Ricardo Merelas Cainzos

CiteULike, GoogleBooks & GoogleReader (A6)

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 12:23:38 +0000

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.

References:

CiteULike. (2009, November 29). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:36, December 26, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=CiteULike&oldid=328621862
Google Books. (2009, December 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:50, December 26, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Books&oldid=333855298
Google Reader. (2009, December 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:08, December 26, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Reader&oldid=333224059
Top 100 tools. Retrieved 26th December, 2009 14.27 from http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Top100Tools/googlereader.html

Wikis & blogs (A5)

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:39:51 +0000

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.

References:

Wiki. (2009, December 2). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:21, December 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wiki&oldid=329241410
Blog. (2009, November 30). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:21, December 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blog&oldid=328824472
Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Inocencio Maramba and Steve Wheeler. Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical pratice and education. Retrieved 5th December, 2009 16.26 from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41/
Naomi Augar, Ruth Raitman and Wanlei Zhou. School of Information Technology, Deakin University. Teaching and learning online with wikis. Retrieved 5th December, 2009 16.30 from (finish)

“TeX”, “Scribe” & “GML” (A4)

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:35:02 +0000

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.

References:

Text Executive Programming Language. (2009, July 31). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:50, November 8, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_Executive_Programming_Language&oldid=305276963
Scribe (markup language). (2009, February 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:56, November 8, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scribe_(markup_language)&oldid=273246031
IBM Generalized Markup Language. (2009, August 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:58, November 8, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language&oldid=308444663
TeX. (2009, November 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:56, December 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TeX&oldid=327575917

Markup languages (A4)

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:26:00 +0000

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.

References:

Markup language. (2009, October 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:33, November 2, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Markup_language&oldid=321974387
Tim Bray, Jean Paoli and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. “Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0″. Retrieved 2nd November, 2009 19.15 from http://basie.exp.sis.pitt.edu:9000/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/1898/xml.pdf?sequence=1
XHTML. (2009, October 12). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:50, October 26, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=XHTML&oldid=319514909
Style sheet (web development). (2009, November 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:51, November 21, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Style_sheet_(web_development)&oldid=325725871

La enciclopedia francesa

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:16:37 +0000

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.

Referencias:

L’Encyclopédie. (2009, 30) de septiembre. Wikipedia, La enciclopedia libre. Fecha de consulta: 15:35, octubre 5, 2009 from http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=L%27Encyclop%C3%A9die&oldid=30205921.
Las letras de Francia y del Perú: http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/BibVirtual/libros/literatura/LetrasFranciaPeru/cap_02.htm

Digital libraries (A3)

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:13:29 +0000

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”.

References:

Digital library. (2009, September 21). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:34, October 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_library&oldid=315342241
Darlington Digital Library (Digital Research Library, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh) http://digital.library.pitt.edu/d/darlington/
Google Book Search. (2009, September 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:39, October 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Book_Search&oldid=316695636
The Furness Shakespeare Collection (University of Pennsylvania Library) http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/furness

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

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:54:50 +0000

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.

References:

E-book. (2009, October 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:53, October 4, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=E-book&oldid=317782258
Ian H. Witten, David I.Bainbridge (2002). How to build a library. Retrieved 20.19 October 4th, 2009 from http://books.google.es/books?id=mrlUvcs9koAC&dq=ebooks+characteristics&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Todo ebook. La web del eBook. Retrieved 20.25 October 4th, 2009 from http://www.todoebook.com/index.asp

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

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:12:14 +0000

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.

References:

María Jesús Lamarca (2009). El autor y la autoría en el mundo digital. Retrieved 26th September, 2009, 19.00 from http://artesadigital.blogspot.com/2009/02/el-autor-y-la-autoria-en-el-mundo.html
Author. (2009, September 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:34, September 4, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Author&oldid=311786491
Jakob Nielsen. Multimedia and hypertext: the internet and beyond. Published by Morgan Kaufmann. Retrived 20.00, September 26th, 2009 from http://books.google.es/books?id=KgZXCCfP0rQC&pg=PA321&lpg=PA321&dq=the+role+of+the+author+hypertext&source=bl&ots=OEql72JnDp&sig=y4SfNXmAZM0QR_NBVCXqW2gKLcM&hl=es&ei=8le-StfeHseO_Abhy9V1&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=the%20role%20of%20the%20author%20hypertext&f=false
“Hypertext and the role of the reader and writer”. Part of the examination for the doctoral program in English at Michigan State University. Retrieved 20.30 26th September, 2009 from http://faculty.gvsu.edu/patterna/hyperreading.html

Question answering systems (Q3)

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:03:57 +0000

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.

References:

Question answering. (2009, March 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 09:29, April 1, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Question_answering&oldid=278611780
Giuseppe Attardi, Antonio Cisternino, Francesco Formica, Maria Simi, Alessandro Tommasi. PiQaSso: Pisa Questions Answering System. Retrieved 4th April, 2009 16.30 from http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec10/papers/piqasso.pdf
Matthias Rauterberg, Mario Menozzi, Janet Wesson, International Federation for Information Processing. “Human-computer interaction”. ISBN: 1586033638, 9781586033637. Published by IOS Press, 2003. Retrieved 4th April 2009, 16.52 from http://books.google.es/books?id=PTg0fVYqgCcC&printsec=frontcover#PPR5,M1Matthias

Natural language processing (Q3)

Ricardo Merelas Cainzos — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:12:56 +0000

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.

References:

Natural language processing. (2009, March 23). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:07, April 4, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_language_processing&oldid=279119029
Natural language processing. Microsoft research site. Retrieved 4th April, 2009 14.40 from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/nlp/
Giovanni Battista Varile, Ronald Cole and Antonio Zampolli (1997). “Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology” Published by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0521592771 9780521592772). Retrieved 2nd March, 2009 from http://books.google.es/books?id=WlHD141lKw4C&printsec=frontcover