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CiteULike, GoogleBooks & GoogleReader (A6)

December 26, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

With regard to CiteULike, it is a free online service, which has as a purpose to organize academic publications. Nowadays, it is run by Oversity; however, it has not always been like that since it was created in the year 2004. This system is commonly known as the first Web-based social bookmarking tool created for meeting the needs of scientists and scholars. Furthermore, what makes the difference between CiteULike and other similar systems such as del.icio.us is that users are allowed to bookmark the different books with metadata thanks to a Web browser. In fact, such has been this system’s success that there are more than 3 million articles bookmarked in CiteULike nowadays.

As regards to Google Books, previously named as either, Google Book Search or Google Print, it is a service provided by Google, which was firstly introduced in the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. Its main characteristics is that it searches full text in a wide range of books. These books have previously been scanned owing to an optical character recognition and stored in Google’s databases.

Last but not least, Google Reader is considered as a Web-based aggregator, which can not only read Atom, but also RSS feeds,  online or offline. It was in 2005 when it was first released (a beta version), nevertheless, it was not until 2007 when the current version started working.

 

 

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Wikis & blogs (A5)

December 5, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

Despite being both websites, whose main purpose is to allow the easy edition and creation for the user, there are some differences between them, as I will now explain:

As regards the wikis, these allow the editing and creating process through a browser, by using either a text editor known as WYSIWYG or  a simplified markup language. At the same time, they are very often powered by wiki software and they’ve got a wide range of uses; creating collaborative websites, powering community websites and personal note taking spring to my mind. Besides, according to Ward Cunningham, who is the developer of the first wiki software, this system is “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.

With reference to blogs, they are usually performed individually, maintained with different kind of materials;  commentaries, descriptions of events, video or graphic, to name but a few ones. The order of the entries, is at the same time, of reverse-chronological order. Focusing on their functions, most of them work as news-providers on a specific subject, whereas the rest usually have the function of online diaries.

Unlike most people think, blogs and wikis are very easy to use. In fact, this is one of the reasons for their popularity, which has grown dramatically in the last years. As a clear consequence, there are about 112,000,000 blogs nowadays, not to mention the quantity of wikis used at universities or multinational companies.

 

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“TeX”, “Scribe” & “GML” (A4)

November 8, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

TeX is a typesetting system, designed and written by Donal Knuth, which once connected with the METAFONT language had two goals; on the one hand, to allow anybody to produce high-quality books and, on the other, to create a system that gae the exact same results on all computers, nowadays and in the future. 

Scribe is at the same time a mark up language and a word processing system, that completely revolutionised the use of descriptive markup when it was created by Brian Reid as part of his doctoral dissertation in the 1980s. It was later sold to the company Unilogic. 

The Generalized Markup Language, commonly known as GML, makes the description of a document easier if we talk about its format, organization structure or contents parts and their relationship. Due to the system of specifying heading levels, this programme classifies the parts of the documents in terms of importance. Just by selecting a profile, documents can be formated for different devices which go from screens to either, laser or line printers. 

  

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Markup languages (A4)

November 2, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

A markup language is a system by which a text is, in some way, made syntactically distinguishable from that text. This is exemplified by editors’ instructions written with a blue pencil on authors’ manuscripts or typesetting instructions. Despite being the “HTML”  (one of the document formats on the World Wide Web) the most known, there are more examples of markup language such as “GenCode”, “TeX”, “Scribe”, “GML”, “SGML”, “XML” and “XHTML”.

The markup languages can be classifies into three different groups: presentational, procedural and descriptive. With regard to the first one,  it has typically been used by word-processing systems, remaining hidden from human users, including authors and editors. As regards procedural markup, its aim is to provide instructions for programs that are to process the text, being  therefore expected that the processor runs through the text from the beginning to the end. The most significant examples are “troff”, “LaTex” and “PostScript”. Finally, the descriptive markup, which is also known as “semantic” has as a function to label parts of the document.

With reference to style sheets, they are a way to separate presentation on the one hand and content on the other. Therefore, the markup, take for instance HTML or XHTML, owns the page’s semantic content and structure but not the style. The style is defined by using a different language like CSS or XSL, by using a style sheet language.

Due to the amount of different markup languages existant, a new article will give further information about the already mentioned different systems, whereas this article stands for a general vision of the topic and a quick survey of the kinds existant.

 

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La enciclopedia francesa

October 7, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

La Enciclopedia Francesa, que fue ideada por Diderot, se empezó a publicar en 1751, constituyendo un auténtico acontecimiento cultural. El objetivo era el de formular en ella una síntesis del saber moderno, crear un “corpus” de la sabiduría erudita puesta al servicio de la sociedad, al mismo tiempo que se planteaban nuevas ideas flotantes en el ambiente de su época, un tanto disimuladas u ocultas en obras de poca difusión o de restringido tiraje.

Pese a no ser el primer intento de condensar los conocimientos, ya que en 1697 había aparecido en Francia un Diccionario de la misma índole confeccionado por Bayle y que existían antecedentes como el de Chambers en Inglaterra o Hoffman en Suiza alemana, dio nombre a todo una generación; la de los famosos “enciclopedistas” como como Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Condillac, y Daubeton, el barón de Holbach, Turgot y Quesnay y Marmontel, quienes colaboraron en sus páginas. Además, reunió a hombres de ciencia notables como Laplace, Herschell, Buffon, Lavoissier o Berthollet.

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Digital libraries (A3)

October 5, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

Due to the development of the new technologies, not just ebooks have been created, but also digital libraries -where, as the name mentions, collections are stored in digital formats, being accessible by computers-.

To this extent, I would like to draw your attention to some of the most relevant libraries; “The Google Book Search” and “The Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library” .

As regards the last one, it has promoted the research and scholarly use of rare book since 1996, being the main target on the one hand, to create quality digital facsimiles and on the other to make them available online through specific sites for each of the collections.

 With the regard to the financial aspects, the startup costs were paid by a donation from Library Overseer Lawrence J. Schoenberg.  In addition, several projects have been carried out (“The Digital Scriptorium” or “Philadelphia Neighborhood City Planning Reports” to name but a few ones) with their respective costs, and at the moment several experiments are still in production like the “Theodore Dreiser Bibliography” or the redesign of the “Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Music Archive”.

 

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The main differences between the “ebook” and traditional books (A2)

October 4, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

Commonly known as “ebooks” -term that stands for electronic books-, these new devices are catching on many people according to recent surveys, which show that in the last years, there has been a marked increase in the number of units sold.

Nevertheless, many people still remain reluctant to these devices since, despite sharing the same name, their differences are huge. For instance, if we focus on the material, traditional books are easier to read, not only because the paper can be molded, but also because they can be read with all kinds of light (including direct sunlight). Besides, traditional books could be seen as a better investment by many experts as whereas almost nobody would steal classical books, ebooks are more valuable, therefore they are thieves’ target.

However, ebooks have some advantages that classical books don’t. This is exemplified by the fact that as of August 2009 there were more than 2 million books free from download. This has obviously a clear impact in the number of readers, which may easily enlarge as these books are free. Due to this, many unknown authors can make their way in this business, step by step, as publishing is much easier than before and thus, many books that nowadays remain in publishing houses because they  would not live up to the companies’ standards, could be published.

In a nutshell,  taking into account that both don’t offer the same features, they will both exist if you ask me, since the ecologist’s argument -ebooks protect the environment by using less paper- is a white lie. In fact, ebooks require various substances to produce, which are not biodegradable.

 

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The author’s role after the creation of the hypertext (A1)

September 26, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

Along the centuries, the role of the author has developed and changed dramatically. Whereas before the invention of the printing, the relevance of the author was minimum -since, among other things, the stories were transmitted orally and therefore there was not a single creator-, the importance of this started to become more important, reaching nowadays’ levels.

However, with the creation of the hypertext, the author’s power is running down. Taking into account that by publishing a document on the internet you make it available to almost anybody, the author loses his mastery of the piece. To this extent, some critics such as Sven Birkerts believe that “electronic text, and hypertext in particular, is killing the author”. Besides, it comes without saying that once something is published on the web, anybody with some basic knowledge of computers can copy and paste the document, becoming copying even easier than before.

In contrast, others believe that hypertext has some advantages for the author as well. For instance, each of the readers is free to select the information that wants to see, not being obliged to see some things that may be considered as a burden. In other words, it provides readers much more opportunities than a normal book, with the result it has on the author.

 

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Question answering systems (Q3)

April 4, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

Question answering (QA) is a task which has as the main purpose to answer automatically to questions done in a natural language.

In order to do this, a pre-structured database may be used, or in contrast, a collection of natural language documents such as the World Wide Web. The questions asked, which may go from why questions to definitions, can be of two different types: either close-domain questions or open-domain questions. With regard to the first ones, the are considered easier to answer since, they belong to a topic which can be easily found on the Internet. However, the open-domain questions are harder to reply as the answers rely on world knowledge.

In spite of the amount of money invested, question answering systems such as “Powerset” or “Assimov the chatbot” still show that much work has to be done as most of the questions, can not be answered accurately yet.

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Natural language processing (Q3)

April 4, 2009 by Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

Natural language processing, which has much to do with the field of computational linguistics, is usually considered to be a sub-field of artificial intelligence.

NLP, as it is usually called, deals with the interactions between computers and human natural languages. In order to achive this, natural language generation systems are involved, which convert into readable human language, the information stored in computer databases. This system, involves at the same time, text and speech. However, for several reasons, the work carried out in the field of speech processing, belongs now to a separate field.

Strange as it may seem, different companies are paying out big sums of money for the purpose of developing this technology. Take for instance, that the “Redmond-based Natural Language Processing Group” (microsoft), is trying to design a software that analyzes, understands and generates languages that humans use naturally, so that eventually we can address computer as if we were addressing a person.

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