Science Library Pad

Yahoo MyWeb tags

You can see all the tags in one of those visual folksonomy displays at

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?dg=6&dmode=vtags

If you want to search for a particular tag, use

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6&tag=TAG e.g.

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6&tag=folksonomy

via Library Stuff

Google Earth - play with global maps for free

Google bought Keyhole, which made software for navigating around global satellite maps.
Google took Keyhole's technology and incorporated it into Google Maps.

They have now released the next version of the software package, redubbed Google Earth.
The Google difference being, they are making it available for free.  Currently Windows only.

Via Slashdot /.

UPDATE: You may wonder, what's the big deal?  The big deal is, you can fly.  You can fly as easily as entering "1200 montreal road ottawa ontario" in the box under "Fly To".  It will automatically zoom out of your current location, and fly over the Earth to the new location.  That is very cool.

Another cool software package in the free computer globe space is NASA's World Wind.

I talked about various satellite image solutions previously in:
2005-04-05 Google Maps integrates satellite images

Apple iTunes 4.9 with podcasting support

The banner on Apple.com today is "Introducing iTunes with Podcasting.  Radio Reborn.  Subscribe to thousands of radio shows and sync them to your iPod." 

I suppose it doesn't hurt that the coinage "podcasting" reinforces their brand.

You can grab the new software for Mac and Windows from http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

There is also a new page http://www.apple.com/podcasting/

Via Slashdot /.

IBM buys Gluecode - can they get buy-in for small J2EE?

Reading Service-Oriented Architecture blog today, found these interesting comments:

A completely proprietary SOA solution would work - as long as the INTERFACES are standard."

I agree.

However, an SOA running on a commodity open-source environment — built with open-source toolsets — is an incredible value proposition, far more than an SOA built on Websphere, WebLogic, or Microsoft BizTalk and .NET. These app servers have steep licensing costs, and companies looking for low-end platforms to build their services can turn to open-source app servers such as JBoss and Apache Geronimo.

Now, IBM steps into the scene with Gluecode under its wing, which leverages Apache Geronimo. ...

IBM intends to position Gluecode at the low end of the market, and keep WebSphere at the high end, where it's been strongest

You can get more info in the official IBM Press Release.
Forbes has some reporting on the open-source marketplace in general, in a category they have interestingly called Intelligent Infrastructure.

Ujiko enhanced search engine

A search engine with the concepts of categories, unique visual display, and more.
Not sure how useful it is, but it looks cool (requires Flash).

http://www.ujiko.com/

more postings on library Web Services

Let's start with a side note necessary due to bad terminology choices: Web Services, which really should have been called "Vendor-Neutral Middleware", refers to a set of standards using XML, WSDL, and SOAP, and extended using the WS-* specs.

This is of course very confusing, because people quite naturally also use "web services" to mean any service exposed on the web.

The LITA blog is doing a bang-up job of blogging ALA 2005, I have Furled some of their posts.  One of particular interest to me was Preconference: Intro to Web Services.  It references a number of projects, it's not clear to me how much Web Services are involved with some of them.

• Rochester’s CUIPID (Catalog User Interface Platform for Iterative Development) project
• web services projects such as OAI-PMH, the WordNet thesaurus project from Princeton, Google Maps, Weather Channel on the desktop, and “semi web services” of integrating MyLibrary content into Notre Dame’s campus portal
• the OCKHAM Initiative project
• OCLC discussed their Library of Congress Controlled Vocabulary project
• OCLC Terminology Services that can be delivered through MS Office 2003 Research Task pane
• Vendor Initiative for Enabling Web Services (VIEWS)
• June 15th issue of the Library Journal on library automation (The Dis-Integrating World of Library Automation)

Also of note is a recent Silkworm blog posting Google AJAXSLT - another step towards a Browser based networked OS?

The new approach in the emerging service-oriented world is to get 'services' [out there somewhere on the net] to do the hard work of data manipulation, data access, business processing, calculation etc. for you. These services returning their output in XML. Amazon AWS, Google Web Services, OCLC's xISBN, and of course the services that will be supplied by the Silkworm Platform, being examples of these services.

There is a big question in my mind as to whether the public interfaces for services will be actual full Web Services WSDL-described SOAP-accepting interfaces, or whether we will end up with lightweight REST interfaces and AJAX types of things.

UPDATE: Lorcan Dempsey has some interesting thoughts in a similar mind-space - Libraries, maps, and platforms.  What is that is our goal exactly, and what are the proper enabling technologies?  Is it Web 2.0?  Is it infrastructure?  In CISTI's space, we talk about cyberinfrastructure supporting e-science and e-research.  Are we building a platform?

This aligmnent of 'horizontal' and 'vertical' services will be one of the most interesting things to watch over coming years in the library space. My view is that one of the major changes we will see is that more operations are moved into horizontal 'shared services' so that libraries can concentrate on creating value in their vertical, user-oriented services. These 'horizontal' services may not start out as 'platform' services in the sense that they are made available through web services and can be stitched recombinantly into other applications. However they will move in that direction.

UPDATE: Jon Udell is also pondering - How do you design a remixable Web application?

How do you design a remixable Web application?

We've focused a huge amount of attention on RESTful versus WS-* APIs, but that distinction isn't central to the current mashup craze. In many cases, as a matter of fact, neither kind of API plays a central role.

...

I think we've known the answer for a long time. A website that wants to be remixable will deliver content as XML and behavior as script. These aspects can be, and will be, combined server-side for Web 1.0 clients, but Web 2.0 clients will increasingly be able to do this processing for themselves. So there will be two ways to remix: by intercepting the server-side combination of XML content and scripted behavior, or by recombining on the client.

What's unclear, at least to me, is whether -- or to what degree -- the content and code will be augmented by external descriptions that can be used by automated tools, and can insulate derivative works from change. Could a lightweight schema for the content, and a lightweight service description for the code, make these remixes more resilient without imposing too much overhead? It's a great experiment for someone to try.

John Battelle's Searchblog: News: Google To Launch Online Video Playback This Monday

John Battelle's Searchblog reports Google To Launch Online Video Playback This Monday.

I've confirmed that Monday Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. This is the logical next step for Google's video search and upload function, which began taking uploads from anyone who cared to submit back in April.

UPDATE: It's here.  And it requires...

System Requirements
Windows 2000 or later with latest updates installed;
Firefox 1.0+ or IE 5.0+.
DirectX 9.0c End-User Runtime.

So no Google video in your Mac brower for the moment.  Google Blog says "We're releasing the Windows version first, with Mac coming soon."  Find out more from the About Google Video page.  Update via Slashdot /.

Gnomedex conference

You might think the Gnomedex conference is about the Gnome desktop suite for Linux, but it actually gets the name from a completely different organization, Lockergnome.

To inform, empower, and entertain - Lockergnome is here as a resource for people who are curious about the world of technology around them.

Gnomedex takes place in Seattle, hmm, are there any tech companies around there... ?

Here's some of the conference tech they set up:

• Updates will be consistently posted to our Conference Blog
• We have set up a Forum for Discussion [with RSS]
• Photos have been tagged at Flickr
• Content is being tracked at PubSub
• Incorporate our official Blogroll
• We have a EVDB page for Gnomedex 5.0
• There's an entry for Gnomedex on Upcoming.org
• 2004's partial Attendee List can still be found at Yahoo!
• You can sign up for updates with LiveMessage
• Get involved with the Gnomedex Wiki
• Gnomedexers with blogs!

The tag is gnomedex.  There are currently 243 tagged posts.
Topics are: "Grassroots of RSS, Blogging, Podcasting, BitTorrent, Media"

presentations from 2004 IBM summit on Service-Oriented Architecture

Executive Summit on SOA

You will also see on that page that there are more summits this year, one that has already taken place in San Francisco and ones coming up in London, England and Hong Kong.

An online video is also available - Service Oriented Architecture: A New Model for Engagement.

OPAX - make the OPAC bow to the power of XUL

I just ran across this in a Google search

OPAX - The XUL OPAC Browser

See discussion in From Ghostbusters to libraries: the Power of XUL (Word document).

Also published in Library Hi Tech, vol 23, no 1, 2005.

investigations of integration with the Microsoft Research Pane

In Serving Your Users in their Offices, The Shifted Librarian talks about what I would consider a continuation of the "live where your users are" concept, using the Research Pane in Office 2003:

Microsoft® Office 2003 Research Pane

“The Todd library now offers the ability to search our library catalog directly from within most Microsoft Office 2003 applications. To activate this new feature you will need to install our Research Service….

... You may now perform keyword searches of the Todd Library Online catalog any time from your Office 2003 Application.”

In the OCLC blog Outgoing, there is a great posting today about the concept of being Loosely Coupled, which also mentions integration with the Research Pane.

In addition to the xISBN and authority services I've mentioned in previous posts, we've started some experiments using IE's 'research pane' to expose terminologies. 

Here, the interfaces are Microsoft's SOAP definition for services that will interact with the research pane (you have to have Office 2003 to use these.  Conforming SOAP Web services, such as a thesaurus, or in our case some genre lists and a MeSH subset, can then be searched and selected, all in a sidebar within the MS Office application, such as IE or Word).

There is also a repository that supports Research Pane integration, I mentioned it previously:
2005-01-10  SOPS open source OA repository

DASER blog call for postings on librarian-publisher interface

With apologies for copying entire post

Information on new IT products, information services, software upgrades, etc. now floods the STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Medicine) library environment. While some STEM-orientated blogs and other web-based services offer general coverage of this flow of information, no single source focuses on the STEM publisher-librarian interface. While originally conceived to support just the DASER Summits, this blog will now expand to report on news items, issues, and announcements dealing with digital archives, e-libraries, repositories and other STEM-related products and services, with a focus (but not exclusive view) on the librarian-publisher interface, and how we can improve communication between these two professions in support of the authors and readers of scholarly publications. It is our intention to develop a number of blog authors and editors from both professions to manage this blog, not necessarily just from the ASIST community. If you are interested in participating in this process, please contact me ([email protected]). Michael Leach

from DASER Blog Expands Its Purpose

a couple upcoming Web Services conferences

International Conference on Web Services 2005  July 11-15, 2005  Orlando, Florida.

3rd European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS 2005) November 14-16, 2005   Växjö, Sweden

fun with RSS tools

LibraryClips has a very detailed report on RSS tools online in Subscribe to a blog via the RSS engines?

You can see Findory's view of my blog neighbors.

If you use the same username on many different sites, you can use the BlogDigger author:(name) syntax to aggregate all the different postings.

The example from LibraryClips is author:(johnt)

results of first OCLC Research Software Contest

The winner of the OCLC software contest is Dazhi (David) Jiao of Bloomington Indiana for his OPAC.

CAT-OAI integrates OAI harvesting and metadat searching to OPAC search engines and expands users' discoveries in a OPAC search results to related web-accesible digital resources.

from Catalogablog

The runner up was the WAG the Dog web localizer which does nifty things with Google Scholar.

OCLC announcement with various links.

Lorcan Dempsey: Rewarding experiences

IFLA 2005 preliminary programme - docdel session

The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) 2005 conference preliminary programme is available.

There will be a session in which CISTI will participate, here are a couple associated brief papers:

125 SI - Document Delivery and Resource Sharing
Perspectives on supply of electronic documents

• The use of a digital rights management system for document supply
  ANDREW BRAID (The British Library, Boston Spa, UK)
• Transforming document delivery in the e-content environment
  LUCIE MOLGAT (CISTI, Ottawa, Canada)

adding your content to My MSN

It took me a while to find this, so I thought you might find it helpful.

MSN Syndicated Content: Guidelines for Publishers

They want you to copy the button to your site, rather than linking to an image on their site.

It appears that MSN has to have already indexed the feed in order for you to add it; when I click the button currently it takes me to My MSN but it doesn't do anything as far as I can tell.

UPDATE 2005-06-23: The button should work now.

trends from the LITA blog

Browsing the LITA blog, I liked both the visionary trends and the curmudgeonly non-trends.

OCLC pilots its way boldly

Lots of info about various OCLC Research coolness in the posting OCLC Beta.

I am particularly interested by their work with MetaWiki, I think this kind of wiki extensibility will be a big way to quickly build sophisticated pages in the future.  I actually wonder whether extensible wikis will take over many of the roles envisioned for the portlet containers like Jetspeed.

ILI2005 - provisional programme

The provisional programme for Internet Librarian International 2005 is up.

I have a search set up in Bloglines, I have been catching a few postings recently, including Peter Scott reporting about the programme.

I have Furled a few people who will be presenting, using tag ILI2005.

There is a daylong track on Monday October 10, 2005: Blogs, Wikis, and Collaboration Tools.

Au blog, citoyens

La planète blog atterrit en justice
La ville de Puteaux poursuit pour diffamation un blog, site web très personnel. Une première en France.

La solidarité de la blogosphère
E-démocratie
A savoir
La démocratie participative en marche
«Le blog permet de créer son petit média personnel»
A Puteaux, motus sur les potentats locaux

dans http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Journal=1141
par BusinessWeek Blogspotting

voir également:
2005-02-05 newspaper blogging, including readers
2005-01-24 the blog ecosystem

Canadian Copyright Bill C-60 introduced

MichaelGeist.ca Canada Introduces New Copyright Bill

It's up to all Canadians to read this and contact their representatives.
There was a long consultation process, but according to Geist, the final result is (rather disappointingly, but not very surprisingly) not particularly citizen-friendly.

Library Boy has some good linkage in Copyright Act Reform Tabled Monday?

UPDATE: Digital Copyright Canada has been working on these issues for a long time.  There is quite a large (and I find sometimes confusing) site.  Here are a few starting points:

http://www.digital-copyright.ca/blog
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/discuss/

UPDATE:
Radio-Canada Carnet Techno Le partage de fichier sera illégal au Canada
GlobeTechnology Copyright bill satisfies recording industry

UPDATE 2005-06-22:
Library Boy New Copyright Bill Introduced

UPDATE 2005-07-01:
I am not a lawyer.  This section of the bill was pointed out as applying to libraries:

19. Subsection 30.2(5) of the Act is replaced
by the following:

(5) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply with
respect to the making of a copy in digital form
of printed matter and its provision to a person
who has requested the copy through another
library, archive or museum unless the library,
archive, museum or person providing the copy
takes measures that can reasonably be expected
to prevent the making of any reproduction of the
copy other than a single printing, its communication,
or its use for a period of more than
seven days.

overview of scholarly communication in Canada

UPDATE 2005-10-15: Fixed many, many broken links (links were copied from my email client which had set them all to attempt to proxy through my mail server).

I have been linking to an assortment of presentations and information, so I thought I would attempt to bring some of it together to present my perceptions of the current and planned state of Canadian scholarly communication.  We don't have big cyberinfrastructure programs like some other countries, although there is a good fast network, and activity around creating a computing grid.  There appears to be a growing consensus around the importance of open access and improved communication of research results.

Here are three recent presentations or reports, followed by some additional links.

1. Tapping The Global Information Base To Build An Innovative Knowledge Society
http://www.bibl.ulaval.ca/iatul2005/iatul-pres/carty_arthur.ppt

Dr. Arthur Carty, National Science Advisor to the Prime Minister

He states the following challenges and opportunities:

1. “Open Access” – Science Meets The Information Commons
2. Harnessing The New Power Of Data

He describes a "21st Century Research Communications System" with these characteristics

• Open Access journals, archives & databanks
• Internationally networked
• Wide range of users (including Government, Academia, Industry, NGOS & the Public)

He presents the following vision:
"Any researcher could access:

• Full text of most journal articles & extensive back issues
• Monographs & theses
• Relevant research data supporting published outcomes
• Powerful search engines
• Research reports, conference proceedings & non-peer reviewed research materials
• Discussion forums, contact lists, directories & other basic information sources
• Electronic tools to customize channels of communication (websites, weblogs, etc.)

... from their desktop"

He highlights three proposals:

• Federal Science eLibrary
• Synergies Project from SSHRC and Canada Foundation for Innovation
• National Data Infrastructure as recommended by NCASRD report

2. A Researcher's Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication in Canada
http://www.bibl.ulaval.ca/iatul2005/iatul-pres/shearer_kathleen.pdf

Kathleen Shearer, Canadian Association of Research Libraries

The Canadian scholarly communication system is just one part of a larger international system that isundergoing profound changes. And, while other countries are undertaking national research strategies aimed at understanding and navigating these changes, Canada is not. In order to optimize the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, it is critical that Canada develop a comprehensive research strategy to examine the future of scholarly communication in this country.

A ubiquitous knowledge ecosystem represents a holistic research environment in which scholarly communication is integrated into the research process itself. In contrast to these strategies elsewhere, the dissemination of research knowledge in Canada continues to be perceived as an adjunct to research, rather than as an integral part of the research enterprise. In Canada, the strategic emphasis remains on the generation of research, with little attention to its dissemination.

One important feature of the panel report is the emphasis on the creation of a national strategy:

A coherent national policy of knowledge preservation and dissemination must be devised to create a greater cohesion, accessibility, security, and access to research findings.

The study upon which the above report was based is
Towards an Integrated Knowledge Ecosystem: A Canadian Research Strategy
http://www.kdstudy.ca/results.html

3. National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data (NCASRD) Final Report
http://ncasrd-cnadrs.scitech.gc.ca/NCASRDReport_e.pdf

The report recommends a task force (Data Force).
The mandate of Data Force would be to guide and oversee a small implementation
secretariat to:

• commission a pilot data access project (Data Project) to illustrate the concepts and values of this Report;
• plan and supervise the formation of a permanent Canadian data access organization (Data Canada);
• secure the long-term commitment to federal financing of Data Canada;
• develop a data access strategic plan (Data Plan).

There were a number of recommendations, see my previous post for more information.

Here's what they have to say about research data archiving:

Unlike many forms of traditional archiving, research data archiving is not about keeping records for legal, historical or cultural purposes; it is about meeting the needs of researchers operating in today’s digital environment. The core mission of a research data archive is not to preserve the recorded memory of a group, organization or nation, but to provide a vital service to the research community.

Additional info:

The Synergies Project is to

help all Canadian humanities and social sciences journals convert to an electronic format and then collect the digital products into one massive, searchable database. ...  to create a "unique Canadian database" of an estimated 90,000 back-and-current issues of 211 journals in the humanities and social sciences and make them freely available to researchers through five university libraries (Simon Fraser, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and an Atlantic site).

http://www.fedcan.ca/english/fromold/persp2003-spec6.cfm
(I couldn't find a specific web home site for the Synergies project)

Various Canadian organizations are working on research and open access issues, including the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), the SSHRC funding organization, and the Canadian Libraries Association (CLA) which just made a declaration in support of open access at its 2005 conference.

http://www.carl-abrc.ca/
http://www.sshrc.ca/

In April 2005 SSHRC "initiated a national consultation with stakeholders in the scholarly community on how the principle of Open Access can best be implemented in the social sciences and humanities in Canada"

http://open.utoronto.ca/sshrcconsultation.htm

The University of Toronto has an Open Access / Open Source project
http://open.utoronto.ca/

Canada Foundation for Innovation
http://www.innovation.ca/

The Canada Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) replaces the Canadian National Site Licensing Project (CNSLP)
http://researchknowledge.ca/

CRKN Participating Publishers
http://researchknowledge.ca/participants/publishers/

The Canadian Health Libraries Association has proposed a National Network of Libraries for Health
http://www.chla-absc.ca/nnlh/vision.html

Science and Technology Foresight Directorate for Canada
http://www.techforesight.ca/

Previous postings:
2005-06-17 presentations from 26th Annual IATUL (International Association of Technological University Libraries) conference 2005 online
2005-06-15 final report from Canadian National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data
2005-04-21 Canadian National Technology Foresight
2005-01-04 Canadian Health Libraries Network

delicious bookmarks get even more tasty

In case you haven't been playing with del.icio.us in a while, you might want to go and check it out again.
It has added automatic suggested expansion of tags, so instead of me having to type Service-Oriented_Architecture I just type "ser" and then the suggestion is correct so I hit TAB to have it filled in (it took me a while to figure out to hit tab).

You can also see my bookmarks with a sort of tag cloud.

You can also see the most popular postings for tags, if there are enough bookmarks with that tag.  For example http://del.icio.us/popular/folksonomy

UPDATE: Via Macintouch today, I found that Ruben R. Puentedura has done a presentation A Moveable Feast: the del.icio.us web.  It is available as PDF, and as MP3 audio.  As well, he did a report on how to generate maps of del.icio.us using some MacOS X tools.

I suppose while I'm in the folksonomy space, I should mention Gataga, a federated search for bookmark tagging systems.

more on SOA training

I got an email asking about SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) training.
The training my organization got was from a company now called SOA Systems.
You can find them at www.soatraining.com
Here are my thoughts:

After reading Thomas Erl's book Service-Oriented Architecture : A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services, I knew he would be a good choice for SOA training.

His approach was very structured and comprehensive, building the foundations needed.

His experience in this new field was very helpful: he clearly presented the challenges, the current adoption and maturity of the various standards, and gave an approach for planning the use of SOA in the enterprise.

You can see in my SOA category that I have identified a few other sources of information and training.
I also searched around, but most of the other offerings are one or two day sessions, I would guess that they just introduce the topic and give an overview.  See my delicious bookmarks tagged Service-Oriented_Architecture+training for more.

Disclaimer: This posting is in part a result of communications with SOA Systems.