Today, with the help of google maps, M1, M2, my Dad & I went geocaching & found our first geocache at a long-time favorite park. It was most excellent. We left a santa eraser & got a magic card (I really tried to convince M1 to take the studded leather bracelet, but she insisted on the creepiest magic card possible. Heh). M1 nearly alerted the entire park (fortunately empty because everyone was at the beach) when she made her discovery, shrieking, I FOUUUUND IT! Pretty dang adorable. Then we logged everything, took victory pix, restashed & were on our way. I also discovered the concept of letterboxing. Who knew all these funny little stashed things are hiding out there? Well, I guess I did, since I know geeklibrarian has been doing it for ages & my sis-in-law & her family have been doing it for at least two years, but still. Until you start looking, you don’t realize how many of them are stashed away out there! So that was extraordinarily entertaining.

Then we went swimming in the lake. Oof. Holy cow, I am out of shape for lake swimming. There were lots of waves today, big waves which added to the difficulty level of swimming out there too, no doubt. Lots of milfoil. The alarming milfoil. It wasn’t so bad out where I was swimming (except I worked my way out from the beach instead of hitting it from the dock, since until my parents came over to watch The Ms, I had to watch them), but the amount of gnarly slimy green strands & clumps I picked off my chilluns was pretty… gnarly. But they had a ridiculously good time. We got home well after their bedtime & now they’re Fast, Fast, Fast, Fast asleep & should sleep well. Yay for well sleeping children! And me, I think it’s now bath time. When I get around to bed, I think after the swimming today, I’ll sleep well too. And no doubt feel it tomorrow. Oh, bath… and sleeeep…

ZOMG! < runs around the house fanning my my face >< settles down momentarily >

Of course, he points out what I left palely implied rather than said directly, which is that this is why taxonomy governance is very, very important & the implications of structure & restructure can have far reaching affects & need to be considered in the process of re/structuring & developing taxonomies. I tend to push for more than one taxonomist to work on a project, just because we do bring our own biases to the table, but no one ever wants to pay for that. Meh to them. I will continue to push for it because I think it’s a really important point.

I saw a taxonomy yesterday that illustrates why these things need to be thought out… it was for a Christian organization & had a bunch of top level terms, among them “Programs”, “Products’, “Human Rights” & “Human Wrongs”, etc. Trying to recall this correctly, they had things like genocide under “human rights” & genital mutilation under “human wrongs”… Wha? I don’t necessarily consider a morality-based taxonomy necessarily wrong — taxonomy by it’s nature reflects a world/domain view. I do consider wrong arbitrary categorizations that are so murky that one would find genocide under human rights & genital mutilation under human wrongs. That’s just… it’s stupid. Someone thought they were being cute & clever & they’re so not. Then again, this is the same organization whose adopt-a-child uses the shopping basket metaphor. Pick a kid, put it in the basket, get some accessories. It’s just like a doll. Or, y’know, human slavery, speaking of human wrongs. I do believe we said, “Uh, not cool metaphor there” but they’re resisting, is the story coming back to me. Not my project though so I only get bits & pieces of it. The taxonomy containing human wrongs is an internal taxonomy used for tagging then directing content to a specific location, so it’s not displayed externally anywhere, but still. One of the things we think about both in “taxonomy” and information architecture/user experience is the story of the perspective/world view the organization of information is telling. I really think these people should take a good look at the stories they’re telling. Not just but especially because of their morality-based views.

In other work-related news, I think I’ve settled on a personal definition for ontology. There’s the formal definition of these things (which no one can agree on) & then there’s how everyone uses them. I’ve seen taxonomy used for a huge range of things & I’ve seen ontology used just as broadly. The general public doesn’t get as much exposure to the concept of thesaurus except as “that book with synonyms & antonyms that sits next to the dictionary” so I just don’t hear it used very often, except correctly. So ontology. I’ve been sitting in on ontology tool reviews for work in the last couple weeks. What I’m gathering from what I’m going to consider formal ontology tools (TopQuadrant’s TopBraid, Ontology Works, Protégé, Swoop, & the like) is that in addition to just the semantic relationships with named edges that a complex thesaurus can support, there’s a whole ‘nother layer of logic & inference that can be applied on top of the ontology that isn’t generally available in a thesaurus tool. So, I can call out in a complex thesaurus an “Bob’s yer uncle” associative relationship (Robert is your male or female parent’s brother), but I have to manually make that relationship, just like I’d have to make associative relationships to call out cousin relationships, etc. Very time consuming. In an ontology, I can write a rule or query that says, “[find * where] parent’s male sibling = uncle” and gather those inferences rather than having to explicitly call out those relationships. In addition, in a thesaurus, there’s a preferred term & then equivalent terms, authority control lists are good in that they can help diverse domains know what a preferred name (think legal or other authoritative/formal name) is, which works to varying degrees of success. In an ontology, there’s one concept which can be any number of data types, which can have associated term names associated with the concept, allowing more flexibility for multiple domains/systems to work together — as long as the concept is agreed on, they can pick the name they want to use, but it still ties into that central concept.

I know — so what. So, where this all comes into being very handy is for research, say, pharmaceutical research. Make a rule that goes across a series of drugs to find possible contraindications for use, or a query that finds possible new uses for drugs. The flexibility for complex querying of knowledge bases is an order of magnitude greater in ontologies than it is in thesauri & taxonomies. I don’t necessarily see the clients my company has using true ontology, but I have no doubt that some of them will come to us asking for “an ontology”, just like they come to us asking for “taxonomy” when they need a content audit. But it is good to be clear in one’s own head what each is, even if we smile & provide them with a complex thesaurus that has semantic relations/named edges.

I’m rambling — I’m not entirely clear on all this yet, but I think I’ve made great strides in the last week or so. Damn, I love what I do for a living. Taxonomy/Thesauri/Ontology is just about the best job ever. Anyway, I’m still sorting it out a little in my head & I logged on to write about the baking I did today… perhaps the baking is another post now though. :)

[earlier in the article]
SIMPLICIO: But not everyone is cut out to be an artist. What about the kids who aren’t “math people?” How would they fit into your scheme?

SALVIATI: If everyone were exposed to mathematics in its natural state, with all the challenging fun and surprises that that entails, I think we would see a dramatic change both in the attitude of students toward mathematics, and in our conception of what it means to be “good at math.” We are losing so many potentially gifted mathematicians — creative, intelligent people who rightly reject what appears to be a meaningless and sterile subject. They are simply too smart to waste their time on such piffle.

[somewhat later in the article]
A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds, a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun.

Edited to add this quote because for some inexplicable reason I think I love it, “We’re killing people’s interest in circles for god’s sake!”

Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’.
Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion” in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.

Taxonomy tends to be invisible until something like this happens. Taxonomy is how people make sense of the world, in the sense that categorization (which is what taxonomy is at its core) is a sense-making response. Taxonomy is powerful in that it can make entire categories of information totally invisible, either unintentionally, or intentionally. The best taxonomies are largely invisible — that’s a sign of success (for some definition of success). When you notice the taxonomy, it’s because there’s a problem. Something is missing, something is categorized in the wrong place. Missing things & things in wrong places doesn’t on the surface seem like necessarily an awful thing, but because taxonomy — whether implicit or explicit — reflects world views, if that world view doesn’t recognize, say, abortion, or if it misses an important step in an escalation process in human services (child abuse, domestic violence, education, human resources, whatever), people and other assorted things people tend to think are important start falling through cracks (or, in more benign cases, door knobs get classified as toilet seats — sweartagod I saw it once!). I have some immediate experience with folks falling through the cracks because of taxonomy issues too, but NDA & all that stuff… At least I can usually sleep at night knowing what I do isn’t likely to affect someone’s health or kill someone (although there was that case about a decade ago where someone messed up a contentious administrative region issue & someone died at the hands of a pissed off regional, but not due to “my” taxonomy, but a critical error in someone’s interpretation of the geopolitical standard taxonomy).

My former indexing/abstracting & taxonomy professor makes a good point when he points out that Dewey & LC have unexpurged biases. He says:

Classifications are political instruments… all classifications make epistemological, ethical, and political statements; there is nothing new to this. The library blogshere seems to argue that POPLINE’s move is unprecedented and unacceptable… get a grip; what is the ethical assumption behind Dewey’s religion section? I don’t see any ethical justification in the introduction to LCSH…

He’s right, classifications are political instruments — they reflect the perspective/world view of the people who contribute to them. Yes, of course we knew that. POPLINE’s move, while not unprecedented perhaps, is entirely unacceptable. There is no ethical assumption behind Dewey’s religion section, there is no ethical justification for LCSH — but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who actively work to fix that shit & suggest better options (even if they are viewed as cranks & PC gadflies). Having had him critique my papers, I’m going to offer this in turn: He should have put the paragraph I just quoted, his final paragraph, penultimately. The thought I *want* to be left with upon reading his take is the current penultimate paragraph ending with, “POPLINE will, apparently, make a statement re this in a few days – it is going to be interesting to see if they actually are going to say something of substance and make ethical commitments.” I think drawing attention to the need for ethical commitment within taxonomy development, I think, is the core of what he wants to say more so than pointing out the obvious (LCSH & Dewey have some sucky things in them) & less obvious (taxonomy/categorization can have major political implications).

In reading the grey lady, I see Dr. Klag [dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health] said the school was “dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, and not its restriction.” As noted in the NYT quoted paragraph, he restored ‘abortion’ as a search term & will launch an inquiry as to why the change happened. It’s a step in the right direction. I would be interested in seeing the results of the inquiry as well.

So there’s a lot of this story I know I’m not addressing because I’m digging around in my taxonomy bucket right now, fer instance, while it’s maintained by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs, it’s funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — the same group responsible for the gag rule wrt international family planning agencies being prevented from receiving assistance if they perform or counsel their clients about abortion (which ties into the next issue too, but the issue in this case is political ideology being inappropriately reflected in what is supposed to be a neutral research resource). There’s also the women’s health issue presented by not having reasonable access to information surrounding contraceptives & reproductive health. I’m sure there are others.

OOH! SHINY! (The POPLINE Thesaurus!. I do wish it displayed in tree format, or some other graphical interface showing semantic/hierarchical relationships because alpha by keyword is kind of a drag for me. Of course, my interests are perhaps not exactly according to their standard audience…). And with that, it’s late, I have a not so little girl with a tummy ache, and I’ve probably said plenty about taxonomy.