New Organisational Tools

http://www.o3spaces.com/

http://www.toodledo.com

The Knowledge Engine

We all know search engines, we have even started to grasp "help engines" but what is a knowledge engine?

The concept has been developed by Stephan Wolfram who describes it as a computational knowledge engine. Wolfram was the creator of Mathematica: Mathematica provides you with the world's largest collection of algorithms in a single system--each able to operate across the widest applicable scope of numeric, symbolic, or graphical input.(Wolfram Reasearch 2009). Watch it in action here.

So what does a computational knowledge engine do? Wolfram explains here.





Wolfram Alpha screenshots here and is expected to go live sometime in May 2009. Especially checkout the video on the building of the datacentre.. it really appeals to the nerd in me :)

There will always be a need for Information Managers

I was trawling the web looking for information.. as one does, when I came across this journal article on a web site called O'Reilly discussing structuring URLS in what is termed the Presto approach. As I read down the article I couldn't help seeing the cataloger at work and how important it is becoming to use every opportunity to structure information and code it in a way that describes what the material is pertaining too. Here the Library of Congress is describing how is uses handles as a form of persistent identifiers to documents, and in this case legislative documents.

LOC example

How to create a Legislative Handle

Begin the URL with the handle domain name -- http://hdl.loc.gov/ -- then add loc.uscongress. Add a slash and the name of the collection, legislation, followed by a period and the congress number, 110. Finally, add the bill type abbreviation and the bill number.

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110s254
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110sconres33
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hr4544
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hres655

I had a look at the State Library of Victoria and the National Library of Australia and it seems they are not using handles is this way

This about sums it all up

The more contact I have with web 2 under the consideration of its application in the library or information management environment the more I deduce it's presently more about participation. It looks to me like libraries have been missing the opportunity to participate in the free love movement of sharing, collaborating and developing ways to communicate with people. The big fear is that when the love fest has burnt out in a time where libraries might not be the powerhouse of information they once were, will the usual offenders of control try and take over what was once free and turn it into paid under the banners of copyright, intellectual property or the like?

The following YouTube clip is a presentation by Michael Welch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University.

What is the Semantic Web?

I've been hearing the term Web3 and Semantic Web around the traps and thought I would investigate a little further. The following is a quote from an interview with Ivan Herman who is a member of the International World Wide Web3 Conference Committee.

The shortest way is to say it is a data Web. Now, that by itself doesn’t say too much. But if you look at the Web as of today, it’s sort of a Web of documents. People put up documents in HTML or generated from a database or whatever that are linked together and humans look at it. In this sense, it’s a bunch of documents that are on the Web. But in fact, there’s a huge amount of data, and you would like to have the data relate to one another directly. So, you have big databases, and the databases together represent knowledge and information, not necessarily individually, and you want the same kind of linkage among the data the way you do it with documents. In this sense, it’s the Web of data. You also find people calling it the data Web—more or less the same thing. The Semantic Web technologies, the various things that we do, are all the building blocks to realize that properly.

I love this quote:

Ivan Herman says the Semantic Web will lead to “mash-ups on steroids”. As the World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web activity lead, Herman has a lot of influence on the development of Web 3.0 technologies. The computer scientist has coordinated all of the standards body’s work on the Semantic Web since 2006.

Full Interview here.

I found this information using Twine

Leading open source with Pytheas

There is no doubt that if libraries are to regain some authority over the quality of information being disseminated to the online information user, headway into more flexible instant information sharing is going to have to be implemented. University libraries and progressive public libraries are becoming aware of this and starting to experiment with open source software and integrating these tools into existing web presences or rebuilding whole sections of the web sites to accommodate more web 2 applications. The University of South Caroline has used free open source wiki software to build what looks like a normal university library web site. This site allows staff and registered public to edit material. More exciting is the work being carried out by the University of Virginia which has developed an open source OPAC which is calls Project Blacklight and has been build as an open source initiative that will be available to all libraries who dare to cut the strings to more established vendor OPAC systems.

DSpace a free open source software solution for accessing, managing, and preserving scholarly works is being used by a plethora of institutions to foster open source knowledge sharing and information networking.

Pytheas is one application which is attempting through XML code to integrate open source software into the library environment. Although the graphic interface leaves a lot to be desired the code paths protocols that pytheas is using look very interesting. Here they are marrying Marc, RDF, HTML, XML, WorldNet and Google API into one searchable user interface.

PPS Converter

My hubby asked me.. do you know how I can convert a Powerpoint presentation into a video file that I can upload into a Blog. Of course I didn't so he went away, surfed the net and came back this nifty little program which I thought might be very usual for the future. This software is a free download from Presenter Soft and it worked perfectly.