Metataxis Blog

Metataxis is pleased to be sponsoring the second biennial conference of the UK Chapter of ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization), to be held at University College London on 4th-5th July 2011. See http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/ for more details.

Judi and Marc will be attending. See you there!

We are proud to announce that our links to ISKO UK are now strengthened. At their recent AGM, Judi Vernau was elected Vice-Chair, and our associate Fran Huckle was elected Secretary. They join senior associate Alan Gilchrist who is a long-time committee member.

ISKO UK had another successful meeting yesterday, when over 80 people assembled at UCL in London to hear Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner, and others, talk about the tension between encouraging/forcing government to become more open about its information, and respecting the right to privacy. Apparently there have been those who thought there should be a Privacy Commissioner as well as an Information Commissioner, but as Mr Graham pointed out, it’s really two ends of a spectrum, and one can’t create policy or take action effectively on one without respecting the needs of the other.

Val Skelton has written up the event for Information Today: http://www.infotoday.eu/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Public-access-to-information-74981.aspx

A couple of bugs in SharePoint 2010 content types to watch out for (nearly lost my sanity with these).

Bug 1

If you use Office 2007 (Office 2003 and Office 2010 are ok) with SP2010. Make sure you have Office 2007 SP2 installed.  If you do not, all managed metadata fields in the DIP (document information panel) are missing (which looks weird for users). With SP2 you get a more acceptable “Please edit these fields on the server”, which although lame is more friendly! Any default values in your managed metadata fields are not displayed in the DIP, although they are properly set in SP2010. This also means you cannot make these fields mandatory as in Office 2007 there is no way to set them, and therefore you can’t create the document (kind of a show-stopper in a document management system…). Essentially Office 2007 is smart enough to know the field is something different but not smart enough to display it properly.

All this works fine with Office 2010. With Office 2003 there is no DIP, so the problem doesn’t arise in the first place.

Bug 2

Attaching Office templates (of any version) to content types. There are two ways of doing this 1)URL reference 2) direct upload. 1) doesn’t work – it gives you random behaviour! Usually resulting in the wrong content type that you asked for being generated when you create a document. 2) works. There are workarounds for 1). See- http://sharepointchick.com/archive/2011/01/07/using-content-types-with-document-templates-when-using-quotnew-documentrdquo.aspx which seems to work thankfully.

Thanks Microsoft – that’s 3 days of my life I’ll never get back….

Hello again, and apologies for the deafening silence from us over the last few months. We’ve all been working flat out, consulting across the UK and also in Ireland and Hong Kong. 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting year for us so watch this space for further news and comment…

Further to the previous posting, the slides from the event are now at http://www.iskouk.org/events/legal_knowledge_nov2010.htm.

ISKO UK had another successful meeting on Wednesday, attracting about 80 participants to an afternoon of speakers on ‘Legal Know-How: Organization & Semantic Analysis’. I remember some years ago – I think it was 2003 – there was a taxonomy community of practice in London, and a high proportion of people who came along were from legal firms. At that time, they seemed eager to learn more about taxonomy, metadata and findability, but not at all keen to share their own experiences, and definitely unwilling to give any insight into the actual vocabularies they were building. That’s understandable – if anyone knows the value of protecting IP, it’s got to be lawyers!

So it was slightly surprising to see how that’s changed over the last seven years, even to the point where there was some discussion about whether there could or should be a standard taxonomy that everyone in the field could benefit from. I can’t help thinking how sensible that sounds, especially since we were told that a useful legal vocabulary might comprise only four or five thousand terms. Metataxis has been advocating an overarching taxonomy for health and social care for some time, following a piece of research into what various government and research bodies are doing in this area (the number of wheels being reinvented all round the country would power an entire wagon train). So a single source of terminology for law also makes good sense (shared resourcing, maintenance taken care of, etc ): it’s what you actually do with the terminology that potentially gives you the edge.

The slides and recordings from the meeting will be available from the ISKO UK site in a couple of weeks (www.iskouk.org). In the meantime, I can’t help reproducing a great quote on the subject of metadata, which comes (I think) from Pinsent Masons: ‘If you don’t name your kids’ trousers when they go to school, you’ll never see those trousers again!’

Metadata v taxonomy – not sure why the ‘versus’, but an interesting blog from Bearing Point which I couldn’t resist responding to.

http://mike2.openmethodology.org/blogs/information-development/2010/10/11/metadata-versus-taxonomy/#comment-22651