Zzzoot

Glen: "In 12 years, why not an iPod that can carry all scientific literature ever produced?" Of course, I am borrowing from the recent statement made by Nikesh Arora , Google's VP of European operations at the FT World Communications Conference, where he said "I n 12 years, why not an iPod that can carry any video ever produced? " All video ever produced is huge amount of content, and most probably (I may be mistaken) is much greater than the body of all scientific, technology and medical literature (books, articles, etc) or at least all, say, from the last 40 years. If you accept this premise, then the personal digital libraries/collections that are becoming very common ( Beagrie 2005 , Borgman 2003 , Alvaraz - Cavazos 2005 ) will have transmogrified themselves to becoming a world (or at least a Very Big Personal Library) unto their own. It reminds me a little bit of some of the stories we heard when the Internet was just becoming part of main-stream socie...

Extensible Text Framework (XTF) : FLOSS platform for access to digital content XTF is the California Digital Library 's amazing access platform for digital content. It is based on Lucene , a tool that is well known as a scalable and stable full-text engine. But XTF is more than Lucene, and is a full end-to-end system, offering ü ber configurable indexing, quering and display. Java-based, completely XSLT-driven presentation-layer, extensible to things like Shibboleth , and has some very nice additioanl features like OAI-PMH provider and SRU . From what I can tell it does not have an SOA architecture, but offers a high degree of modularity which could easily be wrapped in Web services, etc

Google not cashing-in on Amazon linking? In my ever-vigilant interest in making sure that Google has covered all the funding streams it can ;-) , it seems to me that it is missing an important one: whenever I search Google and there is a link to a book on Amazon, the URL does not seem to have an Amazon associates ID. Why isn't Google an Amazon Associate member, cashing-in on the click- throughs to Amazon, getting a % of the sales from people it directs to Amazon? They are likely the top forwarder to Amazon and it shouldn't be too hard to insert their Amazon Associates ID etc. into their Amazon-bound URLs...

Proprietary vs. Open Source development analogy: like training-for-a-race vs. running-a-race In reading about the new (to me, at least) transactional database engine for MySQL (v >= 5.1 ) called the PrimeBase XT storage engine ( PBXT ) I ran across an interview with its creator, Paul McCullagh . It seems that Paul was from the proprietary software development world, and was surprised by the response to the Open Source community around this project, and the new friends he has found. He felt it was a very different environment from what he was used to. In his words, from the article: I like to take marathon running as an example. Think of the difference between training for a marathon and running a race. The closed source industry is like training for a marathon. You are basically on your own. The open source community is like running a race. Not because you want to win. Most people don't run a marathon to win, they run to complete. But during the race you experience a c...

Big Ball of Mud pattern Reading Grady Booch's very well developed " S nake O il-oriented A rchitecture " [a must-read for anyone doing or buying SOA] in his blog ( Software architecture, software engineering, and Renaissance Jazz ) brought me to a truly joyous article for a pattern that I had forgotten about: the Big Ball of Mud pattern. Read and enjoy (and remember architectures of days long gone - but still with us!). :-)

Tapping the power of text mining In his closing plenary to the Access 2006 conference in Ottawa, Clifford Lynch listed text mining as one of the exciting areas of activity for the near future, soon (hopefully!) realizing its potential for discovery on large text corpora. In the September 2006 issue of Communications of the ACM, Fan et al. have a good general introduction to this area. Fan, W., Wallace, L., Rich, S., and Zhang, Z. 2006. Tapping the power of text mining. Commun. ACM 49, 9 (Sep. 2006), 76-82. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1151030.1151032 More text mining Wikipedia text-mining.org New Zealand Digital Library

ACM & IEEE team-up for Wiki for Discussing and Promoting Best Practices in Research The scope is somewhat(!) narrower than the title suggests, focusing on the challenges in running and managing conferences in the areas on which the ACM and IEEE focus. The Wiki includes categories dealing with: acceptance rates (too high & too low), creative ideas (like lightning talks), examining allowing author responses to reviewer concerns, (technical) competitions, tracking reviews (if a paper is rejected by conference X and is usually re-submitted to conference Y, with some organizing & cooperation, the two conferences can have the reviews carried-over (shared) ), two-phase reviewing, double blind submissions, scaling of programme committees using hierarchy and not agglomeration. Hill, M. D., Gaudiot, J., Hall, M., Marks, J., Prinetto, P., and Baglio, D. 2006. A Wiki for discussing and promoting best practices in research. Commun. ACM 49, 9 (Sep. 2006), 63-64. DOI= http://doi.ac...

Stan Rueker I've just learnt about the nora project which is an amazing visual-based search construction interface from Stan Rueker , University of Alberta, in his David Binkley Award presentation at Access 2006 in Ottawa. today. I can see why see was presented this award, as he is building truly beautiful and functional prototypes...

Eclipse Plugin-in Architecture Article ACM Queue magazine this month has a very good article on Eclipse, The Heart of Eclipse , focused on its plug-in architecture. ACM Queue vol. 4, no. 8 - October 2006 by Dan Rubel, Instantiations

Access 2006: Day 1: v1.1 The Hackfest (and Ad Hoc Fest) results were presented at the Access 2006 conference. For the projects that were worked on, please go to hackfest.kicks-ass.net . Donna Dinberg (LAC) organized the effort, with Dan Chudnov , Ross Singer and Art Rhyno supporting The original 40 spaces were taken up and the 28 people on the waiting list were eventually added to an additional fest, called the Ad Hoc Fest. The Hack Fest was hosted at Carleton University, and the Ad Hoc Fest was held at the Library and Archives of Canada.

WWW 2007 Call for Papers out The 16th International World Wide Web conference in Banff (Alberta, Canada) CFP is out. Hopefully see you all there... :-)

Access 2006: First Day v1.0 While I am here at the Access 2006 conference, I can't help that I am missing out on some great Web 2.0 discussions, knowing that I am missing out on going out with Michael Stephens et al. to the Thai restaurant at Internet Librarian International in London, which I did do last year. Richard Wallis reports in Panlibis that he has the good fortune of doing this this year. That said, I am sure that Access will not dissappoint, as it has always been a great conference for the library techie crowd...

Digital Libraries Come of Age ... Yet again ... In the September /October 2006 issue of IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering , Pam Gorder[ 1 ] presents a view of digital libraries. Project Gutenberg (perhaps a little too much time spent on), ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries , DSpace , Fedora , US National Science Digital Library (NSDL) are all discussed, as well as Google's digitization efforts (and copyright woes). [1] Pam Frost Gorder, Digital Libraries Come of Age, Computing in Science & Engineering , vol. 8, no. 5, September/October 2006, pp. 6-10.

XML11 : Amazing AJAX Toolkit XML11 is a very exciting AJAX toolkit inspired by the X11 protocol. It allows Java applications to be rendered on a web browser, but also under Java Swing and Java AWT. In addition (and very wild), as there is an X11 server implemented ( WeirdX ) in Java, you can also have an X11 application working in a web browser! Seeing xcalc and xeyes rendered on Firefox, via AJAX, WeirdX, AWT and X11 is borderline bizarre. Check out the Google TechTalks video by Arno Puder , it is quite amazing. I would have liked to have seen Firefox running inside of this convoluted set of protocols and environments inside of Firefox. He also coins a wonderful phrase: " JavaScript is the assembly of the Web ...", basically claiming that while JavaScript is fundamental to the Web (or at least AJAX), no sane person wants to use it (like assembler today: is is a " pain " to write in). You would prefer to use a proper high level programming language like Ja...

Yes, the cryptically titled conference is on once more this year, in Ottawa, and it looks like I'll be attending yet again. While you won't have to be exposed to any presentation of mine, it appears that I have been gang-pressed into moderating the Friday afternoon and Saturday morning of the conference. And I should also be blogging it, so stay-tuned for some exciting stuff!

The W3C has just announced the first public working draft for this initiative: Press release: in English, French, Japanese The Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) Roles for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA Roles) States and Properties Module for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA States)

I recently received an email about the new Codex canadiensis from the Library and Archives of Canada et al . A very interesting collection, but when I checked the collection pages all I see (except for the splash page) for metadata is: <!-- META START --> <!-- META END --> No DC. anything , not anything at all. Quite surprising, and more than a little disappointing from a National Library-type organization.

At the recent " 1st European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine & Medicine - Open Access and Researchers, 21-22 April, 2006, Lund Sweden ", Tim Brody, Chawki Hajjem and Stevan Harnad presented a slide stack which contains a data tidal wave of evidence supporting Open Access. Multiple graphs from a broad range of sources, disciplines, sectors, timelines etc dealing with, and mostly convincingly slaying, many of the bugbears associated with Open Access. Of specific interest to the research community in my neck of the woods (Canada) are the statements on last three slides (#80-82): Canada is losing about $640 million dollars worth of potential return on its public investment in research every year. The Canadian Research Councils spend about $1.5 billion dollars yearly, which generate about 50,000 research journal articles. But it is not the number of articles published that reflects the return on Canada’s research investment: A piece of research, if it is w...

In June I spoke at the GeoTec conference in Ottawa on the past, present and future of Web-based mapping and the implications for data providers, mainly national- and similarly levelled mapping agencies. The meeting had particular resonance for me as it was also celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Atlas of Canada , where I worked in the early-mid 1990s, and where we did some very exciting work in early Web-based mapping. NAISMap was created by various explorations I made, and with the support of my director at the time, Jean Thie, and the efforts of the National Atlas team, NAIS-on-the-Net was born, with NAISMap being playing a central role. Ah, those halcyon days!

I just found out about this conference: The International Conference for Science & Business Information . The 2005 proceedings are online ( http://www.infonortics.com/chemical/ch05/05chempro.html ) and there are some very interesting presentations dealing with the transformations we are seeing in how scientific research is done and how the scholarly publishing world is also changing.

SOA / Web Services as Service Personnel Explaining SOA / Web Services to non-technical people is not always easy. Web services can -- depending on your business and the granularity in which you implement your web services -- be modelled as the service people who previously -- in an earlier non-web age -- performed those services. This entry is an attempt to make web services more understandable to non-technical people. Let's start. Let's use a library which has a document delivery service (for which is charges), which in the present web age delivers documents in both analog (paper photocopies) and digital form. We'll start with how one might have done this in the past ( I admit this example presents things in their extreme: in the real world one service person performed a number of service roles. But please bear with the example ). You are a researcher. You are looking for the following article, i.e. you want a copy of the following article: Kendrick, B. 1962. The Leptogra...

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