IMM Blog

Following on from the Sydney launch the IMM has now been launched in Melbourne and a follow-up to the September launch has been held in Adelaide.  All of these events were held in December 2011 and positioned the IMM to grow into 2012.

Melbourne's launch was held at the Melbourne Museum and thanks to both Tim Hart and Jenny Roper for hosting us.  Tim also helped us secure Ryan Donahue from Eastman House in Rochester as a speaker.

Melbourne's launch focused on the openness and sharing of information, and Dr Mohsen Kalantari from the University of Melbourne started us off by giving us an overview of the work he is doing in the area of geospatial data.  An important point that Mohsen made was around the difference between managing information spatially, versus managing spatial information.  Spatial information can be tremendously important for citizens, and as both social and semantic systems mature this integration of spatial information will radically change how information is viewed and utilised.  It also has huge implications for information management, most of which are only just beginning to be recognised.

There is a growing recognition in the use of spatial information in disaster management but the key issues here are those of:

• reliability of networks;
• accuracy of information;
• volume of information, and the
• filtering of the information.

Devices are needed which will connect information on the fly, and bring disparate systems together.

Ryan Donahue, from Eastman House, talked us through the challenges of managing a graphic archive in the digital age.  He gave an amusing talk around how people within the Museum world can work with their collections to leverage the power of crowd-sourcing as well as to push some of the boundaries.  Museums are great for doing things that can’t be done elsewhere because they are in the business of access and they want to give information away and encourage maximum participation and involvment.

The main challenge is that of resolving issues of obsolescence and data formats, and for small institutions the complexity of data models are problematic as there is often only minimal IT support and a lack of understanding of changing standards.

Linking to Mohsen’s talk Ryan spoke of the importance of linking to geospatial information and providing as much context as possible.

If content is King, context is his Queen

Thus the linking of social graphs to photography, and bringing together the collections of digital libraries and digital museums could greatly influence the knowledge about collections the collectors themselves.  This is also where semantic technologies such as Natural Langage Processing will bear fruit.

Our final speaker was Dr Yang-Fang Li from Monash University.  Yang-Fang gave us an overview of the development of the semantic web describing it as “a form of ontology with meaning for the web”.  He reinforced the challenges described by both Mohsen and Ryan but talked of the potential of semantic technologies in order to enable greater data integration, information sharing and access, and from there making knowledge and data management systems future proof.

Some of the current examples include “MyGrid” in the UK which is connecting systems; BBC’s Music site, the New York Times and IBM’s “Watson”.

Watson is the one that many have been following and it has taken all of the DBpedia data set and been able to query data in real time.  That is an amazing feat and one which gives hope for the future in terms of building an architecture for extensible data management.

Next steps for the IMM into 2012

THe IMM has set a charter of bringing together conversations from a range of communities and disciplines which all need to coalesce to enable better information management and governance.  Holger Kohler, one of our 2010 speakers, commented in Adelaide that at Meta 2010 there were different presentations on different things and that "30% of the audience was confused at any one time".  This is a fascinating comment and highlights the challenges that many within the information management community face.  

So, what are those conversations?

For record-keepers and archivists the challenge is to promote best practice in how data and information is created, managed and stored.  Metadata repositories and systems that are carefully crafted and maintained are the dream, so that information retrieval and from there linkage, connection and sharing, is as seamless, easy and accurate as possible is what it's all about.

Then, there is the web.  For many in the web world the idea of a semantic approach where the metadata will emerge from folksonomic interactions and user tagging, where natural language and parsing technologies will present diagnostics of particularly unstructured information is where things may be headed.  Andrew Stott from the UK's Transparency Board made that comment to us at FutureGov 2011 in Canberra.

Finally, there is social media.  What Web 2.0 has done is to bring metadata to the forefront and reveal both it's power and challenges.  As people are adding their own tags and descriptions, metadata, the power of social co-creation is truly astounding and portends a new era of information transparency but also confusion.  Data, as Genevieve Bell so rightly tells us, has a story and must be interpreted within the context of that story.  Hence a conversation at the IMM Adelaide event on 13th December was about the challenge of bringing health records together when some have been collected for research purposes and others for patient treatment purposes.  The two live within different systems and have different meanings; ones linked to getting research funding the other to delivering patient services.  It is these differing objectives that make all the difference.

So, the challenge for the IMM is to bring these conversations together as the syntactic, semantic and social worlds collide and combine.  It is not an insignificant one and, of course, it is to an extent a question of semantics and context.

We don't have the answers, they lie within the communities themselves, and perhaps the most pleasing thing about the meetings we've had thus far is to connect and re-connect people who have complementary interests and skills, divergent approaches, but are all working towards the same goal.

The journey thus far has been an exciting one, not without it's challenges, but I do feel that we have positioned the IMM for the year ahead.

Our report for 2011 will be available our website at www.metalounge.org towards the end of January so please visit us again then, or sign up and we will keep you posted.