Patrick’s taxonomy development infographic has sparked off a little friendly competition in the office. The infographic you see above is my attempt at explaining the different pieces of an intranet puzzle that KM practitioners may have to deal with, and how they all fit together.

This is the link to the pdf version – Intranet_Poster.pdf. Note that it is formatted for A2 size and you will need to set your printer to print within paper size for smaller sizes.

I would like to commend Patrick for his sportsmanship, for even though my poster is evidently better than his, it did not hold him back from providing some of the explanations that you see on the poster.

I can’t remember how I happened across this post by Robert Kosara on “The State of Information Visualization” but it’s a good one – and here’s an interesting prediction:

“2010 might be the year of visualization theory. While our field is certainly an applied one, we still need a much deeper understanding of how it works and how to build better tools. There is some existing work, but much of that is old (Bertin’s work was published in the 1960s, Mackinlay’s almost 25 years ago, Shneiderman’s 13 years ago, Chi’s taxonomy almost ten years ago). The field is progressing and we are developing new tools that do not always fit the old molds. We are also gaining a better understanding of how things work, and we are seeing interesting new concepts from other fields. So an update of our theoretical foundations is really overdue now, and this year will hopefully be when it happens.”

This remarkable image (original here) shows the actual passages of scientists and researchers as they move between articles in scholarly journals. A team at the Los Alamos National laboratory got the idea that mapping scientific research via citation links might be a tad awry because (shock horror) citations have political correctness built into them. So they procured clickstream data covering almost a billion transactions on scholarly journal portals over two years, and produced this elegant map, showing that social sciences and some humanities sit at the densely connected centre of a cartwheel of suspiciously silo-looking scientific disciplines.

The full story is here, including how they mapped two science taxonomies to the Getty AAT in order to show an aggregate map of the relationships between sciences, humanities and the social sciences.

Oh, and the original suspicion about citation mapping? The JCR citation database gives a heavy bias towards natural sciences (92.8%) and a passing nod to social sciences (7.2%). What scholars actually read? Natural sciences 41%, social sciences 47%, humanities 8%, interdisciplinary fields 3%.

Thanks to Jack Vinson for this lead.