Category: Book Review

There is probably no more difficult task in information management in being the Editor of a multi-author on any topic, and the level of difficulty goes up by an order of magnitude when the topic is taxonomy management. Taxonomies (and the strap line Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information) has been… Continue reading Taxonomies – Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information – Book review

You may be somewhat surprised to see a review of a book on the science of reading in Informer. It seems to be implicit in information retrieval research that ‘users’ have such a competence in reading that a consideration of reading ability can be discounted from the research analysis. If only that was the case!… Continue reading The Science of Reading – Book review

There are many books about knowledge management but very few about what I might refer to as IKM (Information and Knowledge Management) technologies. What is distinctive about this book is that it spans the crevasse between KM and IT and does so with considerable flair. The authors, Zach Wahl and  Joseph Hilger established Enterprise Knowledge (based in Arlington VA) close… Continue reading Making knowledge management clickable – Book review

I expect that most readers of Informer will have read the 2011 edition of Modern Information Retrieval edited by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Riberio-Neto. It runs to almost 900 pages. Chapter 15 is a brilliant essay by David Hawking which sums up everything you should know about enterprise search in 40 pages. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research… Continue reading Funnelback and Me: Celebrating 30 Years of Funnelback Technology 1991-2021 – Book review

I am concerned at the lack of interest in the IR search community in the design of search results pages and the design of the individual results snippets. You could argue that these are topics  are out-of-scope and yet recent work on perceptual speed suggests that we should be taking more care about information design… Continue reading Book Review – Seeing with Fresh Eyes:  Meaning Space Data Truth by Edward Tufte