DPR at 8:17 PM [url]:

Open Spectrum and Spectrum Policy

I'm really excited by what may be starting to happen at the FCC. A new Spectrum Policy task force was launched earlier this year, and on a very accelerated schedule the FCC called for comments on a wide range of interesting subjects. Comments were due earlier this week on issues that related to a whole range of technical and economic ideas that might free up spectrum for innovation.

I got a chance to file my first ever comments to the FCC. A revised version of my comments in HTML can be found on my web site.

My friend Tim Shepard captured the issue in a metaphor that is uniquely accessible to die hard Green Bay Packers fans. The corporate execs who experience sports from their skyboxes just won't get it.

Other very interesting filings were made by Kevin Werbach (editor of Release 1.0 and former FCC'er), Dewayne Hendricks, Dave Hughes, New America Foundation, et al., Consumer Federation of America, Steve Stroh.

Of course the bulk of the filings are made by retained Washington lawyers who file comments on just about every issue that might be relevant at all to their clients. I was surprised by this, but of course that's their job - blocking change. [SATN.org: Comments from Frankston, Reed, and Friends]

More insight courtesy of David Reed. Besides the value of the material itself, I always learn something new by watching minds like David's do their thinking. How he tackles a problem is at least as interesting to me as what he says.

10:21:02 PM •  • comment  

The hot new term in information organization is "ontology." Everybody's inventing, and writing about, ontologies, which are classifications, lists of indexing terms, or concept term clusters (Communications of the ACM, 2002). But here's the problem: "Ontology" is a term taken from philosophy; it refers to the philosophical issues surrounding the nature of being. If you name a classification or vocabulary an "ontology" then that says to the world that you believe that you are describing the world as it truly is, in its essence, that you have found the universe's one true nature and organization. But, in fact, we do not actually know how things "really" are. Put ten classificationists (people who devise classifications) in a room together and you will have ten views on how the world is organized.

Librarians had to abandon this "one true way" approach to classification in the early twentieth century. As many are (re-)discovering today, information indexing and description need to be adjusted and adapted to a myriad of different circumstances. Why, then, use the misleading term "ontology"?

Apart from philosophical issues, there is another, more important reason to abandon use of the term. Recorded information does not work the same way the natural world does. Information is a representation of something else. A book, or a Web site, can mix and match informational topics any way its developer feels like doing. There's no such thing as a creature that is half squirrel and half cat, but there are many mixes of half-squirrel/half-cat topics in information resources and Web sites. Methods of information indexing have to recognize what's distinctive to information, as opposed to classifications of nature, and design the systems accordingly.

10:18:11 AM •  • comment  

What is a k-log?. Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging ("knowledge-logging"). But will it catch on - will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps? [WriteTheWeb]

I've posted this interview with John Robb before, but it remains an excellent introduction to the notion of a k-log.

8:53:51 AM •  • comment