Information Quality is Not a Myth

Ever since my little brother and I jostled in the backseat of the Oldsmobile for control of the power window I have wrestled with the question -- how do we get beyond subjective claims on truth and the universal limitations of self-preservation? As the "KM" guy at a global consulting firm this question is less personal -- but no less pressing: how to determine information quality...

* Is it on an incremental grading scale?
* Is it fact-based, answering to the accuracy of the details it reports?
* Was it written by someone you know representing a media brand exposed to the full force of any laws the author has otherwise violated?

I remember quoting Bill Moyers in a college term paper on media bias that the greatest myth about journalism was its stated mission of objectivity -- that the story tells itself, not the reporter who files it. Yes I still agree with this premise. No I don't think you can create an assembly line of qualified observations and shiny, error-free and verifiable news stories parading out the door on a world we share and shape. But relativism is no excuse not to try. Shades of gray in fact are much closer to a meaningful assessment of quality than how any absolute verdict rings in pursuit of any final truths and supporting facts -- no matter how selective or self-serving.

In our clamoring for truth the most insatiable hunger we feed is the desire of knowing who to believe -- not the belief itself:

* Oh, her pedigree all graduated with honors from the Gospel School at Harvard
* So, he's on the board of Unassailable Opinion Group
* Hey, they've been selected to present their latest study to the leading lights of our Truth Squad eight years running.

In all instances we're not talking about truth, accuracy, actuality or even debate. We're talking about credentialing -- our need as individuals to wrap ourselves within the stature of the groups to which we're members or branded in some way. But while credentialing curves our quality cravings, it does nothing to pass the sniff test -- do these experts square on-the-ground realities with the actual consequences to their analysis, and where their recommendations may lead their disciples, clients, and subscribers?

* Are they detached observers?

* Do they get their hands dirty?

* Do they have their palms greased?

This dilemma is the core battle to determining information quality:

1. Do I want cool disinterest in my content supply? Or do I want a bona fide witness, maybe an advocate.

2. Do I want a referee with a degree? Or do I want a vested party whose passions can pierce the confusion and noise of the marketplace?

Information quality is not about removing defective sound bytes from the news radar. It's not about ridding the public information supply of erroneous conclusions. It is about presenting the perception of content producers so that we can reference information that meshes with our own quality standards. Every time we saddle the content supply with some new requirement...

* Accurate (and fact-based)

* Credible (and believable)

* Authentic (and real)

... we are really asking for qualities that are at cross-purposes.

We're no better off than rejecting objectivity as propaganda, the intoxicant of the news elites and the self-important. I would argue that we can scale, diagram, and yes measure the presence of these vital ingredients to our public discourse. But the first convention we need to drop is that the values are absolute. Authenticity and credibility represent a continuum of relative values and they are inversely proportionate. You surrender some authenticity -- you buy a little street cred. No authenticity to trade? Here's one absolute dictum: a fraud is a fraud.

Information Quality is Not a Myth

Ever since my little brother and I jostled in the backseat of the Oldsmobile for control of the power window I have wrestled with the question -- how do we get beyond subjective claims on truth and the universal limitations of self-preservation? As the "KM" guy at a global consulting firm this question is less personal -- but no less pressing: how to determine information quality...

* Is it on an incremental grading scale?
* Is it fact-based, answering to the accuracy of the details it reports?
* Was it written by someone you know representing a media brand exposed to the full force of any laws the author has otherwise violated?

I remember quoting Bill Moyers in a college term paper on media bias that the greatest myth about journalism was its stated mission of objectivity -- that the story tells itself, not the reporter who files it. Yes I still agree with this premise. No I don't think you can create an assembly line of qualified observations and shiny, error-free and verifiable news stories parading out the door on a world we share and shape. But relativism is no excuse not to try. Shades of gray in fact are much closer to a meaningful assessment of quality than how any absolute verdict rings in pursuit of any final truths and supporting facts -- no matter how selective or self-serving.

In our clamoring for truth the most insatiable hunger we feed is the desire of knowing who to believe -- not the belief itself:

* Oh, her pedigree all graduated with honors from the Gospel School at Harvard
* So, he's on the board of Unassailable Opinion Group
* Hey, they've been selected to present their latest study to the leading lights of our Truth Squad eight years running.

In all instances we're not talking about truth, accuracy, actuality or even debate. We're talking about credentialing -- our need as individuals to wrap ourselves within the stature of the groups to which we're members or branded in some way. But while credentialing curves our quality cravings, it does nothing to pass the sniff test -- do these experts square on-the-ground realities with the actual consequences to their analysis, and where their recommendations may lead their disciples, clients, and subscribers?

* Are they detached observers?

* Do they get their hands dirty?

* Do they have their palms greased?

This dilemma is the core battle to determining information quality:

1. Do I want cool disinterest in my content supply? Or do I want a bona fide witness, maybe an advocate.

2. Do I want a referee with a degree? Or do I want a vested party whose passions can pierce the confusion and noise of the marketplace?

Information quality is not about removing defective sound bytes from the news radar. It's not about ridding the public information supply of erroneous conclusions. It is about presenting the perception of content producers so that we can reference information that meshes with our own quality standards. Every time we saddle the content supply with some new requirement...

* Accurate (and fact-based)

* Credible (and believable)

* Authentic (and real)

... we are really asking for qualities that are at cross-purposes.

We're no better off than rejecting objectivity as propaganda, the intoxicant of the news elites and the self-important. I would argue that we can scale, diagram, and yes measure the presence of these vital ingredients to our public discourse. But the first convention we need to drop is that the values are absolute. Authenticity and credibility represent a continuum of relative values and they are inversely proportionate. You surrender some authenticity -- you buy a little street cred. No authenticity to trade? Here's one absolute dictum: a fraud is a fraud.

Build It (and they won't come)

Call them ECMs or KM Hubs or Knowledge Nets or enterprise portals. Yesterday's sand castles? Meet tomorrow's ivory towers without the sustaining investment of your content producers. Here are five KM construction fictions and the corrections necessary to debunk the myths and get your users engaged as participants.

Construction Myth 1: Increased traffic to your site(s) means that users feel compelled to share their own experiences.

The perennial, time-tested truth is that people who love to learn don't share that love for what they learn (or care to share). How do we make it worth their while?

Myth #2: Producing content is its own reward -- Users are inspired by altruism, team play, and a sense of community.

Turning users into contributors requires that we architect searches that highlight who the contributors are along with the volume and nature of what they're contributing. What are some common recogition programs that can be applied here?

Myth #3: Users want to stay in-the-loop and feel compelled to check in by using a central KM system to stay up-to-date.

No 12 step program can move forward until the addict admits that they have an addiction -- in this case relying on email to provide a dashboard-like visibility into what's fresh and noteworthy on an organizational level. How can the addict be weaned from the isolation of 1:1 asynchronous communication so that their comfort zone includes RSS readers, search alerts, and subscription feeds for staying on top of their priorities and moving targets?

Myth #4: Your search engine is revving like never before. Everyone is using it. So content submissions should be edging up too, right?

Enterprise systems are saddled with the tags we force on them to label their content baggage. But the more control we exert on our metadata the more pressure we put on our producers to execute our elaborate coding schemes. At what point can we introduce commony accepted web 2.0 fare as folksonomies, tag clouds, and ability to aggregate these terms by their popularity?

Myth #5: The case of network effects has sold itself. Your executives all agree: we've got to let our people use KM to find each other, not just documentation. How do you re-deploy an internal resource as a social network?

One of the self-fulfilling failures of expert-finding deep dives is that when you ask for volunteers your most sought-after domain leaders are already snowed under -- why would they volunteer their protected time to be officially pegged for all to see on your corporate radar? One of the many benefits of connecting metadata to search is that the engine can quantify thought leadership based on business need -- not based on who volunteers for guru status in a given topic.

Build It (and they won't come)

Call them ECMs or KM Hubs or Knowledge Nets or enterprise portals. Yesterday's sand castles? Meet tomorrow's ivory towers without the sustaining investment of your content producers. Here are five KM construction fictions and the corrections necessary to debunk the myths and get your users engaged as participants.

Construction Myth 1: Increased traffic to your site(s) means that users feel compelled to share their own experiences.

The perennial, time-tested truth is that people who love to learn don't share that love for what they learn (or care to share). How do we make it worth their while?

Myth #2: Producing content is its own reward -- Users are inspired by altruism, team play, and a sense of community.

Turning users into contributors requires that we architect searches that highlight who the contributors are along with the volume and nature of what they're contributing. What are some common recogition programs that can be applied here?

Myth #3: Users want to stay in-the-loop and feel compelled to check in by using a central KM system to stay up-to-date.

No 12 step program can move forward until the addict admits that they have an addiction -- in this case relying on email to provide a dashboard-like visibility into what's fresh and noteworthy on an organizational level. How can the addict be weaned from the isolation of 1:1 asynchronous communication so that their comfort zone includes RSS readers, search alerts, and subscription feeds for staying on top of their priorities and moving targets?

Myth #4: Your search engine is revving like never before. Everyone is using it. So content submissions should be edging up too, right?

Enterprise systems are saddled with the tags we force on them to label their content baggage. But the more control we exert on our metadata the more pressure we put on our producers to execute our elaborate coding schemes. At what point can we introduce commony accepted web 2.0 fare as folksonomies, tag clouds, and ability to aggregate these terms by their popularity?

Myth #5: The case of network effects has sold itself. Your executives all agree: we've got to let our people use KM to find each other, not just documentation. How do you re-deploy an internal resource as a social network?

One of the self-fulfilling failures of expert-finding deep dives is that when you ask for volunteers your most sought-after domain leaders are already snowed under -- why would they volunteer their protected time to be officially pegged for all to see on your corporate radar? One of the many benefits of connecting metadata to search is that the engine can quantify thought leadership based on business need -- not based on who volunteers for guru status in a given topic.

KM 2.0: Idle Worship?

gossip
Originally uploaded by t-squared

Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.

- David Brooks, The Great Forgetting / Published: April 11, 2008 copyright New York Times

KM 2.0: Idle Worship?

gossip
Originally uploaded by t-squared

Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.

- David Brooks, The Great Forgetting / Published: April 11, 2008 copyright New York Times

KM 2.0 -- Real or Hype (or a Simple Case of Reflexivity?)

The Boston KM Forum convened at Bentley College this past week with a blend of academics, practitioners, vendors, and evangelists appending the big 2.0 to their own take on the topicalities of what David Brooks is calling the Bad Memory Century. In The Great Forgetting Brooks pits the memory-haves against the memory-have-nots for control of total ... well incomplete recall. Faulty wiring challenges our recollections of whether we've: (1) intentionally deleted KM 1.0 or (2) reigned in an excessive 2.0 that discards all remembrances of where 1.0 was heading when 2.0 took over.

Bentley CS Professor Mark Frydenberg asked us the main difference between the two releases. I don't know whether it was more telling that no one answered his question because it was too obvious -- or really that hard to answer? He said the 1.0 was about getting to content and 2.0 was about getting to people. Hard to refute? I guess.

But to me the greater divide harkens back to The Machine is Us(ing) replay that began his discussion. Is it really about how we use technology? If we reverse roles with our social 2.0 toys could we really prove they were helping us get where we wanted 2.0 to take us? Did we even have a destination in mind?

Don't get me wrong. I can see how a LinkedIn profile or even a Facebook page could make the difference between landing a contract and receding into the dead contractor pile. But is eavesdropping on the recent bookmarkings of a Del.icio.us tagger a course of action? Is observing a bunch of Beltway commentators yammering on and then blogging about it a call to action? More to the point: has our technology convinced us that the gossiping of speculations and observances are substitutions for taking a risk or bringing an idea to life?

If I vote for a news story on Digg about George Soros and reflexivity do I expect an uptick of interest across the blogosphere in perception measurement? There's a difference between an action item and a thought bubble. And when I last cracked the window most realities looked at the experiential world through the lens of direct engagement, not high def screens, taking leave of one's chair, not our other senses.

If I choose not to answer Frydenberg's 2.0 quiz out loud but look for unverbalized responses on Twitter does that enrich those fleeting moments before the Great Forgetting reasserts itself? If you're performing on stage living in the moment can be a redemptive, even sacred part of a luscious experience. But in a 2.0 state, life is no longer the contact sport we were raised to play. It is a fantasy league.

Maybe that's the 2.0 world that our children will look back on when the dawning of their 21st Century begins to fade? Living in our heads. An entire to-do list mapped out in a series of keystrokes. For digital immigrants like me short-term memory is trapped in the immediacy -- dare I say the tyranny -- of now. To indulge this temptation any further would be to grade the notes passed in class with the same deliberation we once reserved for term papers.

KM 2.0 -- Real or Hype (or a Simple Case of Reflexivity?)

The Boston KM Forum convened at Bentley College this past week with a blend of academics, practitioners, vendors, and evangelists appending the big 2.0 to their own take on the topicalities of what David Brooks is calling the Bad Memory Century. In The Great Forgetting Brooks pits the memory-haves against the memory-have-nots for control of total ... well incomplete recall. Faulty wiring challenges our recollections of whether we've: (1) intentionally deleted KM 1.0 or (2) reigned in an excessive 2.0 that discards all remembrances of where 1.0 was heading when 2.0 took over.

Bentley CS Professor Mark Frydenberg asked us the main difference between the two releases. I don't know whether it was more telling that no one answered his question because it was too obvious -- or really that hard to answer? He said the 1.0 was about getting to content and 2.0 was about getting to people. Hard to refute? I guess.

But to me the greater divide harkens back to The Machine is Us(ing) replay that began his discussion. Is it really about how we use technology? If we reverse roles with our social 2.0 toys could we really prove they were helping us get where we wanted 2.0 to take us? Did we even have a destination in mind?

Don't get me wrong. I can see how a LinkedIn profile or even a Facebook page could make the difference between landing a contract and receding into the dead contractor pile. But is eavesdropping on the recent bookmarkings of a Del.icio.us tagger a course of action? Is observing a bunch of Beltway commentators yammering on and then blogging about it a call to action? More to the point: has our technology convinced us that the gossiping of speculations and observances are substitutions for taking a risk or bringing an idea to life?

If I vote for a news story on Digg about George Soros and reflexivity do I expect an uptick of interest across the blogosphere in perception measurement? There's a difference between an action item and a thought bubble. And when I last cracked the window most realities looked at the experiential world through the lens of direct engagement, not high def screens, taking leave of one's chair, not our other senses.

If I choose not to answer Frydenberg's 2.0 quiz out loud but look for unverbalized responses on Twitter does that enrich those fleeting moments before the Great Forgetting reasserts itself? If you're performing on stage living in the moment can be a redemptive, even sacred part of a luscious experience. But in a 2.0 state, life is no longer the contact sport we were raised to play. It is a fantasy league.

Maybe that's the 2.0 world that our children will look back on when the dawning of their 21st Century begins to fade? Living in our heads. An entire to-do list mapped out in a series of keystrokes. For digital immigrants like me short-term memory is trapped in the immediacy -- dare I say the tyranny -- of now. To indulge this temptation any further would be to grade the notes passed in class with the same deliberation we once reserved for term papers.

The Genuine and Discredible Blog

To blog or just to have dinner conversation?

Chatting up one's own crowded company of ardent opinions and and defensible positions is the stage personality -- the celebrity of blog. But that's pretty bland. It's passive recessive. It's almost like a media reporter who leads with the wink/nod that the Blogosphere is what blogs are known for.

Do you blog for the sake of touting your blogging credentials? Do you wave your blog pass to get into sites and discussions otherwise off limits? Didn't think so.

Blogs are vessels. They hold our peeves and praises in an editorial without editors. It's a one-sided debate from all sides of the aisle. But the most hermetic blog is porous with links and collaborations inspired elsewhere. Blogs live on an island where the word "my" is implicit. Any other pronoun will not do.

As a communications medium blogs fall much closer to closed circuits than printing presses -- confessionals, not tabloids. The cover charge for entry is a medium ego or larger: Yes, that's your personality on my screen. Where "the media" revolves around third-party celebrities and consumed by third-person audiences, blogs are decidedly first-person, singular. The moment a second party is involved a blog loses its "come-as-I-am" authenticity. When you're dressing your blogger in bedclothes or tuxedos, you know the jig is up. Keeping up an appearance is no more heroic than leaving your journal out to be read.

It's not a pretense to long for that same third-party bonding shared by media creations and their legions. What could be more flattering than the attentions of a stranger? But it's less than sincere to pose as a broker, referee or huckster whose credentials rest on their own blogging rites. Blogs are devoid of credibility just as an individual cannot confer credibility onto themselves no matter how big their name, persuasive their fight, or widely held their blogging postures.

* Tagging productive reference sites
* Endorsing content and then commenting on its impact
* Using a blog roll to reflect on your own aspirations
* News feeds that synthesize the thinking of otherwise disconnected worlds

That's where blogs become bigger than the bloggers who blog them and the self-referential nature of first person communications.

The Genuine and Discredible Blog

To blog or just to have dinner conversation?

Chatting up one's own crowded company of ardent opinions and and defensible positions is the stage personality -- the celebrity of blog. But that's pretty bland. It's passive recessive. It's almost like a media reporter who leads with the wink/nod that the Blogosphere is what blogs are known for.

Do you blog for the sake of touting your blogging credentials? Do you wave your blog pass to get into sites and discussions otherwise off limits? Didn't think so.

Blogs are vessels. They hold our peeves and praises in an editorial without editors. It's a one-sided debate from all sides of the aisle. But the most hermetic blog is porous with links and collaborations inspired elsewhere. Blogs live on an island where the word "my" is implicit. Any other pronoun will not do.

As a communications medium blogs fall much closer to closed circuits than printing presses -- confessionals, not tabloids. The cover charge for entry is a medium ego or larger: Yes, that's your personality on my screen. Where "the media" revolves around third-party celebrities and consumed by third-person audiences, blogs are decidedly first-person, singular. The moment a second party is involved a blog loses its "come-as-I-am" authenticity. When you're dressing your blogger in bedclothes or tuxedos, you know the jig is up. Keeping up an appearance is no more heroic than leaving your journal out to be read.

It's not a pretense to long for that same third-party bonding shared by media creations and their legions. What could be more flattering than the attentions of a stranger? But it's less than sincere to pose as a broker, referee or huckster whose credentials rest on their own blogging rites. Blogs are devoid of credibility just as an individual cannot confer credibility onto themselves no matter how big their name, persuasive their fight, or widely held their blogging postures.

* Tagging productive reference sites
* Endorsing content and then commenting on its impact
* Using a blog roll to reflect on your own aspirations
* News feeds that synthesize the thinking of otherwise disconnected worlds

That's where blogs become bigger than the bloggers who blog them and the self-referential nature of first person communications.

The Web: Blind Spot Removal?

I watched Clay Shirky promote his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations on Colbert this week. Here's basically what he said: As a communications channel the web is credited with bringing media access to non-media elites. It is the soap box that doesn't depend on the timbre of your voice or the size of your budget. Ask the blogger in the street and you will hear how we've rifled past staple guns, leaflets, and petitions. We're no longer captive audiences awaiting the judgements of vested opinions.

I admire Shirky and his heretical views towards organized and disorganized classification systems. I'm mostly in agreement about the Smart Mobs mantra and the inclusiveness of our media climate changes:

* opt-in when you want to join
* publish when you clear your throat
* disband when the center does not hold

But if the web has found its voice through blogging where can we find its ears? There are equal opportunities for attentive snoops to pick up on signals not evident to less astute listeners.

The answer that inspires me is the Emotionality of Privacy. Written in 1997 in the ASIS&T Journal by Barbara Flood. Flood's theory is that privacy is based on belief that "big" trust can only be conferred in "small" situations:

Families are tied together by information about members. Friendships exchange personal information and cede a certain amount of privacy. The larger the social aggregate, however, the less the individual is willing to sacrifice privacy and the more the individual needs to retain privacy in order to maintain a sense of self.

Political figures surrender this right the moment they announce their candidacies. But what about the rest of us?

What we decide to put out there on the web bears only passing reference to the stage-managed profile we would have our web snoops first come to know about us. (Remember that's assuming the total stranger is completely positive we've been accurately identified). Of course agents of control like my LinkedIn profile is a world of perception removed from what my computer reveals about how I use it. These are the awards, achievements, and even endorsements that we display in our virtual trophy cases. But less invasive than a government sting or a virtual surveillance ring is the far greater probability that our blind spots are out there. There for the taking.

Blind spots are the unknown unknowns to us that are known to others. As Donald Rumsfeld famously gandered in the most revealing press conference held during two Bush terms, "there are the ones we don’t know we don’t know." In the case of the missing OMD he could not have been more candid!

Ms. Flood's framework for describing the blind zone is the Johari Window:

* What's known to others and not known to others
* What's known to the self both publicly and privately
* What's not known to the self through the blind self or the unknown self (subconscious)


The goal of any effective researcher is to focus on the blind self. The blind self contains our respective zones of ignorance (the impact my actions have on you beyond my own awareness). It is the world of former colleagues, spouses, and witnesses on the scenes of past wreckages -- the outcomes that don't find their way to the trophy case. On the web our delusions, supressions, misguided faith, willful ignorance, and past admissions of guilt are now open to question if not actual publication. We would be well served to self-educate and research our own vulnerabilities before we cast our investigative nets out to others.

The Web: Blind Spot Removal?

I watched Clay Shirky promote his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations on Colbert this week. Here's basically what he said: As a communications channel the web is credited with bringing media access to non-media elites. It is the soap box that doesn't depend on the timbre of your voice or the size of your budget. Ask the blogger in the street and you will hear how we've rifled past staple guns, leaflets, and petitions. We're no longer captive audiences awaiting the judgements of vested opinions.

I admire Shirky and his heretical views towards organized and disorganized classification systems. I'm mostly in agreement about the Smart Mobs mantra and the inclusiveness of our media climate changes:

* opt-in when you want to join
* publish when you clear your throat
* disband when the center does not hold

But if the web has found its voice through blogging where can we find its ears? There are equal opportunities for attentive snoops to pick up on signals not evident to less astute listeners.

The answer that inspires me is the Emotionality of Privacy. Written in 1997 in the ASIS&T Journal by Barbara Flood. Flood's theory is that privacy is based on belief that "big" trust can only be conferred in "small" situations:

Families are tied together by information about members. Friendships exchange personal information and cede a certain amount of privacy. The larger the social aggregate, however, the less the individual is willing to sacrifice privacy and the more the individual needs to retain privacy in order to maintain a sense of self.

Political figures surrender this right the moment they announce their candidacies. But what about the rest of us?

What we decide to put out there on the web bears only passing reference to the stage-managed profile we would have our web snoops first come to know about us. (Remember that's assuming the total stranger is completely positive we've been accurately identified). Of course agents of control like my LinkedIn profile is a world of perception removed from what my computer reveals about how I use it. These are the awards, achievements, and even endorsements that we display in our virtual trophy cases. But less invasive than a government sting or a virtual surveillance ring is the far greater probability that our blind spots are out there. There for the taking.

Blind spots are the unknown unknowns to us that are known to others. As Donald Rumsfeld famously gandered in the most revealing press conference held during two Bush terms, "there are the ones we don’t know we don’t know." In the case of the missing OMD he could not have been more candid!

Ms. Flood's framework for describing the blind zone is the Johari Window:

* What's known to others and not known to others
* What's known to the self both publicly and privately
* What's not known to the self through the blind self or the unknown self (subconscious)


The goal of any effective researcher is to focus on the blind self. The blind self contains our respective zones of ignorance (the impact my actions have on you beyond my own awareness). It is the world of former colleagues, spouses, and witnesses on the scenes of past wreckages -- the outcomes that don't find their way to the trophy case. On the web our delusions, supressions, misguided faith, willful ignorance, and past admissions of guilt are now open to question if not actual publication. We would be well served to self-educate and research our own vulnerabilities before we cast our investigative nets out to others.

Word Algebra

It was Steve Arnold who fathered the ABI Inform taxonomy. And we thank him. In it he created two telecommunications categories -- one as an industry and another as an operational function. And we owe him big time. Why?

Arnold understood that taxonomies had to be strongest where search is weakest -- separating objects from predicates, actions from actors, the simple mechanics of grammar. His decision to isolate industries from operations was an elegant way to map verticals and horizontals within what the pre-web world used to call full-text databases.

So now we've got big, messy data sets whose only barrier to entry is hitting the key. How do we create clarity around the events we anticipate? How do we increase the certainty that we can identify who is driving those events and who's on the receiving end?

The framework I use for teaching this to my BU students is through "word algebra." In word algebra the Boolean construct would be:

actor1 OR actor2 "(verb1 OR verb2)(outcome1 OR outcome2)"

Plug this into Google as a future crime fighter and you get:

police OR cops "(taking OR took OR take)*(bribe OR bribes)"

The beauty of the formula is that you're tuning your results to the consequence of actions. This is nearly always a more interesting result than a topic-based query string consisting of keywords and subject classifications.

Better still, consider an entire index of query-based strings that chronicle a common set of outcomes -- say police corruption. The result is a formula more productive as an indexing agent for information-gathering than any static taxonomy related to criminal justice.

Word Algebra

It was Steve Arnold who fathered the ABI Inform taxonomy. And we thank him. In it he created two telecommunications categories -- one as an industry and another as an operational function. And we owe him big time. Why?

Arnold understood that taxonomies had to be strongest where search is weakest -- separating objects from predicates, actions from actors, the simple mechanics of grammar. His decision to isolate industries from operations was an elegant way to map verticals and horizontals within what the pre-web world used to call full-text databases.

So now we've got big, messy data sets whose only barrier to entry is hitting the key. How do we create clarity around the events we anticipate? How do we increase the certainty that we can identify who is driving those events and who's on the receiving end?

The framework I use for teaching this to my BU students is through "word algebra." In word algebra the Boolean construct would be:

actor1 OR actor2 "(verb1 OR verb2)(outcome1 OR outcome2)"

Plug this into Google as a future crime fighter and you get:

police OR cops "(taking OR took OR take)*(bribe OR bribes)"

The beauty of the formula is that you're tuning your results to the consequence of actions. This is nearly always a more interesting result than a topic-based query string consisting of keywords and subject classifications.

Better still, consider an entire index of query-based strings that chronicle a common set of outcomes -- say police corruption. The result is a formula more productive as an indexing agent for information-gathering than any static taxonomy related to criminal justice.