I think it may have been the point they overheard themselves described as "a bog standard ordinary common a garden library assistant". Gareth, I'm sure we would all speak as highly of you ...
 
Kevin
Bog standard ordinary common a garden library assistant.
 
PS Mock offence taken but not taken seriously.
-----"lis-pub-libs: UK Public Libraries" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: -----

To: [log in to unmask]
From: Peter Miles <[log in to unmask]>
Sent by: "lis-pub-libs: UK Public Libraries" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 02/07/2010 09:01AM
Subject: Re: The semantic web in (very) simple terms (aka Web 3.0)

Hi Gareth

At what point in your explanation (in very simple terms) of the semantic web did the bog standard ordinary common a garden library assistant keel over and fall asleep?

:)

From: Gareth Osler <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Fri, 2 July, 2010 0:40:18
Subject: The semantic web in (very) simple terms (aka Web 3.0)

There were a couple of articles in the press today on the semantic web, which is two more than usual:

Health Sites Use Semantic Technologies to Provide Better Results
http://bit.ly/9BbFde

How Best Buy is Using The Semantic Web
http://bit.ly/9MqK8K

Anyway I found myself trying to explain to a bog standard ordinary common a garden library assistant what the semantic web was ;)  It went something like this (in very simple terms)...

"You know like Library Web has a 'Directory of Articles' ( http://libraryweb.info/articledir.php ), in which I very haphazardly try and catalogue articles posted on Library Web under subject headings.  Now imagine that a group of librarians got together and created a formal list of proper subject headings for digital material on the web on the subject of libraries, and published this list of subject headings for anyone who puts digital content on the subject of libraries on the web to tag their content with - blog posts, journal articles, etc., anything.  But further more anyone who wanted to could look at the list of subjects published on the web by the librarians, and search only for those blog posts, articles etc. tagged with the particular subject they are interested in.  Maybe they could then do a keyword search within those search results to finer tune the results.  They could as well get email/RSS when someone writes something new about a particular subject they are interested in."

People could even be encouraged to draw up their own vocabularies of subject headings, and formally publish them.

Dewey classified books (there were too many to not to have to organise them), this is one way that librarians can classify the web, by overseeing for quality the vocabularies of terms that describe a field perhaps?


Gareth Osler
Library Web
http://librarweb.info


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