Back in Scientific American featured an article by Tim Berners-Lee and others on the possibilities offered by the semantic web. Last month's issue (Dec 07) featured an article by Lee Feigenbaum and others which gives a good overview of progress towards that early vision. The article is online but for a fee: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web-in-action.
The article talks about how the development of standards (RDF and OWL) has spurred developments in the commercial sector. A number of large organisations are now using ontologies to manage information and deliver content. It also talks about how the semantic web can build on the popularity of tagging on social sites such as Facebook and Flickr as RDF and ontologies are maturing.
The article features two interesting case studies in drug discovery; and health care. A common theme across both case studies is the volume of data/information. It'd be interesting to learn more about the contribution text mining can make to the Semantic Web vision - the BOOTStrep project at NaCTeM is exploring the role of text mining in ontology development, for example.
Other interesting applications mentioned include: Science Commons (semantic web tools for attaching copyright and licensing info to data) and DBpedia (linking information within Wikipedia).
Their conclusion? "Grand visions rarely progress exactly as planned, but the Semantic Web is indeed emerging and is making online information more useful than ever".
Friday, 4 January 2008
Thursday, 3 January 2008
VRE 1 - lessons learned
Just found my notes from the JISC Conference 2007 and rather than lose them again thought they might be more useful here:
The session on VREs raised a number of questions:
Roger Slack talked about users:
The session on VREs raised a number of questions:
- is a VRE a warehouse or a federated repository?
- should it be a social space or an organised rich space?
- what is the right level of granularity?
- should content be open or protected?
- what about desktop integration?
- how can we enable added value by researchers?
- how is software evolving? how can we make it sustainable?
Roger Slack talked about users:
- requirements gathering is not a one-off - it is longitudinal
- need active involvement of all partners
- enfranchisement - spell out benefits to users
- ensure funding to support championing
Cloud computing
Over the Christmas period, Bill St Arnaud posted a couple of interesting items on cloud computing. He also points to an excellent presentation by Savas Parastatidis. I'm not going to explain the background as the links here will do that much better than I can...
Advocates explain that cloud computing offers advantages over grid computing - clouds are potentially more powerful and crash-proof. And there is the idea that outsourcing the infrastructure can save institutions money and drive the environmental agenda.
The downsides associated with cloud computing include: immature standards (though this seems to be changing); inadequate access to high speed connections; data protection concerns.
The big players are all involved in cloud developments - Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo, Google, Amazon. Google is starting to work with a handful of US universities - University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Maryland - with a view to expanding later to work with more, globally. Amazon is already offering its Simple Storage Service (S3) and is developing its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The Wikipedia entry for cloud computing points to a couple of interesting articles:
Advocates explain that cloud computing offers advantages over grid computing - clouds are potentially more powerful and crash-proof. And there is the idea that outsourcing the infrastructure can save institutions money and drive the environmental agenda.
The downsides associated with cloud computing include: immature standards (though this seems to be changing); inadequate access to high speed connections; data protection concerns.
The big players are all involved in cloud developments - Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo, Google, Amazon. Google is starting to work with a handful of US universities - University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Maryland - with a view to expanding later to work with more, globally. Amazon is already offering its Simple Storage Service (S3) and is developing its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The Wikipedia entry for cloud computing points to a couple of interesting articles:
- http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc20071116_379585.htm
- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories which quotes Tony Hey on research clouds: "Tony Hey, vice-president for external research at Microsoft, says they'll function as huge virtual laboratories, with a new generation of librarians—some of them human—"curating" troves of data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials. Authorized users, he says, will build new tools, haul in data, and share it with far-flung colleagues. In these new labs, he predicts, "you may win the Nobel prize by analyzing data assembled by someone else."
More accurate name searching
Tidying up my Bloglines, came across this story from 2006 in New Scientist:
http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10588&feedId=online-news_rss20
about a search engine being developed which can distinguish between different instances of the same name, by identifying common keywords to cluster similar results together. In testing, it was between 70 and 95% accurate. Another application of text mining? Will be interesting to see how the Institute of Education project working with the ASSERT project at NaCTeM (National Centre for Text Mining) will get on.
http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10588&feedId=online-news_rss20
about a search engine being developed which can distinguish between different instances of the same name, by identifying common keywords to cluster similar results together. In testing, it was between 70 and 95% accurate. Another application of text mining? Will be interesting to see how the Institute of Education project working with the ASSERT project at NaCTeM (National Centre for Text Mining) will get on.
Wednesday, 2 January 2008
Information management over the last 10 years
The latest issue of FreePint has a good readable overview of the information developments of the last 10 years (it's FreePint's 10th birthday): http://www.freepint.com/issues/201207.htm - showing how we've changed in the way we find, use, manage and share information
UPGRADE issue on project management
Has some interesting snippets, including an article on PRINCE2 and risk, as well as handy reference list
http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2007/5/upgrade-vol-VIII-5.html#contents
http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2007/5/upgrade-vol-VIII-5.html#contents
News from ja.net
ja.net's December newsletter mentioned two launches relevant to eResearch:
Lightpath: "a centrally managed service which will help support large research projects on the JANET network by providing end-to-end connectivity. It includes the UKLight service for fine-grained circuit provision and extends it to include whole wavelengths across the JANET optical transmission infrastructure."
Aurora: "a dark-fibre network to support research on photonics and optical systems. It will interconnect research groups at the universities of Cambridge, Essex and UCL, with access to intermediate locations along each fibre path where additional equipment can be sited. This is a national facility funded for two years operation by HEFCE via JISC, and if projects require it, the JANET Lightpath service can provide circuits for use as an access mechanism to other locations on JANET, and also internationally."
http://www.ja.net/
Lightpath: "a centrally managed service which will help support large research projects on the JANET network by providing end-to-end connectivity. It includes the UKLight service for fine-grained circuit provision and extends it to include whole wavelengths across the JANET optical transmission infrastructure."
Aurora: "a dark-fibre network to support research on photonics and optical systems. It will interconnect research groups at the universities of Cambridge, Essex and UCL, with access to intermediate locations along each fibre path where additional equipment can be sited. This is a national facility funded for two years operation by HEFCE via JISC, and if projects require it, the JANET Lightpath service can provide circuits for use as an access mechanism to other locations on JANET, and also internationally."
http://www.ja.net/
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