The future of organization

How will we organize information in the future? Will humans continue to design, create, and use highly sophisticated organizational systems and databases, or will we rely more and more on the "good enough" algorithms search engines provide us with? Will our search engines become highly sophisticated organizational and retrieval tools?

Taylor recognizes that it has taken centuries, since the development of the printing press, to arrive at the state of organization we have now. She believes that the principles that have guided organization to this point will be built upon, that organization will continue to be a priority because it is human nature to organize (Taylor, 2004).

Brad Eden, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services and Scholarly Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara says, in Information Organization Future for Libraries (2007), "the era of the library OPAC is over" (p. 6). This is not, he claims, because catalogs are not a useful tool for organization, but because they are too expensive to create and maintain. Eden has a number of ideas about the future of organization, from "reinventing the OPAC" to "3D information visualization, mass digitization, Library 2.0, and metadata related to digital resources" (p. 7). He argues that librarians have got to take the future of organization seriously if we want our institutions to remain viable in an increasingly competitive information world.

Some involved in information organization believe that the "Semantic Web" is going to play a huge role in the future of organization. The Semantic Web is a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Semantic Web is a vision of a web of information that not only is useful to humans, but can be manipulated and organized by computers as well. This is not a new Web, but an extension, and ideal, of what we already have. By describing information in a way that makes sense to computers, the computers will then be able to do much of the organizing of information that is now done by humans. This enhanced Web will be created with technologies that already exist, specifically, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Another component of the Semantic Web will be the ontology, "a document or file that formally defines the relations among terms" (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001). These ontologies will include taxonomies which define classes and subclasses of information and relationships between terms.

Is this starting to sound familiar? Watch out Dewey.

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For more information about the Semantic Web visit these sites and articles:

The Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila (Scientific American)
A More Revolutionary Web by Victoria Shannon (International Herald Tribune)
Semantic Web Tutorial
The Semantic Web: a Primer