You might think that there need be no war over creating a taxonomy. When should you use a hierarchical classification, and when a set of facets? You might think it hardly worth bothering over. Yet some thesaurus experts fight to defend …
Category: web development
Reading Time: 3 minutes
“We really did have customers in those early days— true visionary early adopters— and we often talked to them and asked for their feedback. But we emphatically did not do what they said.” This startling admission appears in the first …
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Big Bang is certainly the way to describe it: At the Mark Logic London User Group, Freddie Quek of Wiley described how Wiley achieved their “big bang”, the project to redevelop what had been known as Wiley InterScience and created the …
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Whatever they teach you on a computing degree, it doesn’t seem to be sufficient to create an effective web site. One of the paradoxes of the modern world is that we are surrounded by IT, and yet those who have studied …
Reading Time: 2 minutes
The curiously named “Beyond eBooks” (University College, London, April 2014) was the latest in a series of annual conferences devoted to ebooks. The title was curious, since ebooks were hardly mentioned in several of the presentations. A better title might have …
Reading Time: 3 minutes
So said Roovn Pakiri, co-presenter of the keynote address at this year’s Enterprise Search Europe (London, April). His presentation represented the curious way in which a logical argument can go from a simple, sensible statement to something that is decidedly questionable …
Reading Time: 2 minutes
I was fortunate to be invited to talk at Enterprise Search Europe in London this week, which gave me an excellent two-day overview of the state of search. It was an impressive event, combining practitioners, academics, and visionaries, with detailed, blow-by-blow …
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Years ago I worked at Dorling Kindersley producing illustrated four-colour books – that is to say, with pictures on every page, and the text often wrapped around the pictures. Whatever the subject, cookery, health and wellbeing, or DIY, Dorling Kindersley’s working …
Reading Time: 3 minutes
O’Reilly’s new initiative, Safari Flow, which is currently available in beta form, is a timely prompt to review the success, and the qualities, of its elder brother, Safari Books Online. For several years Safari Books Online has been a great exemplar …