The role of Information manager and Information flows at the moment

Even though the practice of metadata were changed from catalogue cards to machine-readable formats, for a long time metadata information is stored in repositories as electronic records. During the recent year, the World Wide Web is moving from the web of documents to the web of data. The metadata information is moving from merely machine-readable towards machine-processable, where it is essential to break the record and repository silos and make data (especially metadata) into machine understandable pieces. We present information about the data using the RDF (Resource Description Framework) which provides a data model for presenting metadata as machine-understandable and –processable triple statements (i.e., subject, object, predicate). For example, Adam (subject) is from (predicate) Peru(object). The subject of a triple is the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) identifying the described resource, a predicate is the existing relationship between subject and object, and an object is a literal value or the URI of resources that is somehow related to the subject. In the above example, “Adam” is a person and “Peru” is a country. Although they represent totally different metadata, they are linked through the predicate (properties) and made it possible to gain the data and information from Adam to Peru such as the population, environment, currency, culture etc. of Peru. Furthermore, the information will be connected into the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud where anybody can join, put their data and access the others information. This can be used by UN organizations, and play the role of one family for providing the services to the world. The linked data will have an impact on e-science, e-government, and e-agriculture.

The roles of information managers have changed due to this movement. The classical information mangers managed the information in order to be findable or searchable in the context of records in a small or large silo. Nowadays the information managers will need to manage the information in order to make it to be accessible, exchangeable, useable, reusable in context of data that are semantically linked, far beyond the boundary of repositories or silos, and far beyond bibliographic data. In my opinion, in the next five years more metadata and raw data will be liberated from silos and join the LOD cloud. The agriculture data will form its own cloud, interacting with other scientific data, geographical data, government data, and social society data. Here metadata is critical for the overall quality of their interaction and reuse. On the other hand, not every current Semantic Web technology has a clear implementation guideline; different models and tools are invented by implementers each month. This is very challenging because it requires information managers to be able to understand the whole landscape and master the technologies quickly and correctly. It is also the new role of the information managers to compare different approaches, identify good practices, and contribute to best practices through their own work

The year 2011 is a personalization of Web

The 2010 was the year of Linked Open Data. Most of the organizations introduce their data in the web as RDF format by breaking their old databases. I think, this year will be more agent based approach for the web. For example, I am in Peris and I would like to get more information about hotel, food, people, night clubs etc from the web. I was working the project "visit findland". It was a primary steps to make your own travel plan by using 2nd generation web technologies. I am expecting this work will continue further in this year and coming years and make people life more easy.