Specialized Digital Objects

I've just come home from the 2008 Special Libraries Association annual conference, and had the opportunity to see a keynote discussion held between Charlie Rose and Vinton Cerf, chief internet evangelist at Google - and also the man most commonly referred to as the “father of the internet.” 

At one point in the discussion, Dr. Cerf acknowledged that the internet is currently really good at dealing with, searching for and delivering is text content, but “specialized digital objects” are still a very big challenge. Dr Cerf explained that specialized digital objects encompassed anything more than plain text – it logically extends to images, photographs, video, tables, charts and graphs.

The problem is that the web generally treats these objects as pictures - thus it can't really interpret what they are about.  And while in some cases, with Flickr being the best example, users will keyword or tag pictures so they can be found. Some information vendors like Proquest with their Illustra product, attempt to do something similar by tagging scientific objects - mostly images. I’ve even seen some development projects attempting to use artifical intelligence to determine the content of photos for search purposes - with varying levels of success. Things get even more complex, and we move past single frame images, and into video. How do you adequately capture the meaning and pieces that are being conveyed over time?

But what really fascinated me is how closely the phrase “specialized digital objects” captures what Knovel is working to accomplish. Finding better ways to electronically extract meaning from engineering objects is the core of Knovel does when it takes a print table and turns it into searchable data, or ensures that a graphic actually encompasses the formula which governs it. 

And it was clear to me that the information professionals who truly value what Knovel is do so because they understand the trouble they have extracting this type of meaning from standard web content.  And while the web's difficulty in dealing with complex digital objects might not stand in the way of shopping for consumer goods, users of engineering and technical data are often looking for something more.