Revised 6/19/00

Where is Meaning when Form is Gone?

Investigate expert sites

Introduction

	Technology is advancing rapidly, faster than our conceptual paradigms.

	This paper surveys the relationship between the physical manifestation of information and the declaration of its meaning, traditionally the act of cataloging.

	The rapid technology advances promote two opposing trends: New ways to model information to enhance expressability and retrieval destroy traditional approaches to declaring the meaning of documents.  Meanwhile technology empowers the individual, therefore groups of individuals who construct "meaning communities".

	The thesis of this paper is that methods of establishing meaning of a text form is based on certain assumptions of the form of a text, assumptions that changing or disappearing under the transformative pressure of the Web.

	"It is reasonable to predict that catalogers will soon accept the notion of customized data structure for document surrogates, in which the definition of metadata in an online catalog will be tailored for local user groups or even individual users based on need and preference."  Ling Hwey Jeng, p. xviii

	Duality of meaning and document.  CIP as an example of the self-declaring text form.	

	"…the most important characteristics of the printed text is that it is a single, transportable, and unique entity.  This feature is a typical result of the technology used.  As mentioned above in a printed text, presentation and storage are comprised in the same medium.  In the electronic environment this essential uniqueness will be abolished and storage and presentation become disentagled." (Kircz, p. 217)

	"In this article we argue that the very form of scientific communication might change due to electronic technology, in such a way that a more precise and to-the-point communication system will emerge…In the tradition of the print-on-paper article a clear document structure emerged; a structure characterised by its linear build up and closed character.  In an electronic environment, where all articles and parts thereof can be interconnected, new ways of presenting scientific information will develop."  Kircz, p. 211.

Cataloging and the establishment of meaning

Cataloging:  Three aspects of the act of cataloging pertinent for this 
discussion
  Making a representation 

  Reading the text and naming it (constructivist theory of meaning).  Indexer as 
  privileged reader 
  Assumption of a certain community 
 
“Information and its embodiments” 
(p. 8) a distinction of great importance  “information is an abstract, but the documents that contain it are embodied in some medium, such as paper, canvas, stone, glass, floppy disks, or computer chips…Organizing information to access it physically requires not only descriptions but also its material embodiments and the mechanisms needed for retrieval.”  Svenonius.
 
Lubetsky distinguishes the work from its physical embodiment, which he refers to as “book.”  
 
“The book, it should be noted, comes into being as a dichotomic product-as a material object or medium used to convey the intellectual work of an author.” (p. 189)
“But the distinction between the book and the work is not purely an academic one.  It is, rather, of basic importance to an understanding of the nature of the problem of cataloging and of the objectives wich the catalog should be designed to serve.  This is due to the fact that the existence and the vicissitudes of the work are not confined to any particular book; that the book is actually only one particular edition, or representation of the work embodied in it -- …(p.190)
“In summary, then, it must be recognized that, genetically, a book is not an independent entity but represents a particular edition of a particular work by a particular author;  (p.190)  Lubetsky

Theories of text:

	ACM publishing strategy assumptions: (1) documents will be object-oriented, with some components being other objects already published on the Web, (2) Some documents will be interactive, (3) Documents structured for search and retrieval will be preferred to electronic analogs of the printed page. (ACM Publishing plan)

	Characteristics of on-screen text: "situationally embedded, interactive, functionally mapped, modular, navigable, hierarchically embedded, spacious, graphically rich, customizable and publishable"  (Bernhardt, p. 152)

	...text is an "ordered hierarchy of content objects" (following the patterns of SGML)(p. 6)..."Files tagged with descriptive markup are also much easier to port to other processing systems, since they are relatively system- and application-independent.(p. 17) DeRose, Durand, et al

Moving documents to the web
History of technology; applying yesterday's methods to tomorrow's new technical forms.

HTML

OCLC’s web characterization project, June 1999 web statistics reports 
Approximately 300 million web pages on public web sites.
[May 26, 2000]  
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/research/projects/webstats/statistics.htm

Strategy of developing self-descriptive web documents. "What would be ideal would be for each web or intranet document to be self-describing.  Ownership and provenance, of course, as well as aboutness.  That's the goal of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and of the Dublin Core (DC) metadata element set, developed separately the Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), but now regarded as a particular instance of the RDF." p. 36  Bater  "It's CIP, Jim, but not as we know it." p. 38

CORC project of library-selected database of Web-based electronic resource descriptions. (http://www.oclc.org/oclc/promo/10520corc/index.htm)
Extent of activity as evidenced by processing of records: NetFirst approximately 150,000 records, CORC approximately 26, 000 records. (e-mail "Database load and diacritics and UNICODE" by Greene, Richard, Friday, June 16,2000 12:54 PM)

 	How much metadata?
 
However, Lawrence and Giles (Nature, Vol. 400, p107-109, July 8, 1999)
estimated it at 800 million pages.  As best we can tell, the difference is largely definitional.
 
Our study of Metadata, now a little dated, can be found at
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/research/publications/review98/frameset.htm.

A key issue facing the Web community is Web resource discovery and description.  Although the Web is unquestionably a rich source of information for nearly every conceivable topic, isolating the subset of information pertinent to a particular need is often a formidable task. Similarly, assessing the prevalence of certain resource types--for example, scholarly research--on the Web often produces results that are little better than anecdotal. The difficulty in contending with 
these issues is exacerbated by the Web's exponential growth.
Web Characterization Project
An Analysis of Metadata Usage on the Web
Edward T. O'Neill, Consulting Research Scientist
Brian F. Lavoie, Systems Analyst
Patrick D. McClain, Senior Systems Analyst
[May 26, 2000]  
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/research/publications/review98/frameset.htm
Interpretation of the metadata
In other words, it is assumed that metadata found on the home page generally applies to the site as a whole, rather than to the information specific to the home page itself.
Sample of public sites:
The following analysis is based on the set of home pages corresponding to the 1,457 unique, public Web sites identified in the Web sample. The population is restricted to these sites because in general, they are intended for public consumption, and would therefore be most likely to provide information that facilitated resource discovery and classification. On the other hand, private and provisional sites, which constitute the balance of the Web, are either not intended for or are not ready for public consumption; therefore, it is less 
likely that these sites would provide metadata. Note also that for this 
analysis, the home page is considered a proxy for the site.
These results suggest that the use of metadata in some form is quite common in public sites: nearly three-quarters of the sampled sites had at least one instantiation of the META tag
Seven of the 1,024 home pages containing metadata used Dublin Core metadata elements The results reported above suggest that metadata usage is quite common in Web documents. However, a number of caveats must be attached to this conclusion. 
First, it is evident that much of current metadata usage can be attributed to the automatic generation of META tags by HTML editors. It is not clear that metadata of this kind is particularly useful for facilitating resource discovery and description. Second, metadata is often used to describe only the site itself, or at the most a small subset of the site's documents. Current metadata usage patterns are a long way from comprehensive document description at the page level. Finally, most metadata usage is still ad hoc; with a few exceptions, 
most sites do not adhere to a well-defined set of metadata elements.

	How trustworthy is the metadata?

Clifford Lynch’s concern with trustworthy markup.  "Information retrieval systems have dealth with databases that are assumed to be well-behaved, consistent and often admission-controlled, and questions of trust and data accuracy have been completely implicit, to the exent that they have been considered at all"..."Highly distributed informatin dissemination systems like the WorldWideWeb herald a fundamental change to thes4e assumptions which will, in my view, have broad-reaching implications for the desing and use of the next generations of information retrieval systems."  Lynch.

Size dynamic of the web
How feasible is the metadata strategy?  The physical size of the web would seem to invalidate metadata, yet the development of meaning communities described below would validate the strategy.

	"There are now more than a billion pages on the World Wide Web, all loosely tied together by seven billion annotated links, called hyperlinks, which is at least one link for every person on the planet.  Each day, more than a million pages are added, and a page can appear in any language, written by any person, for any reason; it can be three lines long or the length of the Bible.  For the first time in history, people everywhere have access to the thoughts, products, and writing of a large--and growing--percentage of the earth's population."  Specter, p. 88

	20% of web pages are not older than twelve days, while 25% of web pages is older than one year.  "The researchers sampled more than 2 million of the estimaged 800 million Web pages over seven months." (As web expands, search engines puff to keep up")

Web consequences on document forms

	In an effort to speed up web performance, there are two approaches, caching the frequently requested material and content distribution (serving up parts of a page from the server with the shortest, fastest connection).  
"Inktomi, with America Online as a trophy customer, aims to make Web traffic flow faster by sotring or "caching" the most frequently requested material on network server computers nearest to the people who request it."   "Akamai, which counts Yahoo among its big clients, takes a different approach to the same problem, with a technique called content distribution.  When a user in Singapore, say, clicks on a popular page in Yahoo, only the first request goes to Yahoo's server in Palo Alto, Calif.; the balance of the page is then delivered from an Akamai server with the shortest, fastest connectio the person in Singapore."  "For a user, calling on any Web page requires downloading multiple 'objects' -- a banner ad, a photo or a set of activity buttons, for example.  Any or all such objects must be broken down into packets of digital bits, sent across the Internet and reassembled at the end user's computer."  Fisher, p. 4

Further Evolution of Text Forms

Dynamic html

	XML - Extensible Markup Language

	XML is a simplified, fully conforming subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).  XML separates a document's structure from its contents.

New forms of documents: APIs - application programming interfaces
  DOM 
  SAX 

	Name spaces
	A namespace can be thought of as a context; it is a setting, which gives a specific meaning to what might otherwise be a general term.  One of the difficulties in working with XML documents retrieved from multiple sources is that the meaning of application-specific tags may sometimes become unclear.  For example, if a financial application merged two XML documents - one from a Canadian bank, the other from an American bank -- into a single document, and then came across the tag <dollars> while processing it, how does it know whether the contents of that element refer to Canadian dollars or American dollars?

	Links among "documents"

	Impulse to link all documents together…"A Universal citation database as a catalyst for reform in scholarly communication" R.D. Cameron.

	The Xpath 1.0 recommendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath) defines a syntax for addressing a document's structure.  Xpath identifies portions of the document (for example, find all child car elements whose make = 'BMW'.
 
	Systems integration of many media types 
	"Furthermore, digital libraries are composite multimedia objects comprising different media components including text, video, images, or audio.  Therefore, the challenge is to provide users with the ability to seamlessly and transparently access digital library objects in spite of the heterogeneity and dynamism among the information resources, and the composite multimedia nature of the objects." Adam et al. p. 64

	System integration issues: "system integration includes pre-integation, identification of schema matching, schema integration, and source-data integration sub-processes." (p. 64)

	New Forms of Meaning

		Situational expertism

		Application of expertism - instant reference librarian - who can offer and explain the special jargon.

			MindCrossing delivers critical knowledge in the form of "MindStores," individual online ventures operated by experts in your industry. MindStores offer white papers, journal articles, best practices, case studies, and more which are delivered on a relevance-basis to your users in real time at the point of purchase. Your customers can feel comfortable making buying decisions. http://www.mindcrossing.com/html/IMarketPlacesMain.asp

		Communities
Establishment of communities situated around certain products and processes who will develop their own special vocabularies of meaning - their own special metadata.
	"Back in Q3 1999, the Internet saw an explosion of sites based on the concept of knowledge sharing.  At a rate of more than one starup a months, investors and entrepreneurs pumped tens of millions of dollars into this new category, in which a Web company functions as a forum--sometimes a broker--for the exchange of expert or everyday wisdom.
-	Allexperts.com
-	Askme.com
-	Epinions.com
-	Exp.com
-	ExpertCentral.com
-	Experts-Exchange.com
-	Keen.com 

Biz Talk example

	"Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the role of information technology in markets, both in traditional markets, and in the emergence of electronic marketplaces, such as the multitude of Internet-based online auctions.  Bakos, p. 35

References:
 
The ACM electronic publishing plan.  http://www.acm.org/pubs/epub_plan.html

Adam, N. R., Atluri, V. and Adiwijaya, I. (June 2000). "SI [System Integration] in digital libraries"  Communications of the ACM, v.43 (6), 64-72.

"As web expands, search engines puff to keep up."  (May 29, 2000) The New York Times, p. C3

Bakos, Y. (August 1998)  "The emerging role of electronic marketplaces on the internet"  Communications of the ACM, 41(8), 35-42.

Bater, B. (May 2000) "Cataloguing electronic resources: Wise up or dumb down?"  Managing Information, v. 7 (4), 36 - 38.

Bernhardt, S. A. (1993).  The Shape of text to come: The texture of print on screens. College composition and communication, v.44(2), 151-175.

Cameron, R.D. (?) "A Universal citation database as a catalyst ffor reform in scholarly communication."  6/14/2000  http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/cameron/index.html

DeRose, S.J., Durand, D.G., Mylonas, E., and Renear, A.H. (Winter 1990)  "What is text, really?"  Journal of computing in higher education, v. 1(2), 3-26.

Fisher, L. M. (April 17, 2000) "2 companies take separate paths to speed delivery of web pages."  The New York Times, p.C1-C4.

Jeng, L. H. (April, 2000)  "Millennium project research agenda"  The Library Quarterly, v. 70 (2), xvii - xviii

Kircz, J. G. (1998).  Modularity: The next form of scientific information presentation?  Journal of Documentation, v.54 (2), March 1998, 210-235.

Lubetsky, S.  (1969). “The Objectives of the catalog”, in: Foundations of 
cataloging: A sourcebook, edited by M. Carpenter and E. Svenonius.  Littleton, 
CO: Libraries Unlimited.  pp. 189-191   book itself published in 1985

Lynch, C.A. "When documents deceive: trust and provenance as new factors for information retrieval in a tangled web"  In publication.

Specter, M. (May 29, 2000)  "Search and deploy: The race to build a better search engine."  The New Yorker, 88 - 100.

Svenonius, E. (2000). The Intellectual foundation of information organization.  
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.