Updates and recommendations

Right, so here's where I'm up to these days ;

I'm working for a local (but fairly large) health care provider as their intranet guy (building an empire from scratch, and may well include Topic Maps) both in design, implementation, usability, and process management, a role that is being expanded crazily with every day as we discover new territories to conquer and submit to our new reign of knowledge management. So yes, I'm actually enjoying it, even though the challenges are sky-high and densely packed.

I'm writing a book tentatively (and probably) called "The well-tempered monkey" (with some fancy sub-title, I'm sure), and it's about evolution, baroque music, the IT industry, software development, human psychology and cognition, category theories, philosophy, geeks, procreation and laser-guns! I'm roughly 1/4 finished with the first draft, and it contains heavily edited blog posts, lots of new writing and thinking, and my own pictures and designs. (Can an eBook embed music? If yes, I'll put some of my music in as well for good measure) Looking for tips, but think I'll make it a eBook-friendly PDF with a donate button at this point, unless you have a better way.

A good friend and librarian / cataloger Saskia has started a new blog called "All things cataloged", and she is well-versed in the black art of Topic Maps and identity management. You should check it out, it's good stuff.

Today I stumbled upon a Dutch version of a Norwegian classic by Sigrid Undset on a lonely bookshelf in the corridors of a health care facility in Albion Park, Illawarra. Man, that was a seriously crazy moment!

I'm closing in on xSiteable RESTful event-driven resource-oriented PHP framework for enterprise application development with embedded Topic Maps / identity management. I've started documenting the thing, and I'll release it soon-ish, I think. It also feature a funky Topic Maps-based XSLT dynamic GUI templating framework that I think should be a project all by itself, but hey, I'll throw it in for good value.

I've created a number of upper and core ontologies that I might release at some point, some of them obviously designed for more fuzzy Intranet stuff, but I'm increasingly getting all representialist on my arse, outing basic category theory and generally thrashing the good name of entites everywhere. I feel a long blog coming on.

Did I mention that all enterprise knowledge management software friggin' sucks? Like, sucks balls? All of them. I've tried them all, extensively, and they all just fail the one simple rule I've got; make KM easy for people. Confluence, Atrium, Documentum, SharePoint, SocialText, LifeRay, all the portal apps and associated server technologies, Vignette, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun (hehe), I could go on and on, they all SUCKS BALLS! They are technologists solutions to human problems, and failing basic compassion and respect for the generic user! Usability is not about pretty friggin' colors and cute graphics! I'm disgusted with the state of affairs as the usability of these things have not improved much or at all in the last 20 years I've worked in this field. (And yes, I'll friggin' make my own, I'm sick of this ...)

Anyway, on that happy note, life isn't so bad, and I'm eagerly awaiting the next crazy chapter in my life. We'll talk soon.

I would think that, too

If I were you, I'd think that this blog didn't exist anymore, that it was abandoned and left behind in some digital heap of leftovers and unwanted peripherals. But no, it's still here, still serving your humble host as a way to express himself. But wait, if that is true, where is it? Where's this expressions you speak of?

Fair question. And the answer is a bit complex, but since my Indian adventure ended I've had a really shitty time finding proper income, especially given that I live in a region that is chemically free of IT jobs. It's pretty here, and life is nice and slow, but my family can't live off pretty and nice and slow (or so my wife and kids tell me). I've done a smidgen of contract work, but laughable as it stands, and it has in general been quite difficult for me to focus on much else. Of course I could vent here every day about my struggles, especially the vile and evil ways of the recruiter (and a lot of blame has to fall on those morons who hire them; shame on you) but I've been sparing you, good reader, from a repetitious stream of vile and frustrations.

Sure, some interesting things have happened, and a lot of it will be revealed in due time. But right now things are slowly falling into place (although not all is as good as it could be), normality returns, and I'm having a cup of tea before bed, and wanted to pop this message out there that things are looking up, if only for a brief moment.

One thing that has happened which I'm somewhat excited about is that I've decided to write a book, and I'm already 50 pages of edited and (re-)written materials. the title and contents will come a bit later, but I'm thinking of a self-publishing model in eBook form, but I'll take any advice at the moment. (It's a book for technology developers, managers and entrepreneurs - very broad in scope! - on the more philosophical side of things)

Anyway, I'll let you in on the details of work later. I'm in Australia for now, but there's a Norwegian adventure possibly a bit later on, but as with all things in my life, the details are light and fluffy.

Can you just stop this obsession with books?

Hey, Library. How are you? It's been a while since we last had a serious talk, but I've been busy. Anyway, I've got a few minutes to kill before I have to fly off again, so care for a cup of coffee or something? Great!

So, how have you been? Busy, eh? Yeah, I know the feeling, always striving towards the future, making things better, solving more complex problems, finding within yourself which path you should travel, all those things. Yeah, I've been busy, too. Life is always in motion, always changing, and we cling to those things that don't while learning and re-learning to let go of that which does.

Oh, that's not what you've been doing? Right, you've ... tinkered with FRBR? And you're excited about RDA? No, no, I'm not disappointed, I just thought, you know, the last time we talked that we knew that was a bit of a dud, you know? That the future of the library isn't in, well, bibliographic?

Look, Library, I know you love your books, I really do, but didn't you agree with me that the world was more than just books? Yeah, so why are you still obsessing with them? Why is your world still revolving around small rectangular physical paper-based objects with words in them when there is simply so much out there? Heck, there's even all of that stuff in the books available in other formats and mediums, too, but you seem to just have a fetish for paper? What's up with that?

Can you just stop this obsession with books? It's not healthy for you. You go on and on about the measurements of the paper, what it weighs, you talk only about what it looks like, who wrote it, when it was written, who printed it, and so on. In fact, you go on and on about how to simply read and describe the title of the darn thing, and not once do you dig into the content of the thing to tell me what this thing is really about. Sure, you pop out some keywords about it, but seriously, you got all that from reading the sleeve cover, I mean, come on, have you even read the darn thing?

Look, I know why you do this; so that, through your brilliant description, others might find it when they search for whatever you described it as. The problem is that the ratio of getting it right for all people is about the word-count of the book itself. It's not good to have a few butchered select words about a tome of knowledge or inspiration. You're not helping people on their path with this sort of stuff. People are not interested in books. They are interested in its content.

You need to stop talking about books, and seriously - as in, right now! - start talking about content. Otherwise, all that will be left of you will be an epithet of what you once was. And I hate to see you down, my friend, I really do. But the power to change is from within. You will have to want to change. I'll help if you like, heck, we all will! We all love you and think you're the greatest, but seriously, you have got to change, you have got to shape up and lose that bibliopheliac addiction.

Ok, sorry to sound so glum and direct, I don't have the time for a long boring committee meeting. Thanks for the coffee, by the way, it was great. And great seeing you again, I've missed our little chats! Take care, ok? And call me if you need anything, alright? Love you. See you later.

Updates : Hate and rage

Hi, folks. It's been quiet from me for the last little while. This whole "chasing up a new job" thing has kept me busy, and, to be frank, rather uninspired. But I should keep you updated (so I shall do that at the very end of this post), but I also need to vent before I explode!

Recruiters.

That word I've just written up there? It's a synonym with "arsehole." (But wait, there's more! I could add 'incompetent' and 'nasty' without blinking!) Not because they will come right out and be arseholes; no, that would be terribly unprofessional of them and possibly lose them money. No, they are arseholes in a subtle but deviously efficient way.

I had a stint a few years ago dealing with recruiters when I wanted to quit working for the National Library of Australia. I sent out my CV, wrote letters, wrote emails, called and talked with them, on and on. Those experiences are mirrored by my experiences of late. But before I leap into a lament, let me ask you something, where "you" are people in companies and organisations across the globe who might be looking for good people to join their team :

Why the bloody hell do you use recruiters? What is it that you hope to gain from using them? Is it simply that you think that quality people are queuing outside their shop, waiting for those skilled recruiters to match the perfect candidate up with your perfect job description? Seriously? Is that what you think? Because if that's so, I feel the need to tell you that that is not what's happening.

Recruiters are evil. No, no, it's true ; they do not care about the people involved in the recruiting process, they care about their commission in doing so. They are evil, money-sucking bastards that don't give a rats ass about who they match with whom, and so in being arseholes they treat people like crap. Unless they feel there's a slight chance of a match they simple will not contact you, they will not answer your emails or calls. And what do they base their matchability on?

Shit skills. Every time and every single recruiter I've had the pleasure of "talking" with during this last month of riding the Boogeyman their complete lack of understand of what the hell I was talking about was shockingly clear. The client wants a senior developer with MySQL skills, and I say "No problem, I know mySql, in fact I've been doing Sizzle for the last year." You can hear the humming buzz on the line as the other side tries to process this. I say "It's a MySQL fork". More silence. "So, you haven't done any actual MySQL work, then? Ok, that's too bad ...", so I interrupt "What? No, I've done MySQL for years [I mean, for fuck sake, I've been a web developer since 1997!], I was just pointing out that I'm really into the matter of things and hack on forks and play around with unofficial features through MariaDB and ...". Recruiter breaks in with, "so, er, mariaDB, right, so no recent MySQL work, then?"

Or when asked about PHP I said I've done Zend Framework for years, which the job description mentioned as a bonus. "Right, but have you done any PHP work?" Or when asked if I know SCRUM, and I said sure, and that I've done a bit of MODENA of late as well. "So, no real SCRUM experience, then?" Or when asked about if I know XML well, and I say that, sure, I've even created a full Topic Maps engine in XSLT, written a canonical XML dataset serializer (for some obscure project), and get a "well, I meant if you have any core XML skills?" Obviously not. Or how about being asked

Look, people, you're putting these people in charge of finding you the best people? Please don't. Every company I get direct contact with I have a good open dialog with. Recruiters are fucking areholes who treat people like disposable napkins (fit for wiping their saliva from thinking about their commissions, I suppose), and you should not use their services. It's not good for your organisation, nor is it good for the progress of humanity.

Right.

Now, the update. It's very short; I had 6 good leads. I blew one (I aimed too high with that one), 2 were with recruiters (and obviously they don't get back to you unless someone has thrown money at them, so I'm counting them out as I cannot find out what the actual companies are), 2 are in Norway (and they're pretty good, in as much as if nothing else happens within days, we will decide to move back to Norway), and 1 up-in-the-air with a really funky company locally that has great potential (but might fail due to time).

So, all in all, we're in a pretty downy, unstable, crazy place. We're considering taking off for a couple of weeks in a camper-van and see the south coast, but we'll see. Frustrations are running high, and I think the family needs to chill for a little while.

Take care!

Topic Maps visualisation

I've had a screenshot of a demo I made some time ago just lying around on my desktop, sulking for being forgotten and ignored for so long. I guess I wanted to polish the demo up and make it live at some point, but I've been distracted by a pandemonium of butterflies that has taken up room in my house of late, so I'm just going to dump it here ;

What you're seeing is parts of the Opera Topic Map by Steve Pepper represented as a Treemap (similar to the Protovis thing that Patrick linked to today), and the concept work well as a way to browse around the Topic Map itself, even through smooth zooming in and out of large and small groups of things.

The next fun thing is another tool I've made that takes some YAML structure or XTM as input, and create pretty decent graph representations of the map using GraphViz ;

This one is an ontology that is especially made for a portal I'm doing for Claudio Monteverdi, the baroque composer (and a hero of mine). Here's what a partial input looks to get the idea ;


    Music:
        (c) Work:
            (i) L'incoronazione di Poppea:
            (i) Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria:
        (c) Form:
            (i) Madrigal:
            (i) Motet:
            (i) Canzonet:
            (i) Mass:
            (i) Trio sonata:
            (i) Opera:
        (c) Style:
            (i) Primo prattica:
            (i) Secondo prattica:
    Person:
        (i) Monteverdi, Claudio:
        (i) Monteverdi, Baldasarre:

This method is perfect for sitting down with customers and clients, and just jot out models, ontologies and concepts; all you need is a text editor. (You'll notice that assocs are made through (c) (i) and a few others, which basically are assoc templates you can define more of, so a meta ontology for ontology construction. Yay! :) It's a couple of PHP classes (one of them being the PHP Topic Maps engine I've talked about before that I'll wrap up if I get some spare time) that generate DOT from the input, and serves up a generated image on refresh, so basically you edit the text file, save and hit refresh. Very fast. I might even consider an inbuilt editor in the browser, but pah!

Anyway, just a quick dump there. I'm also working on a far more complicated TM visualisation thingy using RaphaelJS to play directly on the HTML5 Canvas using native and SVG graphics, and it's looking very good so far. I'll show you more when things gets closer to something I won't hide in shame over ...

Need my brain?

Recall how I have been neglecting my blogging due to just too much work these days? Well, the day when the crazy busy stops is today. After working non-stop with some pretty lofty crazy funky Topic Maps stuff, getting some traction on the potential and seeing some light at the end of a very busy tunnel, it's a bit odd for me to announce ;

My project has been canned for strategic reasons, and I'm out of a job.

Well, now, things move quick around here; the one moment I'm crazy busy doing crazy stuff, next I'm crazily trying to figure out what to do next. If anybody need a brain for hire, this is your chance!

The stupid thing is that I live in the Illawarra / Wollongong area, an area renowned for lack of jobs and being chemically free of IT and innovation (the local government tried to fix that by calling Wollongong 'the city of innovation' and build a huge innovation center that's too expensive for any upstarts to get into). I guess this is a good time to link to my LinkedIn profile, no?

However, I'm not bound by that we must be living here. I'll go anywhere, especially interesting places, interesting countries. I've got three little kids to worry about so I can't jump too quick, but I certainly can hop around New South Wales and possibly Canberra, and sort out where to live after that. Or I can telecommute, or fully work from home. I'm not fussy at this point.

I guess this is where I tell you what I can do; through my 20+ years career I've chewed over and gained specialist expertize in just slightly too abstract things, like Topic Maps (a fantastic technology that doesn't exist in Australia, but obviously should and you should hire me to teach you how to kick arse!), XSLT (a fantastic technology far too few use and truly understand, but you should and you should hire me to teach you how to solve complexity with simplicity!), AI (a crazy notion only researchers use, and I'm not a qualified researcher, but you should hire me just because you value solutions over credentials!), library technology and science (a dying cluster of concepts, but you should hire me to get you up to speed and make you thrive and survive!), epistemology (don't even know where to begin with this one, but you should hire me because I'm telling you!), and training / speaking / coaching on a mixture of the above (been on the conference speaking circle a bit, and held tons of training sessions and seminars). I guess more conventional stuff I can do out of the box is complex PHP (lots of that the last few years) and front-end stuff (HTML, CSS, JS/JQuery, the usual suspects) and middle-tier stuff (JSP, JSF, XSLT, a bit of Ruby, a pinch of Python, Perl if I'm crazy, ASP / .Net to some degree) ... heck, I used to be a proficient C developer in my early days, and there's really no language I can't meddle in. Oh, I know; I'm big on architecture with SOA concepts and REST technologies, although I'm not one of those who think the UDDI is great and promote ESB or any somesuch bundle of WS-* wherever I go, even though I can do that, sure (but I'd recomend a RESTful approach for a simpler and richer infra-structure). I've created CMSes of various kinds, frameworks (event-driven, load-balancing, etc.) and APIs, query engines, Topic Maps engines and KM platforms all from scratch, so it feels a bit silly to explain what I can and can't do. There's probably nothing I can't do as such.

My strong side is being creative, though, to see possibilities, opportunities and plan for that in mind. I'm one of those who embrace somewhat agile methods without being an agile-head (coaching is, in fact, a satisfying way of getting things done), and have a special interest and knack for project management. If you need a project manager with a coaching style in areas of knowledge management and using Topic Maps, well, you know who to call. :)

Anyway, in the off-chance that you think I'm the guy to help you out, you can reach me all the time at alexander.johannesen@gmail.com. And if you've got pointers, point me there, or point your pointers here. It's a tricky situation when it happens this abruptly, but I took a risk going into this project, so I knew this was an option. Let's just hope it pans out alright. And thanks for any help you can provide in this crazy time. :)

What I did last weekend ...

I've been meaning to blog this for a while, but work and, uh, work got in the way. However, as a band-aid for low blogging I bring you a special edition of "What I did last weekend!"

The week before (Tuesday? Wednesday?) I was out on my lunch-time walk to get much needed coffee (a poor substitute for Masala and / or proper Chai tea), when I was coming back up the hill I noticed something interesting in front of me ;

On a trailer of a big four-wheel off-road monster of a car, a big white boat similar to the modern fishing vessels around down by the harbor was attached, except it was all white with a big blue logo on its side which read "Australian Museum."

I was intrigued, and I wondered to myself if they were lost or something, accidentally taking a wrong turn to somewhere exciting and had to turn down our street to get directions or something. I had stopped, and while pondering these things, a lady came out of the rental house it was parked in front of, and we started some idle chatter about why this boat (with all its magical capabilities) were here of all places.

Well, it turned out that the Australian Museum once a year goes out on a collecting excursion to collect samples for both the collection and for scientists as well. I showed some vague interest in the matter (I think I fell to my knees, pleading for insight, frothing at the mouth), and was invited in to have a look at their setup. I got up, and skipped into the house like a little girl, giggling and grinning all the way.

I looked at their photo setup, talked some technical stuff, and then moved downstairs to their lab setup. They were a bunch of people (6 in total, I think) of about my age and up, and I had a quick glance and a lovely but quick chat with them as I mentioned that I'd love to show my kids, and we were all invited back on the weekend.

That's what I did last weekend; I took Lilje and Grace down to their lab, and we got stuck talking to the most wonderful bunch of scientists for about 2 hours. They showed us their findings, specimens, the worms and other invertebrates, plants, shrimps, urchins, you name it, all sorts of little critters who mostly got put in formalhydrane for an all expenses paid trip to provide us with knowledge.

The kids loved it, and I loved it, and I wish to thank the team and the museum for brightening our day and for shining light into dark corners.

Of models, frameworks and the paradigm shifts we don't see

I need desperately to talk about models. I hunger for them, I need them, I love them! They are pretty, of course, arousing us and making us do silly things like buy stuff we don't need, or fooling us into buying something we think we need but we later find out that we're a bit stupid, we were mislead by the models winks and beautiful attire. However, they are often more than just skin deep, more than just the abstract notion of our perversion to objectify everything we see. Confused yet? These models are not found on the cover of glossy magazines.

These models are everywhere. They are how the brain takes a group of concepts - be it physical objects or knowledge nuggets in our head - and plonk them all into a grouping of sorts, and draw lines of meaning between the new group and the old it knows about. Together they form anything from thoughts to language to the reasoning used when voting. Between person A and political issue B we draw a relation type "opinion" with opinion C. A few fuzzy million of these, and we can pin you down pretty well.

Where do models live in our various systems? Well, they live in language, for the most part. And this is not some cryptic ballyhoo I'm inventing here, so I'll demonstrate with the humble book. Let's look at a description of a book in the foreign and mysterious language called Eksemelle ;

The book

<book>
   <title>Some title</title>
   <author>Clemens, Samuel</author>
   <pompador>In a nutshell</pompador>
</book>

"book", "title", "author" and "pompador" mean something to someone. To most people who understand the English word "book", it means those rectangular objects made of dead-trees that's got some kind of letters and / or pictures in them. They are, as we say, semantic in that they have meaning to those who knows what those words mean. Here's the word "book", and it has a definition of sorts; that is explicit semantics. But then there's the implicit semantics of what those words mean in terms of this being an XML snippet, maybe from a specific bibliographic format, maybe with an even more specific XML schema (unless the XML schema is made explicit through something like a DOCTYPE). And finally there's the tacit semantics in the space between the model, the framework, and the people who work with it. Let's explore these shark-infested semantic parts.

How are they semantic? In what way are they meaningful, and to whom? Well, let's start with who. No model is really valuable unto itself; there's always some external framework that understands (and appreciates?) the model, some "thing" that looks at and interacts with that model in order to make it useful. Indeed, a models usefulness is often measured by how the semantics of various models match up. For example, the usefulness of the MARC model can be measured in terms by how well it matches the model librarians work with and need. Needless to say, the usefulness of the MARC model can also be measured how useful it is for a bricklayer, but more on this later.

So in what way are they meaningful? Every time we talk about models, we are really talking about a translation that's going on between models. The model of the words in this blog post is translated first from my brain and into the model used by my blogging software that uses some models of the Internet and computers and complex electronic networks and systems, and then translated to the model of your brain. We take a piece of semantics, and we try to make the transition from my brain to yours - through a multitude of other models - as smooth as possible. Have I succeeded so far? Does our models match up a little, much or not at all?

Things are meaningful when the models match up, when there is little or no difference between them to make understanding the thing in one model hard to understand in another. An example of a semantic mismatch in models are indeed the semantics of the 245$a field for a bricklayer looking for his bricks.

Constraints on entities

In the past I've talked about how models are constraints on entities, and this still holds true, but it needs a bit of clarification to make sense. First, what are entities?

Well, entities is one of those words that we can make to mean pretty much anything we like, but let's take a simple view of entities being "things you can talk about", similar (or exactly the same) as subjects in Topic Maps, "concept" in philosophy, or, to the layman, "things." Anything you can think of. Any subject, fictional or real, physical or surreal; a boat, a thought about the Moon, the idea of North, the concept of the number 1, the Eiffel Tower, MARC, a MARC record, an XML representation of that record, the book the MARC record represents, a physical book, the relationship between the book and the abstract notion of a book that the MARC record represents ... oh, the possibilities are - truer than anything! - endless.

Between the entities, in the cracks of our language and our understanding, flow their relationships. They are part of our model, those notions that give our entities a meaning of sorts, what makes the semantic;

   "This book" was written by "this author"

Look at what we found in the cracks; "was written by." Isn't it grand? This trifecta is known in the Semantic Web world as a triplet, basically a tuple with a subject - predicate - object structure. Make enough triplet statements about a thing, and it grows in semantics. Let's look at our book ;

   "This book" is our subject
   "was written by" is our predicate
   "this author" is the object

Let's make another triplet statement ;

   "This book" is still our subject

   "was published by" is a new predicate

   "this publisher" is another object

We now have a model a bit like this ;

   "This book"

   - "was written by" : "this author"

   - "was published by" : "this publisher"

We got a subject (or an entity) that we're attaching predicates and objects to, in many ways similar to how we might add named key/value pairs of properties to an object, or create a lookup-table with column indexes between two tables in a relational database, or set named properties on a Java Bean, or even scribble two statements about a book in its margin. We're attaching some semantics to something.

When we attach meaning to something, we are constraining its possibilities that those properties might be something else. We are saying that the title of the book is X, and by saying it is X we can infer that it isn't millions and millions of other titles that it could have been. Before we put that title to the book it really had only two options;

Either the book had no title, or it could be any title we could imagine. But by labeling the book with a specific title, we're constraining both of these options, changing them dramatically from the endless possibilities we had to one specific option. We constrained the book by giving it meaning. And the more meaning we give it, the less abstract it becomes, the more constrained it becomes.

Reflections in the mirror

The models we have in our heads rarely perfectly match the model we're interacting with. The model in my wife's head is not matched well with my own model in many ways, like shopping, views on the value of shoes, the model of interacting with people (she's the one with a model closer matched to the generic likable model shared by most social and nice people) and the concept of geekery (of which she has none). And she is a person that's quite well matched in general. It only gets worse from here.

Now imagine the semantic distance between me and a computer system I've designed. I can work with it. I understand it. I can get my job done. However, I show my perfect model to a customer, and they immediately start picking it apart, pointing out how my model doesn't match their (or their individual) model. How could I have been so blind?

Here's a little secret to why usability and user-centered design works; you test your model against most other people's model in order to get to some model that you all can reasonably match with. When you don't test your model against the users models, they are bound to suck.

Models are reflections of how we humans see our world. The MARC standard most certainly reflect how the librarians saw the world, how it matched their needs and wants. My programs are often a reflection of how I see things. Your browser is a reflection of its developers model of how your browsing should be. This blog post is a reflection of me. Your computer a reflection of some manufacturer. The operating system a reflection of yet more developers views.

Sure, we try to create standards that either try to reflect some common model of things, or at least a common language in which to describe this view. However, it is terribly difficult to come to models that match well across so many thousands and millions of possible models. I'm tempted to almost say we need some constraints of commonalities on our models in order to create semantics to better understand our various models, to better agree and share them.

Where models sleep at night

Where do we find the actual models when we peer into the computer systems we use? Somewhere, surely, is that model in which we try to model to our own model rests, somewhere in there amongst the code and the interface we can point to it and say, "There!"

Mostly we can't, however there is one place where you'll find a lot, one place so holy in computer science that people dedicate whole careers to dealing with its innards; the relational database.

I need to speak about the relational database a bit because, well, so much of most computer systems out there a) have one, and b) store much of their model in there. Yes, there's alternatives, and more and more technology pop up that tries to do different, but let's be realistic about what 99% of most computer systems use, those RDBM systems. Let's have a look at a small corner of one ;

What we see is tables; columns of fields, rows of entries. These form the entities of these models. The example given even uses a tricky third table to function as a lookup-table between two tables of entity data (I won't go into too much technical details here). To get data in and out of these tables, we use a query language like SQL to say things like this simple example, "get all fields (with their rows of data) from tables A and B, where table A has a field 'book_id' that matches its value with a field 'id' in table B, sort it by the field 'title' of table A in descending order, and give me the first 40 results."

One SQL statement that matches for that is a semi-cryptic "SELECT * FROM TableA,TableB WHERE TableA.book_id = TableB.id ORDER BY TableA.title DESC LIMIT 40", or some other variety (there's tons of different ways of saying the same, with or without JOINs, sets and filters).

Let's look for our model. First of all, it's the titles of the tables, the titles of each column in them, and lastly the contents of the rows. Notice here that this is three levels of semantics nested within each query, and you need to know all of them to make reasonable statements. But what else is in our model? Well, it's those pesky relationships between things, the constraints on our entities to make the meaningful, and they exist in the query itself, in your application. Think about that for a second, think about where these things go ;

The table, columns and rows go in the database system. The querying goes in your application. The user interface (which we haven't even dug far into but is a wormhole of complexity in its own right) that interacts with you also sits in the middle, in the application. So there's a model in your database, and you reconstruct that model in your application (otherwise, how could you query the database if you don't know what it looks like?) and yet do further things that are not embedded in the database (and so, you've got a super model ... fun with pun!), translate further between your users and the user interface, translate back into the application which translates back into the database ... ah, what fun spaghetti games that makes.

 Surely RDBMS and SQL is better than other alternatives? Well, it was for many years, and it was a way to solve the problem of doing things in far worse way, for sure. But we were also under the constraints of computing power in which we couldn't just do the right thing and still get a computer that gave you answers in time for Christmas. It was a compromise between the need for any answer to all your data, and that of a practical lots of answers to most of your data.

But this analogy can be taken further, especially into the world of MARC and the libraries. MARC itself was also designed with lots of peculiar constraints, funny rules and structuring, and then with the added AACR2 (and earlier friends) rules for manual data integrity, it surely reflected the best of breed at the time, reflected what they wanted and it was something that matched their onset. So we got the model of MARC (I've called it the culture of MARC in the past, but a model suits just as well) in MARC itself, in the rules we add to it, to our ILS, to our OPAC, our catalog, our acquisition, our collection management, everything. And then the model of MARC is everywhere, it even starts to dictate our human processes.

Time flies

But then time flies, and the world changes, sometimes unexpectedly and the harsher if it is. Just like there's a lot of push for alternatives to RDBMS these days because today and tomorrow is somewhat different from yesterday, the same with a push in the library world to go from MARC / AACR2 to something more like FRBR / RDA.

However.

When you create a model of the future you need to make sure it is future proof. You have to make sure that not only does the model match what you need right now, that it reflects the funky stuff you wanna do today, but it must be able to deal with the future. If it doesn't, well then you are going to have to go through the pains of changing the model sooner rather than later.

Here's a few thoughts on that process in the library perspective. FRBR was designed 15 years ago, when the world was sloooowly waking up the the new fresh brew of the Internet and technology. Take a good look at what the world was like back then, especially paying attention to the fact that books were still the main container for knowledge and information, mobile phones did nothing more than make calls, Internet devices were practically unheard of, no eBooks, no iPads, no eEducation, no eGovernment ... for Fraggs sake, the evil monster of Netscape was still alive and doing harm! I remember still writing Netscape specific code to deal with its quirks. This was a time before we all stopped hating the dying Netscape and focused on the evils of Internet Explorer instead. can you even remember back to that time and think that the world might be in your back pocket or pack in the shape of an eReader or iPhone, or that Amazon (in its infancy) would have a full-blown infrastructure including their own eReader with tons of titles a click away? Or perhaps even more profoundly, that WikiPedia would lead the way to the disjointed revolution of knowledge and information? That we would be twittering? That all higher educational institutions would move towards ePresses? That paper journals would turn to online journals? That the pricing models of online content would change? That the price of admission would change? That even the model of content negotiation would be different? That blogs would dominate the future of discourse, even the serious academic ones? That newspapers would ever fail?

Time flies. And models change. Some models are better at dealing with change, some are better at being future proof, but change they will. And when the models change, you must either change your own models, update your models, or use outdated models. FRBR and RDA are outdated models before they're even implemented. Please reconsider.

Model models

The last ten years or so there's been a stronger push towards meta models. That basically means "simple models in which you can create other models." One might wonder what such a crazy thing would do to help, but let me first exemplify through what I've seen again and again over the years I've worked as a consultant ;

The smallest changes to any complex system, where databases, tables, columns and rows must change, you've also got thousands of lines of query / SQL that also needs to change, every model along the way, from the hardwired entities of the database to the user interface controls must all be updated to this new way of looking at the world. It could even be the smallest of things, say, changing the name of a field in a table from "id" to "book_id" (some times even stupid things like this is needed because the people who create the original model [called schema] didn't worry about multi-join SQL statements that would have a hard time dealing with the ambiguity of the many varieties of "id" fields, or didn't have the foresight to think that more than one thing in your table could be rightly called 'id' ...) could cost in the millions. I know it sounds terribly stupid, probably even terribly untrue, but I swear on the grave of all those programmers who laid down their lives in pursuit of SQL ambiguity and integration and middle-tier testing, that it is a very sad truth.

The library is facing similar insurmountable trouble by switching to anything but MARC, and I suspect the cost analysis is in the multi-millions wherever you look. People are starting to ask if the change will be worth it (and with the criticism laid out about FRBR you might want to have a closer look before you leap), is there another way?

Well, sure, kinda. There's meta models, models that are somewhat ready but needs your lovely input and tweaking to get perfect. They are generally easier to deal with because, unlike models, they are designed to be a bit vague and, well, meta about it all. And yes, indeed; Topic Maps is such a technology. The model in topic Maps is simple ;

• a subject is anything you can ever think of, anything you want to talk about, anything in the "real" world, like books and people and cars and thoughts and ideas and ... well, anything.
• A subject is represented in a computer system by a Topic
• Topics have multiple Names, can be of multiple Types, have multiple Identites and multiple Occurrences
• Associations of different types tie them all together with roles

If you can wrap your head around such a concept, it's easy to build whatever you need with it, and here's the advantage ;

• A standardized data model and a standardized reference model
• A standardized XML format for exchange, import and export
• A standardized query language and a standardized constraint language

It doesn't matter one bit what data you put into it; all of the above still applies. You can make model-agnostic queries into your data. You can mix whatever data you feel like; nothing can't be put into it. You determine yourself what level of indirection you want on your data. And you can have serious identity management to boot! Did I mention author records done right? Chuck a thesaurii or faceted navigation systems right in the model! Make software modules understand certain languages rather than the combination of languages and data, and share these! Want to see what your data merged with any other data might look like? It's right there in the standard, it comes out of the box. Play with your data, and invent new ways of interacting with it without dicking around for weeks with databases, filtering and merging. And on and on it goes.

But why do this? Well, since the model exist in a domain which is specially designed to handle the disjointed nature of your models and data, they are free to shape whatever solution you might think of (meaning, you can change the interface without changing the model nor the application logic) where you in the past were stuck with the original model design. You can copy and paste your little models and languages around. Try out new things. Merge stuff with ease. And, not the least, focus on application specifics without worrying about model integrity. Nor do you have to worry about user interface integrity, either. How to put it in a way that you could understand? It's like taking a bucket of apples and a bucket of bananas, which in the past would when mixed together make a sticky slushy fruity goo that no one really likes, would now be genetically merged to make the banapple that can still be split apart into its raw apple and banana parts if you felt like it.

Yes, I've whinged and raved about this in the library world (and other places) for years and years, but getting people up to speed on understanding models, their implications and how meta models might be a better bet, then demonstrate and convince everyone (including people with no technical background), all while standing in an elevator with some people who's off to tinker with some RDA or MARC or something. It's hard to get their attention when they don't actually see the problem.

But I'm not pushing Topic Maps, really. Well, a little, but more specifically I'm pushing meta models, and I'm pushing for better ways of dealing with your computer infra structure, to take a few good steps out of the litter sandbox that permutes the current library systems infra structural designs, and get jiggy with the future before it gets overrun by the cool kids with iPhones and iPads and whatsnot's that also, you know, have a model or two. Models that may or may not be compatible with whatever model you come up with next. If you do. Seriously, I thought librarians loved meta?