Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 2, 2010

Skillful Semantic Users?

Filed under: Usability — Tags: , , , , — Patrick Durusau @ 9:05 am

I recently discovered one reason for my unease with semantic this and that technologies, including topic map interfaces. A friend mentioned to me that he wanted users to do more than enter subject names in their topic map interface. “Users need to also enter….”

The idea of users busily populating a semantic space is an attractive one, but it hasn’t been borne out in practice. So I don’t think my friend’s interface is going to prove to be useful, but why?

Then I got to thinking, how many indexers or librarians do I know? The sort of people whose talents combined together to bring us the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature and useful back of the book indexes. Due to my work in computer standards I know a lot of smart people but very few of them strike me as also being good at indexing or cataloging type skills.

Any semantic solution, RDFa, RDF/OWL, SUMO, Topic Maps, etc., will fail from an authoring standpoint due to a lack of skill. No technology can magically make users competent at the indexing or cataloging skills required to enable access by others.

Semantic interface writers need to recognize most users are simply consumers of information created by others. I would not be surprised if the ratio of producers to consumers is close to the ratio in open source projects between contributors and the consumers in those projects.

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