The final question I think anyone responsible for making an investment decision in terms of building OLE should ask themselves is this: If I were investing my own money in a company that said they were going to build OLE, would I do it? If not, I think you know what you should do when it comes to your organization’s money and OLE.
One of my collegaues called the other day and asked if we still relied on the distinction between intensional and extensional sets (really intensionally and extensionally defined sets). Yes, even more so now.
This lecture elaborates on RDF, RDFS, and SOAP starting from a short recap of XML, and the history of the W3C and the development of "open standard recommendations". We also compare RDF triples with DOGMA lexons. We finalise by listing shortcomings of RDFS regarding semantics, and give short overview of the history of OWL as one answer to this. A full elaboration on OWL and description logic is for another lecture.
"The OLE and Ex Libris URM projects continue to sustain the vendor and content neutrality that has been a hallmark of traditional library software, updated to use newer technology. It will be fascinating to see what values libraries choose to prioritize. Will it be perceived low cost and convenience or will it be content and vendor neutrality, i.e. the ability to negotiate low prices coupled with the traditional need to protect privileged data that will continue to weigh heavily into their future decisions? It's an important decision."
In this second part, we'll try to wipe the muck from our crystal ball and see how this could play out in the future, specifically for the major players of book publishing: readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors.
We believe that dedicating data to the public domain is the best way to ensure that data is universally reusable and remixable. When data is public domain it means that it can be reused automatically without needing to check terms and conditions or track the source of every statement to provide attribution. These kinds of things act as friction to reuse, wasting energy that could be better spent creating inspiring things.
There is too much information available today, from Google to blogs. The death of reading, though, is overblown. The key is media literacy. People should teach media literacy in schools to help.
"Bits of destruction" is a phrase Fred Wilson uses to describe the destructive part of "creative destruction" brought on by digitization. We hear a lot about the destruction wrought on the newspaper business. A more interesting and nuanced wave is now hitting the book publishing business. Actually, it is three waves: the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. However this plays out, a lot of people will be affected, but the way in which it will play out is not at all obvious. This is too big a subject for one post, so read this as an introduction to a multi-post investigation.
Today’s post is not to argue that the settlement should be approved, but to consider what the situation will be if the settlement is rejected. The proponents and opponents of the settlement certainly seem to differ on what the world will look like if the settlement is approved; might there be somewhat greater agreement between the sides about what the world will look like if the settlement is rejected?
Today's announcement by the Open Knowledge Foundation of the release of version 1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL) will create resentment in both professions- information technologists need to understand some of its complications, and lawyers will need to understand some technological limits of the license. In this post, I will try to articulate what some of the hard bits are.
Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party and the international politicized pirate movement, talks about the rise and success of pirates, and why pirates are necessary in today's politics.
A new kind of web—a semantic web—would be made up of information marked up in such a way that software can also easily understand it. Before considering how we might achieve such a web, let’s look at what we might be able to do with it.
This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.
Dr. Rankin, professor of History at UT Dallas, wanted to know how to reach more students and involve more people in class discussions both in and out of the classroom. She had heard of Twitter...
Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best:
Karen Coyle helps the Open Library team navigate the twisty paths of the forest that is library metadata. A little while ago, we were lucky to have her present her view of its origins at the Internet Archive. I thoroughly enjoyed her presentation and I thought someone else might so I've rewritten my notes from the session as an exciting love-and-death-style account of librarianship over the years.
This presentation uses history and a number of stories to imagine the near and medium-term futures of higher education. A call to action for faculty and administrators to engage in policy reform around open access to research and teaching and learning materials.
May 15, 2009: Berlin. A speech that remixes a bit of David Post's fantastic book, In Search of Jefferson's Moose, given at an event hosted by the Heinrich-Boell-Foundation.
"This blog, the result of a collaboration between myself and the Institute for the Future of the Book, is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc."
A group of open data advocates, including Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, and Rufus Pollock, recently met at the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge and articulated a set of principles for open data.
"To find out about OCLC’s move in to providing hosted, Web-scale, Software as a Service functionality for managing libraries, who better to ask than the person responsible for the programme."
ur use of the term within OCLC describes both a technical architecture and the impact the services have within the community they serve. The following is a brief outline focused on the technology aspects. Over the next several weeks I will provide a detailed post on each of these topics.
"I’m seriously tempted to say that Wolfram Alpha takes the SaaS model to its extreme. So Wolfram Alpha’s chances at scaling the heights of fame should force us to stop for a moment and run our own calculations concerning the value to us of data integrity, reliability, privacy, and innovation."
OCLC is beginning a major new initiative to expose the data contributed to WorldCat by member libraries in useful new ways
By Don Hamparian and Roy Tennant
OCLC is connecting the content, technology and expert capabilities of its member libraries worldwide to create the first Web-scale, cooperative library management service. Member libraries can take the first step to realizing this cooperative service model with a new, “quick start” version of the OCLC WorldCat Local service.
But, now more than ever, OCLC must end its attempts to restrict and monopolize library data. It was ugly and unfair for OCLC to claim ownership over what is largely public data. It is obscene to leverage that data monopoly into a software monopoly.
The previous highly controlled expert-editing-only model of authority work has failed, if it worked, it would be working already for the domain Salo’s talking about, but it isn’t, and Salo provides some context to understand why.
So wiki style, yeah.
C. Concordia, S. Gradmann, and S. Siebinga. (June 2009)Paper for the Meeting: 193. Information Technology
at the "World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA General Conference and Council 23-27 August 2009, Milan, Italy
http://www.ifla.org/annual-conference/ifla75/index.htm
Date submitted: 03/06/2009.
S. Thorin. (August 2003)Presented at e-Workshops on Scholarly Communication in the Digital Era, August 11-24, 2003. Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan..