Dr. Dietmar Wolfram to speak at SIS Research Forum Oct. 14

The School of Information Sciences invites you to hear Dr. Dietmar Wolfram speak on Indexing Consistency Across Multiple Indexers/Taggers on October 14, from 12:30 - 2 p.m. Dr. Wolfram will present an empirical study of measuring information representation for retrieval by traditional indexing approach and by new social tagging practices.

The SIS Research Forum will be held in the Thompson-Boling Arena Room A from 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.

View Dr. Wolfram’s presentation here.

What: SIS Research Forum with Dr. Dietmar Wolfram
When: October 14, from 12:30 - 2 p.m.
Where: Thompson-Boling Arena meeting Room A

Abstract:
Indexing consistency has long been recognized as a stumbling block to effective information retrieval. Measures of indexing consistency have long been used to compare the efforts to two individuals. The recently phenomenon of social tagging represents a variant of indexing and permits similar comparisons, except on a larger scale. This study develops and demonstrates a method for comparing inter-indexer or inter-tagger consistency on a larger scale using Information Retrieval modeling theory. The method is applied to a large dataset from a social bookmarking website to determine whether there are significant differences in the consistency of tags assigned across three disciplinary areas. The findings have implications for identifying how vocabularies are used by indexing and tagging communities.

Speaker Biography:
Dr. Dietmar Wolfram is a professor at the School of Information Studies, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his PhD from the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Wolfram teaches courses in information science, foundations of library and information science, electronic networking, and research methods. His research areas include applied informetrics, information retrieval system evaluation, technology education for information professionals, and modeling and simulation of IR systems and use. Dr. Wolfram has published extensively in IR and Informetrics. He is the author of "Applied Informetrics for Information Retrieval." Dr. Wolfram is the founding director of the doctoral program in information science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dietmar Wolfram and Isola Ajiferuke have just been awarded the 2008 Thomson ISI Citation Analysis Research Grant for their article "Citer Analysis as a Measure of Research Impact.”