corprewland

A lot of writing in general, and a lot of web pages specifically, concerns some topic. That writing is about a topic. There are a bunch of different ways of figuring out what something is about, and many of these are hilariously wrong. But that isn’t what this post is about, this post is about ‘aboutness assertions,’ which is how you say what things are about once you’ve decided that something is about something.

sounds confusing? it gets worse but more interesting…
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ANSI/NISO released an updated version of Z39.19-2005, Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies . Since I’m interested in this as a topic, I thought I’d go through and read the standard section by section and make comments on it. This is intended both as a guide to greater understanding on my part and to help other people who might be interested in this material.

As sections get large enough, I’m going to send them off onto their own sub pages. Actually, I’ve largely removed this material for ©opyright reasons. If you’re interested in something that would presumably be here, contact me and we can talk about it.

About The Standard
1. Introduction
2. Scope of the Document
The terms themselves
3. Scope, Form, and Choice of Descriptors
4. Compound Terms
5. Relationships
Displaying CVs
6. Print Display
7. Screen Display
Building and Maintaining Controlled Vocabularies
8. Construction
9. Maintenance
10. Management

Kiva.org is an organization that focuses on making rural microloans. A microloan for these purposes is a smaller development loan, useful for buying, say, a couple of goats or a truck instead of a large infrastructure loan for buying schools or new highways. It’s useful on more of a personal level, and it’s a smaller need that doesn’t get served well by traditional NGOs. Kiva is a platform for these rural focused loans, with an initial focus in Uganda.

Why this is significant is that Kiva has managed to remove several levels of aggregation of loan in order to more effectively reach the people with the needs and the money, and to connect them directly. Removing layers like this is called disintermediation.
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The earlier poster said that he didn’t get Tim Patrick’s talk, so I thought I’d give my own interpretation of it.

There are two different meanings of collaboration in this session, one is collaboration between different groups of people, internal or external, covered by the other speakers. Collaboration in Tim’s sense is also called (more…)