Friday, March 07, 2003

Metadata: pure and simple, or is it? Metadata: pure and simple, or is it? by Marilyn Ch .... Metadata: pure and simple, or is it? by Marilyn Chalmers, one librarian's experience with Dublin Core on their Web site. Southbank's venture into metadata was a major investment in organising and maintaining data to enhance its operations and one that has produced mixed results. It was a steep learning curve for me at the time and has resulted in a deep interest in the subject. Metadata is but a means to an end and was introduced solely with good information retrieval in mind. However, the metadata venture has not stopped here. Trends will be monitored continuously to ensure that Southbank has the most relevant scheme in place and will be updated if required to provide relevant search tools for our most valuable market segment - our clients. [Catalogablog] 5:14:40 PM    comment [] RSS Validator Handy 5:12:09 PM    comment [] PolySearch - Energy "Access citations, abstracts and/or full-text documents related to energy science & technology... I developed this PolySearch tool after my frustration with PubSCIENCE which did not provide access to most of these archives. I am working on other polysearch tools which will cover other disciplines and many other archives and resources. Thanks to Daniel Nishimura for help in customizing the original freeware script which was designed for metasearching Web-wide search engines. " 3:53:14 PM    comment [] Google Dance Technical discussion of how Google's indexing process works... "The name "Google Dance" is often used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google's index update occurs on average once per month. It can be identified by significant movement in search results and especially by Google's cache of all indexed pages reflecting the status of Google's last spidering. But the update does not proceed as a switch from one index to another at one point in time. In fact, it takes several days to complete the index update. During this period, the old and the new index alternate on www.google.com. At an early stage, the results from the new index occur sporadically. But later on, they appear more frequently. Google dances. " 3:24:20 PM    comment [] XML.com: What Are Topic Maps? [Sep. 11, 2002] "...The most common use for topic maps right now is to build web sites that are entirely driven by the topic map, in order to fully realize the their information-finding benefits. The topic map provides the site structure, and the page content is taken partly from the topic map itself, and partly from the occurrences. This solution is perfect for all sorts of portals, catalogs, site indexes, and so on. Since a topic map can be said to represent knowledge about the things it describes, topic maps are also ideal as knowledge management tools. This is by no means all topic maps can be used for, however. They can also be used to organize the content in content management systems (instead of the simple folder hierarchies and property-value metadata often used today), they integrate information from diverse sources (using merging), they can drive expert systems, and much much more. (This article will focus on information-finding, however, since it is an introductory article with limited scope and length. See Marc de Graauw's article about topic maps in B2B exchange for a different view on what topic maps can do.) ..." 12:35:36 PM    comment [] The TAO of Topic Maps "Topic maps are a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. As such they constitute an enabling technology for knowledge management. Dubbed â01Cthe GPS of the information universeâ01D, topic maps are also destined to provide powerful new ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora. While it is possible to represent immensely complex structures using topic maps, the basic concepts of the model â014 Topics, Associations, and Occurrences (TAO) â014 are easily grasped. This paper provides a non-technical introduction to these and other concepts (the IFS and BUTS of topic maps), relating them to things that are familiar to all of us from the realms of publishing and information management, and attempting to convey some idea of the uses to which topic maps will be put in the future" 12:24:14 PM    comment [] XML.com: Using Topic Maps to Extend Relational Databases [Mar. 05, 2003] "...With these few extra tables relational databases can be extended to support the addition of data that is not supported by the database schema. Notwithstanding this flexibility, the data added itself is highly structured through the use of topic types, association and occurrence types. And there is a bonus: the data in the database can easily be exported as an XTM file, providing a standardized interchange syntax..." 12:21:41 PM    comment [] The Covers Project "Welcome to The Covers Project. We're building a database of cover songs (songs performed by an artist other than the original performer) with the intention of creating cover "chains." A cover chain is a set of songs in which each song is a cover of a song by the band who covered the preceding song. So far, we have 42,694 songs (20,680 unique) and 16,065 artists catalogued. The longest "chain" we know about contains 157 songs. If you know of any cover songs, please help us out by adding them to our database (remixes need not apply). The add page also has links to every band we know something about, so feel free to browse that as well. News - 12/19/2002 Due to rampant abuse, song additions and voting have been temporarily disabled... at least until people grow up or we think of a better way to accept submissions. " 10:54:39 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jon Phipps. Last update: 7/10/2003; 5:33:40 PM.