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...