India's Contribution to Open Source Movement - NEWGENLIB

Dear All,

I am happy rather excited to inform you that NewGenLib - Library automation/Management software finally became Open source. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Haravu and Mr. Siddarth, the main persons behind the software.

I always feel, India is more a downloading country, hardly anything to offer to the rest of the world.

Even Indian software industry is mostly service oriented rather than product oriented.

I feel rather proud that India's Open s/w happened in the field of Library and Information Science ( Am I communal, more biased to library profession, yes I do not mind being communal).

From technical point of view, NewGenLib has good back-end technology - Java based, Lucene Search Engine, postgreSQL, JBOSS.

Highly standards compliant - MARC21, Z39.50, UNICODE (Indian Language records can be generated), ILL -- you name any. It is more compliant than many of the so-called commercial software.

I am sure Library professionals all over the world will welcome it, encourage it and the keep it up-to-date. In one word, future-proof. (as technology keeps evolving, so is the software. Remember, how far we traveled from command-lines, to menus, to GUI and now Web-based).

We all can seriously, think of organizing the hands-on training courses, just as we all did in case of CDS/ISIS and DSpace. It can be deployed in any kind of library - public or academic or special

Yes, in my excitement, I forgot, You can download from Website

You all can help in preparing various user manuals. I look forward for you response. Perhaps, by next week, I should be able to configure and show a demo version of it on DRTC site.

Meanwhile, I look forward for you response.

with best regards
ard
Home Page
--
ARD Prasad, Ph.D.
Documentation Research & Traning Centre (DRTC)
Indian Statistical Institute (ISI)
8th Mile Mysore Road
Bangalore 560 059
India
Phone (Off): +91-80-28483002 Ext. 496

----Info courtesy: Dr. Abbas Khan, Moulana Azad National Urdu University

RANGANATHAN REVISITED: FACETS FOR THE FUTURE

ISKO UK meeting: Connecting communities: Content, knowledge, information: Same Difference?

Event Details:
5th November 2007
14:00 - 18:00
Venue
University College London
Sir David Davies Lecture Theatre (G08), Ground Floor, Engineering Faculty
Roberts Building, Torrington Place, WC1E 7JE

Programme

14:00	Vanda Broughton	Facet analysis as a fundamental theory of knowledge organization
14:40	Claudio Gnoli	‘Classic’ vs. 'freely' faceted classification
15:20	Jan Wyllie Simon Eaton	Faceted classification as an intelligence analysis tool
16:00	Tea/coffee
16:30	Factiva	Faceted Categorisation for the corporate desktop Visualisation and interaction using metadata to enhance user experience
17:15	Aduna	AutoFocus: An Open-source Facet-Driven Enterprise Search Solution
18:00	Networking, wine & nibbles

Click here for more Info

The BOBs - BEST OF THE BLOGS - My Electronic Library 2.0

PS. If you see it deserves, vote this blog [request to circulate this message by Blogmaster Heyam Hayek, a Kids Librarian.]

Demise of the Local Catalog or The OPAC Reborn?

Demise of the Local Catalog, by Roy Tenant***

The OPAC Reborn.(Online Public Access Catalog at libraries)

The Future of Cataloging, by Peachy

Thought for the day - Now if we had the semantic web or enough catalogers

***My 2 cent:
This article is an excellent eye opener, and makes a good feed-forward. Thanks to John Jaeger for sharing this info.

I agree with Roy that libraries must pack off their catalogs (I packed it too, and seen so many). But moving with a Google model (a free search-ware mindset) is probably not going to make the library catalog that useful and value-added, on the face of umpteen competitors; and a searchology (as Google calls it) that comes with a package minus the controlled vocabulary (with whatever name one likes it, LC, Meta tags, etc.).

I think there must be an effort to upgrade our mindset of catalogoing / cataloguing and fine tune it with our own foundations of librarianship and user-friendly ventures.

I have been working on the idea of visual catalogs, that started with the idea of an indepth, as well as, localized cataloging spirit of my professional inspirer: Sanford Berman.

FYI. I have compiled a webliography on this theme. Would appreciate your comments on this dimension. The link to my webliography is:

Thought for the day - Now if we had the semantic web or enough catalogers

Source: Limits of FT Search Bring Fun Item @ Alaskan Librarian
Now if we had the semantic web or enough catalogers to catalog web resources, I could specify that I only wanted pages, blog posts etc that are actually related to the virtual world of Second Life. And that's what I'd get. Just like if I'd like the new Haines Borough Public Library Catalog to only notify me when they got new books on Second Life.
see also:

The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”)

WEB IS A FOREST ... SEMANTIC WEB A JAPANESE GARDEN ?

Seamless Structured Semantic Web -Will Tags, Clouds, Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Facet Analysis help?

Semantic Web and Facet Analysis

WEB IS A FOREST ... SEMANTIC WEB A JAPANESE GARDEN ?

Musings of a student of Ranganathan

F.J. DEVADASON

See also related resources:

Seamless Structured Semantic Web -Will Tags, Clouds, Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Facet Analysis help?

Semantic Web and Facet Analysis

Seamless Structured Semantic Web -Will Tags, Clouds, Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Facet Analysis help?

Here is a commercial (with malice towards none):


I found a good article on how tags are messing the Web's infostructure. See:
Tagging: It’s no longer fun and easy, By: Mark Gibbs, Computerworld (27 Apr 2007):

"Most people think that tagging on the Web is pretty easy and fun. Give ‘em a blog or a Web page and a field named “tags,” and they’ll start stuffing in text with wild abandon in the hopes that their content will be easily found by people who are desperately searching for information and opinion on feline hairball cures or cycling in the Ozarks or whatever their particular hobby is.
Alas, all these folks are doing is polluting the Web....
The first problem with tagging is semantic vagueness. For example, does the tag “china” apply to the country or crockery?
A second problem is that the format of tags isn’t standardized.
The third and perhaps biggest problem is the overuse of tagging ..."

Continue reading

Another word by (late) Prof. Karen Sparck Jones:
"Confining the SW (=Semantic Web) to field tagging is essentially high-level cataloguing of the familiar library or museum kind, exemplied by ‘author’, ‘title’, ‘publication date’ and so forth. Done properly, this is far from trivial, as the substantial Anglo-American cataloguing rules demonstrates. For example, is the author exactly what appears on the title page or some specific person? But though proper cataloguing is not for amateurs, it is not necessary for useful cataloguing to go overboard on rules." Source: What’s new about the Semantic Web? Some questions

What is your thinking? Do the tags, clouds, facet analysis, etc. help, anyways? or does the semantic taming can be done via SMORE - Semantic Markup, Ontology, and RDF (ResearchIndex)

See also my previous posts:

So much of visual literary genre, so little time to categorize it

Semantic Web and Facet Analysis

Visualizing the Web Infostructure I - Cites, Insights, Farsights

India tops online population growth chart

Press Trust of India, March 06, 2007 at 1602 hours IST
Updated: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 at 1609 hours IST
New Delhi, March 6: India has emerged as the fastest growing country of Internet users, surpassing the growth rates in the US, China, Japan and has been ranked as the eighth largest country in terms of netizens.

Worldwide Internet audience has grown by 10% over the last year, says comScore Networks
Today, comScore Networks, a leader in measuring the magnitude of the digital age, announced that around 747 million people, who are aged 15 and above, used the Internet worldwide in January 2007 itself. This shows a 10% increase when compared with the figures of January 2006.
Among the top 15 countries, Internet audiences in India, the Russian Federation and China increased the most in 2006, growing 33, 21 and 20 per cent respectively.
India’s Internet population grew 33 Per Cent, which was the fastest increase in Internet population in the world.
PS. World Internet Users' Image courtesy: Carpe Diem

Semantic Web and Facet Analysis

Dear Colleagues,

Sub: Ranganathan had SEVEN Facets and not FIVE : Facet Analysis and Semantic Web

A brief write-up about Semantic Web and Facet Analysis is available on my Website. You can directly read Purpose 2 in the write-up.
Prof. Tom Wilson (famous for his “The Non-sense of Knowledge Management” article) has put some more information on this topic in a Blog. I would appreciate your comments and suggestions.
Thank you
F.J. Devadason
PS: Please forward this message to appropriate lists and friends working on semantic web.

"Most of the atom is empty ... most of the semantic
web is meta data ... WWW is becoming Winding Way Web

See also:

Semantic Search on Pictures, Raju

Punch Line: Finding stuff the Search Engines can't
The secrets of 'Deep Web' searches, By: Lee Ratzan, Computerworld (15 Dec 2006)

See my previous posts:

• Searching Is Polarized; Will The Five Laws Get a New Revised Version: Every Search Engine Its Searcher


• Visual Search Plus