Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...Patti Smith will be curating the 2005 Meltdown.

There's still controversy over the recent discovery of what might be an impact crater under the North Sea. The latest images from seismic data of the Silverpit structure show it having a similar geomorphology to impact craters on Europa and Callisto, with rippled rings and a central peak. However there's an alternate explanation that involves the movement of a known salt deposit.


It's time to get the drills out and actually look at the rocks - that way we'll see just whether the Silverpit is an impact formation or not...

A fascinating question, no matter what the outcome...

I may be a little slow on the uptake, as I only noticed today that LJ's outgoing RSS feeds actually support direct links to each entry's comments page...

Pity it's not there in the equivalent ATOM feed...

Going back through my RSS logs I noticed that it was in fact turned on some time on the 22^nd of June last year, round about 18:50 BST. Nifty.

I do love having a big archive of email and RSS...

I may have spent several months working in the home of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, but I've yet to see Babbage's brain.

All that could change soon, as it turns out that it's on display in The Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons . That's not, all, as other exhibits include "the first ‘keyhole’ gall bladder removal in England; an interactive demonstration of laparoscopic surgery; one of the first heart-lung machines used in Britain; and a prototype ‘bionic’ heart"

Nifty, if a little gory in places.

Thanks to codepope for the link.

If you use tools like Flickr, del.icio.us or Technorati, then you'll be familiar with the benefits of what have come to be known as folksonomies. All these services allow you to create your own tags for classifying content. User-created taxonomies work well in social networks, where there is an tendency to clarity driven by the ethos of the network. Flickr is a case in point, where specific image tags have become fashionable tools for sharing themed images without creating artificial groups.

It's quite simple to create your own folksonomy. Say you're using Flickr as a photohost, all you need to do is upload your pictures and then give them a series of tags that describe what you've uploaded. A picture of a man standing on a beach in the sun might end up tagged as "fred beach cambersands sunny". Four tags that really only mean something to you. However someone searching Flickr for pictures of sunny beaches would be able to find your picture, as their search would pick up the "sunny" and "beach" tags.

Folksonomies are a far cry from the complex taxonomies used by knowledge management systems, where there's considerable research into defining information hierarchies. But there's one thing about folksonomies: they just work.

That's fine. In fact that's just peachy!

The Ronseal "it does what says on the tin" approach is one I like. I'm as guilty of anyone as producing my own idiosyncratic tagging schemes - and I'll often have to go back to edit some consistency into my tagging.

However there's one area where I'd like to have some sort of constraint - and that's in what I've come to think of as "geosonomies": tags that relate to specific places. It's easy enough to find a tag on Flickr for London, but what if you're trying to track down an image of a specific place in a specific country, and you're not sure of the exact spelling. Surely it should be possible to start at "Belgium", and then use a map to find the place you want pictures from?

Implementing geosonomies should be relatively simple. All they do is imply a second level of metadata that says "place". They can be extended to manage well understood hierarchical structures - continent:country:province:city/town - so a tag "London" could be associated with additional hierarchical metadata: "Europe:UK:London". Geosonomy tagging can remain as free as the standard folksonomy approach - the additional metadata should be added automatically if the user identifies a tag as geographical. If the place name is unknown, the user can be prompted to add hierarchical information. We shouldn't expect services to build complete geographical databases when users can add places themselves.

Turning folksonomies into working metadata is an interesting problem for the next few years. Perhaps the geosonomy approach is worth considering as a place to start.

Nokia's Lifeblog is a step in this direction, and as more and more digicams and mobile phones start linking to GPS, geographical information is going to become part and parcel of our everyday online lives.

After all, we all like to know where we've been...

Thoughts sparked off by a walk in the park with marypcb