‘You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.’
I would imagine that Understanding Media (1964) is surely one of those books – like Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Klein’s No Logo – owned by many yet read by few. Great then, on the occasion of McLuhan’s centenary to be able to remind oneself of his ideas
online over a sandwich.
Through Tom Wolfe’s excellent
introduction I learned of the influence on McLuhan of catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin. Now, in writing this, I thought it’d be useful to link through to the excellent entry on de Chardin (who shaped the religious and intellectual outlook many a mid-century catholic intellectual including Belloc, Chesterton and Auden amongst others) in the ODNB. But if I did that, the majority would end up
here, on a page so utterly dreadful that it is to user experience what
Fat Burger is to healthy eating. Instead I have few choices but to direct you to
here. More depressingly, and completely unsurprisingly, if you Google ‘de Chardin’ the first result is from Wikipedia and you give up long, long before you find a scholarly hit in the results.
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As the leading developer of access management systems for digital publishing, we were naturally intrigued by IBM’s prediction before Christmas: ‘You will never need a password again‘. This is one of the five predictions IBM made about ‘innovations that will change the way we live, work and play in the next five years’. Biometric data, it seems, will not only tighten up security online but also massively simplify the business of authenticating your identity, something we all have to do wearyingly often nowadays.
‘Over the next five years, your unique biological identity and biometric data – facial definitions, iris scans, voice files, even your DNA – will become the key to safeguarding your personal identity and information and replace the current user ID and password system.’
Five years really isn’t all that long a time. So, should we at Semantico retool all our client sites for the coming change and rewrite our software accordingly? It may surprise you to learn that we didn’t hire in some extra developers to start working on the task over Christmas.
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We’re all familiar with the difficulty of finding relevant information inside huge sets of search results. The sheer scale of many information resources forces us to iteratively refine and adapt our search queries until either we find the information we need or we abandon our search.
Using taxonomies, thesauri or ontologies to tag our information resources allows us to help users find information more quickly. This in turn leads to increased usage, driving renewals and additional sales of information at the point of discovery. Abandoned searches are clearly a failure in this context!
Here are the four most important techniques for improving search by leveraging taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies.
