Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine: World Wide Webliographers' Revisited

Classifying the World - A Film by Francoise Levie

SCIENCE | June 17, 2008
The Web Time Forgot
By ALEX WRIGHT
The Mundaneum Museum honors the first concept of a world wide wonder, sketched out by Paul Otlet in 1934 as a global network of “electric telescopes.”...

Extract: Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”...

On the same shelf:

• Documentary Film: The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World
• Blogrunner: Reactions From Around the Web
• Index Cards and Electric Telescopes

• A conceptual structure of information at the museum.
  

[Info courtesy: sdyck@hevanet.com ]

Stay in India for free via blogger Web site

Tony Tharakan , Reuters & CanWest News Service, 27 Sep 2007

Hotel rooms in India tend to be expensive and hard to find, but a new Web site is helping visitors find a bed, with a warm conversation thrown in, all for free.

While most hosts on http://www.extrabed.in/ offer a spare bed and an Internet connection, some offer sightseeing tours, endless cups of coffee or even a game of Scrabble to add that personal touch.

The Web site was born after its founder, Kiruba Shankar, randomly contacted bloggers in Mumbai to see if anyone would put him up. He found several. continue reading

see also:

ExtraBed on NDTV

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

Mor Naaman, a research scientist with Yahoo Research Berkeley, stood in front of a roomful of semantic Web researchers and declared that the semantic Web is dead. This happened last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Alberta, Canada, as Naaman describes on the Yahoo Research Berkeley blog. [Search Engine Watch]

The language used to describe the Semantic Web is complicated enough – at a glance, it looks a bit quantum theory-ish, just enough to make your eyes roll back into your head to look for ways to kill themselves – but Tim Berners-Lee, who's responsible for all those Ws littering your URLs, inspired enough faith that whatever the Semantic Web was, it could be accomplished. [Arguing The Semantic Web: Dead Or Just Not Alive?]

May 16, 2007 on 10:24 am | by Mor Naaman, a research scientist @ Yahoo! Research Berkeley:
Last week, I participated in a WWW2007 panel called “Multimedia Metadata Standards in a Semantic Web 3.0“, where I took the opportunity to declare the Semantic Web dead. As you can imagine, such a declaration in front of a crowd of semantic web researchers provoked many responses. While I believe panels should be provocative and entertaining, I also have specific reasons for why I went as far as calling the Semantic Web “dead”. Let me explain what I mean.

There is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with “semantic” labels. At best, we can get the people to annotate content (such as Flickr images or YouTube videos) with short text descriptions or tags. This works only because tags are simple; powerful (can be used for many tasks) and, in some systems, carefully engineered to match the user’s natural motivations. Our best hope is to be able to take this bottoms-up annotation, or folksonomy if you will, and try to assign some semantics to it later - Flickr’s Clustering is a great example, as well as Y!RB’s TagMaps and our upcoming SIGIR paper (”Towards Automatic Extraction of Event and Place Semantics from Flickr Tags”, available in pdf)... continue reading

See also my related posts:

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

Japanese man runs library on a bicycle

"And you thought you were committed to your profession" [Thanks to LibraryStuff for this quote]

Tokyo, May 02: Kazuhiro Doi is on a one-man mission to change the world by pulling a mobile library on a bicycle around Japan.

For more than two years, the 28-year-old has been distributing books on the environment, civil disputes and other social issues on a custom-made bicycle with a waterwheel-shaped bookshelf across his native Japan.

Doi left his home in the central prefecture of Aichi in January 2005, initially to ask libraries around the country to carry a book published by a non-profit organisation 'Think the Earth'.

The book documents the gravity of environmental destruction with about 100 photographs, including those of a mountain of industrial waste, children injured in a chemical factory accident in India and penguins covered with crude oil. Full news story @ Zee News, May 03, 2007;

See also: Japanese man on one-man mission to distribute books by bicycle EARTHtimes.org

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

What the Ancient Egyptians Taught me about Blogging

You may think there can be no way in the afterlife that there is a link between one of the oldest civilisations on earth and one of the most modern pastimes, but you would be wrong. The Ancient Egyptians blogged in Stone. Continue reading MATT JONES

See also:

Blogs and visual innovation

Blog As A Teaching Tool

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