Heading to ASIST

This Saturday I will be heading down to Columbus, Ohio to attend the annual meeting of the American Society for Information Technology.  If you are coming, hope to see you there!

I will be presenting a poster about an empirical approach to the study of (human) indexing systems based on the comparative analysis of the syntax of the terms that are used within the different systems.  The work emerged from investigations of the relationship between social tagging (e.g. Connotea) and professional indexing (e.g. MEDLINE).  As has been typical in my career thus far, when I got started on the project, I found that I didn't have the tools I felt that I needed to answer the question satisfactorily so I spent most of my time trying to make them. 

One of the more interesting outcomes of the work are visualizations of the differences between the structures of the terms used within ontologies, thesauri, and folksonomies.  They are surprisingly distinct from one another. The abstract for a full paper (just accepted today) describing the work as well as the programs written and the data processed are available here.