“A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.”

But fortunately it quickly lapses back into plain English. The article is strongest on explaining how to set up a friendly user-interface, and how that relates to the back-end search using the facets, in particular the logic and usability of the “and/or” search logic. There’s no help, unfortunately, on how to identify the prime facets that you want to use for the filters, probably because Mike’s focus is on internet sites and commerce applications, where the shoppers’ mental distinctions map to product attributes fairly straightforwardly. This is not so straightforward when applying faceted filtering to enterprise knowledge assets.

But a nice addition to the literature, and thanks to James Robertson for the link.

The basic idea is that a collection of information resources should be contextually arranged for easy use (which assumes you know the needs and regular activities of your target user community). Now the problem behind that is that a manually compiled information neighbourhood gets out of date very quickly. So neighbourhoods powered by metadata (tagging, taxonomies and other clustering data) and search (entity extraction, semantic analysis, authority and relevancy ranking) are clearly the way to go.

It looks like search is already moving in that direction, as this interview with search company Kosmix points out. Kosmix uses semantic analysis to cluster webpages in a variety of ways, and has pre-configured information neighbourhoods that essentially assemble links in ways that are very easy to use and navigate – a million times better than either the random assemblies of undifferentiated search links returned by Google, or the overly-constrained old style Yahoo subject navigation.

A good example is the RightHealth website powered by Kosmix. A high level taxonomy organises the topics in accessible ways, and my bet is that there is a more sophisticated ontology feeding the semantic analysis that pulls content into the relevant modules. Take a look.

Elearning pageturners deserve all the cheating they can get. This model of technology-assisted “self” directed learning is at least half a century old.

So it’s a nice coincidence that my mailbox today yielded up the spanking new book from Saul Carliner and Patti Shank, The E-learning Handbook. I’m biased, of course, because I have a chapter on measuring the impact of elearning inside, but that apart I like the way the whole front end of the book comes clean about the overweening hype surrounding the elearning boom of a decade ago, and takes a more critical, measured view – read especially the chapters by Margaret Driscoll, Brent Wilson and Lee Christopher.

There are cognitive functions where machines are better than humans – in calculation, memory and rule-following for example. But human wit far exceeds the machine’s capacity in those large domains of human activity where we shift the rules and simply play. Within its limits, and with intelligent design (the plain English kind, not the creationist kind), elearning can be useful and engaging. But it’s never going to replace the rest of the learning intervention family.

“Corporations rely on specialisation, outsourcing and tacitness. Specialisation is here to manage complexity, outsourcing here to evacuate complexity and tacitness here to hide complexity. It is not perfect. Specialisation impeaches getting the big picture. Outsourcing concretely relocates knowledge out of the organisation. Tacitness prevents management as “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and favours egocentric “political” games. Besides those defaults, it offers managers a simple life (and very similar to the one of a Museum keeper).”

One of the consequences of this is that technology is always favoured over real consulting (read: thinking things through with people and implementing changes in practices and processes).

Olivier uses the metaphor of a Museum (which is how many organisations are managed, as if they are static arrays of artefacts) and a Zoo (a complex and dynamic environment full of living creatures). Read the full post to get the full argument. I’ve blogged in a similar direction before. But what’s the answer? Dave’s new age MBA programme? Or is this problem more than just education?

Meaninglessness proper arrives only when you’ve knocked out all the nouns, verbs and adjectives. Now they say that you can survive the loss of two thirds of your brain as well… although specific brain locations do perform specialised functions, the brain also works as a distributed system so can adapt to loss of brain matter. So there is clearly some form of intelligence at work here – though I’m not sure whether it’s a property of the producer or an emergent intelligence just produced by certain words happening to find themselves in close collocation, a bit like slime mould colonies. What we do know, however, is that marketese, like the brain, fails gracefully. Try it yourself, and let’s wait for the second version of the game where you can insert the quotes of your choice and test them for word-loss resilience. Thanks to David Weinberger for this.

Who would have thought, for example, that the classification of a chocolate teacake as a “biscuit” rather than a “cake” would be worth 3.5 million sterling and a fourteen year legal case that ended up in the European Court of Justice? The BBC’s report gives a fascinating insight into the complexities of tax taxonomies (I don’t for a moment want to go there and do taxonomy work with them).

Nicey and Wifey have a much more accessible taxonomy guide to the critical distinctions, which I have modified slightly into something approaching a matrix format. If only the UK tax folks could keep it this simple. (Go visit their http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/biscuits/index.php3 for the clarity of the scope notes!).

Thanks to JIW of Cambridge for both links.

From Chuck Hollis, who’s a VP with EMC, this nice story (which is still evolving) about how their internal collaboration communities are grappling with the issues of order versus emergence – to taxonomise or to tag? They started with an emergent approach, but as the volume and messiness grew, thought they could help by putting in a taxonomy.

It’s a good lesson in taxonomy development, you need to either go and investigate the language and content thoroughly if it’s a mature content collection, or let it grow for a while until the patterns of language and organisation emerge, then look for consistent organising principles that will help the communities navigate and exploit the content effectively.

For a short while, Chuck thought that activity-oriented organisation principles might work best for the communities. But in opening it up for discussion, he seems surprised that there is so much argument about how to organise and categorise. Second lesson in taxonomy development – you will NEVER get a consensus. Chuck seems all set to run for the hills at the first sound of gunfire. Wisely he focuses on the problems that need to be solved – newbie orientation, proliferation of communities which produces what I call “jungle fever” (impossible to navigate), different human dispositions towards messiness and order.

A great insight into practical issues surrounding the need for taxonomies.

It’s a good lesson in taxonomy development, you need to either go and investigate the language and content thoroughly if it’s a mature content collection, or let it grow for a while until the patterns of language and organisation emerge, then look for consistent organising principles that will help the communities navigate and exploit the content effectively.

For a short while, Chuck thought that activity-oriented organisation principles might work best for the communities. But in opening it up for discussion, he seems surprised that there is so much argument about how to organise and categorise. Second lesson in taxonomy development – you will NEVER get a consensus. Chuck seems all set to run for the hills at the first sound of gunfire. Wisely he focuses on the problems that need to be solved – newbie orientation, proliferation of communities which produces what I call “jungle fever” (impossible to navigate), different human dispositions towards messiness and order.

A great insight into practical issues surrounding the need for taxonomies.