This month marks my twentieth anniversary in business as The Montague Institute. After nearly 40 years in the computer industry, I find myself reflecting on what has changed during that time. New technology gets most of the attention, but I’m more interested in what hasn’t changed, or least what changes much more slowly: 1. Technology … Continue reading
In spite of the fact that I make a living in the computer field, I’m usually slow to use new technology. I was one of the last to get a microwave. I still prefer my desktop computer to an iPad, and would rather use a map or follow my nose than use a GPS. The … Continue reading
The IT world borrowed the taxonomy concept from biology to compensate for the fact that users didn’t know what to type in the search box. It was hard for them to figure out what a Web site was about and zero in on their area of interest. The taxonomy (a hierarchical list of topics) served … Continue reading
I’ve been working with a crackerjack SharePoint programmer to integrate our Filemaker metadata repository with SharePoint. The objective was to maintain thesaurus terms and relationships in Filemaker (where they’ve lived since 1998) and have those changes automatically made to the corresponding data in the SharePoint term store. There are, of course, several good programs on … Continue reading
Originally published December 2005 Article in focus: “Interface lift” (Amy Wohl, IEEE Spectrum, November 2005). More articles on this topic: See “usability and user behavior” in the Digest index or the Montague Institute Review index. About the author. Amy Wohl is a consultant, newsletter publisher, and columnist for VARBusiness magazine. Prior to that, she was … Continue reading
Originally published June 2009 Until recently, information about the Semantic Web has been either visionary and theoretical or highly technical. Now, with the appearance of applications such as Google’s “rich snippets,” Yahoo’s SearchMonkey, and Reuters OpenCalais, the future is tantalizingly close (see De facto standards for semantic search?). It’s time to face two issues that … Continue reading
