Annotating, Tagging, Connecting, and Dialogue

jackpark

Zotero has annotating. Zotero has tagging. Zotero has a version of connecting. May I suggest visiting http://cohere.open.ac.uk/ to look at or gain evidence of new features for Zotero, specifically connecting with semantic relations, and dialogue maps. This all to be supported through groups. Visit http://kmi.open.ac.uk/ for literature on these topics.

The thought is this: four pillars of collective sensemaking are the ability to find and tag resources, to lift key ideas, questions, or arguments out of those resources, then connect those key ideas together to form stories using coherence relations, e.g. this idea contradicts that idea, this idea is an answer to that question, this assertion refutes that one, and so forth, and to debate assertions made, again, using small text snippets serving as questions, answers, and arguments each wired in a dialogue map with specific relation types.

Zotero, I'd like to believe, can do that; it's part way there already. I would contribute code to that were I more skilled with Zotero's codebase in Eclipse than I presently am, but the end result turns groups into sensemaking teams.

dstillman

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1317/semantic-relations/

jackpark

Thanks for linking that thread. It appears to have gone quiet about a year ago. It's not clear to me what came of that thread. It's also not clear whether to move my comments into that thread, since its entire focus seems to be on the nature of what I here have called "coherence relations" after the literature from the Scholarly Ontologies project http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/scholonto/ or to just continue this thread since I am suggesting a particular addition only lightly touched in the semantic relations thread: the conduct of dialogues using Zotero as a user boundary infrastructure for that activity, as distinct from just sharing items through group folders. A group folder could include a new kind of document--a dialogue map that is asynchronously being crafted by group participants, which, itself, could be, just for example, an XML document created in a different object, e.g. http://compendium.open.ac.uk/ or through new gui elements for Zotero. Visit http://debategraph.org/ for a sketch of how dialogue maps can be crafted. This thread wants to be larger in scope than semantic relations; they are entailed, necessary, but not sufficient for this thread.

bdarcus

I've only skimmed this, but ... why should this be incorporated into Zotero, as opposed to thinking about integrating Zotero (and other) data into some other service? Google Wave, for example, might be a good platform?

edit: actually, I misread the meaning of "dialog" here. Wave probably isn't relevant.

jackpark

Actually, my interests originally were focused on using Zotero as one of many IO devices for knowledge gardens as sketched at http://www.slideshare.net/jackpark/knowledge-gardening but then the more I use Zotero, the more I became interested in simply staying inside Zotero, much the same as many people prefer to stay inside their email clients. If it it became possible to, say, turn this forum thread into an IBIS conversation as compared to what it is now, and conduct it from inside Zotero rather than leaving Zotero and following a link sent to me from my email client, then I have the opportunity to draw connections (coherence relations) between individual nodes in this conversation and other artifacts in my Zotero library; as it is now, the best I can do without extra work is to drop this entire page into my library, say in a collection of forum conversations, and tag and link the entire conversation. As Douglas Engelbart has stated, making individual thoughts individually addressable is important.

I've built a few interesting wave robots and am collaborating to create a wave service provider; waves may yet add value to collaboration platforms, but Zotero and other platforms will remain of great value and interest.

tbryson

I would love to have Zotero work with Cohere e.g., by importing rdf files. I could stay in the Firefox browser platform while visualizing and manipulating the semantic relations then export back into Zotero. Not knowing any better, I tried importing a Zotero rdf but Cohere rejected it, saying it wasn't valid xml.

jackpark

The good news is that, while not officially announced yet, Cohere is going open source in a matter of weeks. I'd like to think that there will be room for precisely this sort of coupling. I've grown quite fond of Zotero as a user interface into a much larger federation (topic map) of resources accumulated through varieties of sources. I'm not happy with the transient condition that Zotero isn't synching online properly right now, but I'm certain that will soon be fixed. I suspect we will soon want to setup some form of online collaboration around such an extended family of tools.