Folksonomics and Conceptual Metadata

I necessarily think about information design as a part of my professional duties. I also try to keep frosty on novel ways that information might be presented. So I naturally have been revisiting these notions in some avocational research I have been delving into concerning health care reform.

Health care reform is, of course, a deeply political topic that breaks down along several ideological and interest dimensions. In supporting the claims for all sides, basic research is mined and often cherry-picked to build a case. And my point in this entry is not to make an ideological or political claim but to describe in a way how that information is discovered, used and reused.

Now I was quite a novice on the topic of health care economics and reform ideas when I began researching the topic. I certainly had personal negative and positive experiences over the years. I also had heard the reviews and blowback over Michael Moore’s Sicko (though have not yet seen the film). But, beyond that, I had no real understanding of who the players were, what the research suggested, or what the counterclaims were.

My understanding built from a range of sources, most of which were simply not accessible even a decade ago to casual researchers like me. Instead, you had to be a Beltway insider who subscribed to think tank newsletters and research publications. But now I can download and read Commonwealth Fund reports, CATO news briefs, and a host of other resources and become a moderately well-informed amateur researcher. I can access huge swaths of blogs and commentary, reflecting different perspectives. I can even organize the information by collecting it together and then labeling it for easy recovery based on a recollection.

What I can’t easily do yet is to be able to answer specific questions that have not already been answered in some publication, but that emerge out of the collected information. For example, after I read how the German medical system did not have the kinds of rationing and waits for access that we associate with certain aspects of the British and Canadian systems in a Commonwealth Fund report, I wanted to know the details of the German system. Was it a single-payer or nationalized health service? Perhaps a hybrid? What was the role of doctors and information technology? It took quite a lot of searching to finally be able to answer those questions, ultimately using a Siemens Medical Technology précis and market analysis of the German system.

Could approaches like structured metadata via Semantic Web technologies assist me in these tasks? Perhaps, but it seems to require that propositional information above the level of named entity extraction could be accurately indexed. For the first question, I would need documents labeled with “Structure of the German Medical System” or the equivalent rather than the many nuanced and varied ways that we write. Moreover, the proposition needs to express the timeliness of the resource, a problem I frequently encounter when trying to fix problems with my Linux computers. How timely is a given piece of information?

We can’t, however, expect individuals to be able to code that metadata in any consistent way, though I believe there is a folksonomic method that can lend a hand: a community of users can gradually improve the metadata structure and content in much the same way that Wikipedia is gradually improved. The Wikipedia model has also shown that quality can be maintained—with fits and starts—by a community of users and some policies in place.

Mind and Connectivity

David Brooks in New York Times proclaims the outsourcing of his mind into GPS devices, Wikipedia and cell phones. Technology is changing the way we think and remember things. It is making us both mentally lazier and, as I’ve suggested before, more accurate.

I lamented this recently when my Casio atomic solar watch died due to the gumming up of the backlight button from too much swimming, riding and sweating over the giant, clunky, but remarkably functional watch. I had to start remembering the date and the day of the week. I had to stop using my preset alarms to remind me of the differences between Monday early-release days and other days for my son’s school. I had to expect to be inaccurate with my analog backup watch.

And then there was another day in September when I was out-of-town and having lunch with friends. The topic of tapioca pudding came up and none of us could recall what the origin of tapioca was. Out came the IPhone and we quickly resolved the question, fixing my partially inaccurate recollection from my Peace Corps time in Fiji that tapioca was related to dalo (taro). In fact, tapioca is from another root crop called cassava.

So these technologies may sometimes be reducing our cognitive commitments to certain information (the day and date), but they are also allowing us to reduce ambiguity in answering questions of a factual nature, and in a manner that exceeds what our natural mental capacities allow.

But what is missing for me is information convergence, where the knowledge contained in your DVR or GPS path memory is instantly accessible, exportable, importable, and available for all your needs. My car links via Bluetooth to my phone, but has separate voice memory for dialing. I can download new tunes through ITunes but my car can’t automatically grab Car Talk off NPR through the satellite radio and store it for later listening. Nor can I export my DVR content easily to my laptop for watching while at the park.

But the right technologies are available for the next step forward. The Semantic Web provides a beginning to achieve this step by providing a standard for self-describing information. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the basis for Semantic Web. XML is an information representation language that is similar to HTML but is not merely designed for web page representation. The problem is that a representation language is useless unless every technology agrees on how to represent different information resources. Semantic Web standards provide a meta-description for XML data that makes it possible to code information in meaningful ways, where “meaningful” is defined by the capacity to share information between systems, converting information into knowledge in some sense.

Someday soon, my Ofamind.com approximation of Vannevar Bush’s Memory Extender may be able to talk to my DVR and help me find quotes from PBS’s The War, and my GPS will help me retrace the path of the California gold rush, as exported by Wikipedia. Someday soon.