Knowledge Leadership Associates » Information Management

Citation mapping

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 06:00:41 +0000

Bibliometrics is an information science technique that aims to show the relationships between documents; however, the results have often been difficult to understand and the real meaning obscured by mathematical and statistical relationships. A new approach is being developed by three researchers at the University of Washington, United States of America: Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West and Martin Rosvall. the essence of the work is to develop a mapping technique that can be used to capture the associations between patterns of citations and, thus, to map relationships. In her article of 11 September 2011, Jennifer Howard explains the origin and reasons for developing the technique (Citation by citation, new maps chart hot research and scholarship’s hidden terrain, Chronicle of higher education, 13 September 2011). Their system, InfoMap, makes use of a statistical technique called “Eigenfactors” that provides a rather more sensitive measure than the Journal Impact Factor that has been so widely used. The researchers aim to make their system freely and easily available. Rosvall and Bergstrom’s paper about the technique as applied to the development of neuroscience, Mapping change in large networks (PLoSONE, 5(1) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008694) explains the technique and highlights its advantages.

Citation mapping is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Computer, give me . . .

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:24:03 +0000

Here we are on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise; “Computer, give me a list of the planets with more than 75% of surface covered with water”. Moments later, the reply comes back. Far-fetched? Perhaps, at the moment, but a computer scientist at the University of Washington, Oren Etzioni, has suggested that this is where strong investment in natural-language query processing systems would pay off handsomely. His article in the journal Nature (4 August, 476: 25-26) provides some powerful arguments in favour of experimentation and further research into ways in which searching of electronic and other sources can be radically improved. Perhaps it will be some years before the voice-controlled search is possible — but major improvements in the way in which searches are conducted would be a step towards improved information management.

Computer, give me . . . is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Looking for a new role?

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 06:51:05 +0000

Information today Europe carries an interesting idea: in his blog entry for 5 August 2011, Stephen Cahill proposes a new career strategy, that of becoming an information coach. He makes the point that, in an intensive and information-rich environment, many managers are finding it difficult to cope because they do not have the necessary skills to navigate the information space to find relevant information. Information overload and the difficulties of identifying reliable sources combine to make the task problematic. “Being an information coach means that you need to help a decision maker establish exactly what the key, ‘ruin or success’ dimensions are for their part of the organisation and then build the scaffolding that supports their core needs”, writes Cahill, and goes on to pose five questions that one should ask of decision-makers in order to assist in building a coaching strategy.

Looking for a new role? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Secure searching with DuckDuckGo!

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 08:23:55 +0000

Many search engines, including Google, track and record searches, including search terms used and the location and IP address from which the search originates. Potentially, it would be possible to identify an individual from such information. The data is used, supposedly, to assist in monitoring search quality and, also, to provide a profile of recent searches so that targeted advertising information can be displayed on subsequent search pages. This approach, benign though it is claimed to be, is disturbing, to say the least, and could constitute a serious security risk to a company that is searching for strategically-important information.

So, if you are not happy to be monitored, try a new search engine, DuckDuckGo. The site provides a comprehensive list of special features and searches offered by the engine and also explains its privacy policy. Searches are quick and the results exclude “scraper” sites and those offering advertising of dubious relevance to the search being conducted. The usual range of search features are available, including phrase searching and the so-called !bang syntax, which allows one to force the engine to conduct a search on a particular site for a specific type of medium — !i “Knowledge Leadership Associates” will, for example, find images on the KLA website through an interface with the Google search engine.

Secure searching with DuckDuckGo! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The skill set is changing!

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:00:51 +0000

In his blog entry on Information today (Europe) of 22 July 2011, John Davies of TaskForceProLibra (TFPL), discusses research that uncovers trends in the design of roles and skill requirements in the information sector. In particular, he draws attention to the way in which knowledge management and information management are coalescing. He comments, “One of the outcomes [of the research] was the identification of knowledge and information management (KIM) as a single discipline that would unify and replace information management (IM) and knowledge management (KM)”.

The full report Connecting information with innovation may be downloaded from the TFPL site.

The skill set is changing! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Enterprise risk: the role of information management

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:13:22 +0000

Pat Bryant, a recent speaker at the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange (NetIKX) Information Risk Management Workshop (London, 19 July 2011), emphasised that information is not only a resource, the value of which needs to be enhanced through proper management, but is also a resource that can lead to harm if it is not properly managed, as the recent events at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation graphically demonstrate.

Some important guidelines are:

concealing information (“top secret’) creates silos and can create the impression that it has been hidden for a reason — this encourages attempts to discover it and thus discredit the organisation;
paradoxically, organisations tend not to be very successful at managing boundaries between information sectors — much more can be gained by creating a culture of transparency;
a key role in an organisation is the manager of information — and this is an appointment that should be considered carefully.

Further comment can be seen in the Information today blog (Europe) for 20 July 2011, by Pat Skelton.

Enterprise risk: the role of information management is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The year of searching

Peter G. Underwood — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:56:58 +0000

Thom Craver has provided an interesting review of the year 2010 from the perspective of search engine development: The year in search: a re-cap of the biggest changes and a look ahead (SearchEngineWatch 6 January 2011). He comments on the changes introduced in Google and its competitors and suggests that 2011 may well be dominated by a contest between Yahoo and Google for market dominance. What is particularly interesting (but, perhaps, unsurprising) is the extent to which changes and development are driven almost exclusively by marketing rather than considerations of achieving better search results — all of which serves to confirm the need to consider choice of search engines in terms of search performance within particular search domains.

The year of searching is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The Web: getting deeper and more invisible

Peter G. Underwood — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 04:36:16 +0000

On 3 November 2010, Gabe Elliott published a very useful account of the development of the World Wide Web in his regular Web column, The Internet Vision, and commented on the increasing “invisibility” of many important sources to general search engines, such as Google. His article, “The un-Googled Deep Web”, comments that “Estimates based on extrapolations from a study done at University of California, Berkeley speculate that the deep Web consists of about 91,000 terabytes. By contrast, the surface Web (which is easily reached by search engines) is only about 167 terabytes; the Library of Congress, in 1997, was estimated to have 3,000 terabytes”. On the Knowledge Leadership Associates Internet Information Retrieval and Web 2.0 Tools & Techniques (KL-IIRW) course, discussion and demonstration of the Deep, or invisible, Web is an important component. Elliott also discusses various services, such as the Subject Based Information Gateway, Intute, and specialized search engines that facilitate exploration of the Deep Web.

The Web: getting deeper and more invisible is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Google Books: how does it work?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:00:17 +0000

Alexis Madrigal, writing in the The Atlantic (1 November 2010), outlines how the searching algorithm used for Google Books has recently been improved. The article indicates that the algorithm is somewhat different from that used for Google’s web search and is being “tweaked” as the design team gains more experience in the kind of searching that is used to locate titles of books. Google’s web search makes extensive use of the Page Rank process, whereby full account is taken of the number of pages linking to a site when assessing its likely relevance. This, however, does not happen with the digitized copies of books that Google has stored, so some experimentation was necessary in order to develop a set of some one hundred predictive indicators of “title” relevance, such as how often the title is searched for on the web, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, and how often an older book has been reprinted. The result was released as “Rich Results” and commenced on 1 November 2010. Why not try it now?

Google Books: how does it work? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Are you working too hard?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:09:49 +0000

Independent Online’s Business Report for 20 October 2010 reports the results of the 2010 LexisNexis International Workplace Productivity Survey conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia and South Africa. It has important implications for Knowledge Management. According to the results of the survey, South African professional workers spent, on average, 9.5 hours a day of the working week at their workplace, longer than any other country group included in the study. In addition, “the survey found that the amount of information workers have to manage for their jobs continues to increase at an alarming rate, with much of it irrelevant to employees getting their jobs done”. Not surprisingly, 82% of the South African respondents wished to be able to spend more time in using the information rather than organizing it; 88% indicated that the inability to find relevant information was a major time-waster and that this was having a deleterious effect on their productivity. The survey concluded that “Workers believe they could be more productive at work if the tools they had access to were designed to work the way that they worked.”

Are you working too hard? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates