLs. Tagging allows users to mark photo that they upload into Flickr with key words. Tagging allows bloggers to mark their entries with key words that Technorati will capture. All this tagging builds a folksonomy – a taxonomy of the people, by the people for the people.

The second element is the growth of simple HTML, REST or RSS interfaces. Many of these interfaces have guess-able formats. If you want to get a list of all of my objects (URLs with descriptions and tags) from del.icio.us, you enter in the URL http://del.icio.us/jimphelps. If you want to see just those objects that have to do with folksonomy, you enter http://del.icio.us/jimphelps/folksonomy. Pretty easy to guess to the rest. The interfaces that Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us expose are very simple to use. This means that people have started building cool stuff against these interfaces.

The third element is the open source movement around these services. Many people are developing code that leverages these various services. The code is out there and available for use, expansion and adaption.

Those key elements let me construct this blog as a demonstration application of the power of folksonomy and integration element in enterprise communication and collaboration.

{JJP}

Internet2 Spring Member Meeting Day 2

### MyWOCS: My Virtual Organization Collaboration Suite ###

#### Triple-A – Authentication, Authorization, Accounts ####

* Authentication – has to do with you identity provided by identity provider
* Authorization – has to do with your attributes. How do you combine those attributes especially when they come from different systems and they apply to selected areas.
* Accounts – has to do with provisioning system-specific resources.

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