last updated: December 3, 2005
Dewey's development of the decimal system while working as an assistant librarian at Amherst from 1874 until 1877.
Information recovery relates to how researchers locate relevant articles they know, or think, are out there somewhere in the flood of literature. Subject indexes, like Index Medicus, were the traditional means for information recovery. However, these indexes required substantial intellectual effort and subjective judgment by human indexers. The results were often confusing, duplicative, costly and quite late. At the Welch Project, Garfield became interested in using machines to automatically generate indexing terms that effectively describe a document's contents without human intervention. As a consequence of investigating the linguistic structure of review articles and traditional indexing methods, he was able to take advantage of a fortuitous encounter with legal citations. Eventually, this led to the development of the concept of citation indexes for scientific literature. By combining citation indexing with natural language indexing, he investigated precursors of today's Science Citation Index, including patent citation indexes.4 In those days, this was anathema to the traditional view of controlled Thesaurus based indexing or cataloging. From: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/overvu.html
The use of controlled vocabularies is another important approach to refinement that improves the precision for descriptions and leverages the substantial intellectual investment made by many domains to improve subject access to resources. The Dewey Decimal Classification System, for example, affords a multilingual classification system long used in traditional library environments that can be applied to electronic resources as well. There are hundreds of domain-specific thesauri and classification systems, as well, that can be imported into the Web metadata architecture to support subject descriptions. Specifying the use of a particular vocabulary in a given collection of metadata will allow applications to provide more coherent search and browsing facilities. Even in cases where an application is not designed to take advantage of a classification scheme or thesaurus, users may still benefit from the inherent coherence that such a scheme affords. From: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/weibel/04weibel.html
As a meta language, XML needs definition (DTD's) in order to be useful. Often the DTD's are assembled by a group of individuals, usually in a combination of real time and asynchronous communication in order to determine how the tags should be defined.
In terms of determining value, online auction sites, like eBay, are based on social networks determining the value of an item based on bidding.
It is written collaboratively by volunteers with wiki software, which allows articles to be added or changed by nearly anyone. The project began on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. The English-language version of Wikipedia currently has more than 800,000 articles. Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity,[1] and has spawned several sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
» del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. From: http://del.icio.us/doc/about
Furl.net is another social bookmarks manager, like del.icio.us. http://www.furl.net.
Citeulike.com helps academics share, store, and organize the academic papers they are reading. Citation detail are automatically extracted and the article is added to an online 'personal library' accessible from any computer at anytime. Users can share their libraries with others to find out who is reading similar papers. URL: http://www.citeulike.org/
Connotea is much like Citeulike.com, however, it is geared towards scientists. URL: http://www.connotea.org
Probability dictates that PageRank will successfully capture the subjective sense of Web-page importance. If a large number of Web users in the role of authors create content that points at certain Web pages, then it is highly probable that those same Web pages presented as query results will satisfy a large number of Web users in the role of searchers. In other words, Google satisfies the average Web searcher so well because it has aggregated the valuations of the average Web author. In this way, Google transforms Web authors into lay indexers of Web content where the linkages they set is a plebiscite for the most 'important' Web pages. From: http://informationr.net/ir/9-3/paper180.html
Maps trends in tags on del.icio.us, called "tag clouds" which looks at how tags have stabilized over time. http://www.cloudalicio.us/. Discussed in article, "The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems" by Golder and Huberman at http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0508/0508082.pdf. Also, there is an Italian blogger named Speroni who has written about tags and tagclouds a fair bit: http://blog.pietrosperoni.it./