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Friday, June 04, 2004 |
Bio-ontologies. Judith Blake, Bio-ontologies—fast and furious,
Nature Biotechnology 22, 773 - 774 (2004) (access restricted to
subscribers.) Excerpt: "Beyond dictionaries or thesauri, bio-ontologies
formally represent relationships between defined biological concepts,
such that the vocabularies can be used both by humans and by computers
to exchange and explore information. The pace with which bio-ontologies
are implemented and adopted by the scientific research community will
have a significant impact on the ability to integrate, explore and
infer knowledge from scientific data. This development will also
influence the evolution of traditional scientific publishing towards
reports that are seamlessly linked to online informatics resources." [Open Access News]
8:54:35 AM  Google It!.
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DOAJ launches article-level searching. Today Lund University launched Phase 2 of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). From the press release:
"The new version of DOAJ now includes records at article level and a
search functionality allowing users to search articles in potentially
all Open Access Journals. The directory now contains information about
more than 1100 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific
and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web.
As of today 270 of the 1100 journals are searchable on article level
and both numbers are growing. Researchers can now search almost 46,000
articles through the Directory of Open Access Journals and be sure to
get access to the articles." (PS: This is a major step forward in
making OA content more discoverable, retrievable, visible, and useful.
Kudos to Lotte Jorgensen, Lars Bjørnshauge, and everyone else on the
DOAJ team at Lund!) [Open Access News]
8:53:29 AM Google It!.
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ISBN Y2K+5. At the heart of LibraryLookup
there's a regular expression that matches a 10-digit ISBN. Wouldn't you
know it, come January 1, 2005, that string of 10 digits grows to 13.
Thanks to Tim Meadowcroft for the heads-up (via email, with
permission). He adds:
All 10 digit ISBN's can be converted to 13 digits by adding a 3 digit
standard code before them ("978" - it effectively puts all the existing
codes into a single namespace), but as the last ISBN character is a base
11 checksum digit (that's why it can be "X" but all other chars must be
digit 0-9), the last character will then change, see
http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/transition.asp for details.
The ISBN numberspace is variably partitioned, sort of like class A, B, and C networks. A while ago I pointed to Roger Costello's isbn.xsd,
a formidable XML schema that documents -- and validates -- a bunch of
combinations of country ID and publisher ID. I'd hate to have to update
that beast! ... [Jon's Radio]
8:39:47 AM Google It!.
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More on Elsevier's business position. Jeremy Warner, Outlook: Reed Elsevier, Independent,
June 4, 2004. Excerpt: "As market leader with approximately 17 per cent
of the global market, Mr [Crispin] Davies should be sitting pretty, yet
he's under attack as never before from those who want to see scientific
and medical research freely available to all over the internet. The
Commons' Science and Technology Committee promises next month to
produce a report on the issue....Yesterday, Reed appeared to make a
small concession to the 'free to air' lobby. In future, all research
that has been approved for publication in one of Reed's journals can be
displayed free prior to publication in edited form on the researcher's
or institution's website. Researchers can already display their work on
their own websites after publication, so the move hardly represents a
decisive break in the dam. Even so, it's a concession which plainly
weakens the business model to some degree. First publication rights
have been conceded. It is indicative of the pressure Reed is under from
its contributors that it has felt obliged to go even this far." (PS:
Warner then gives some off-base commentary on OA. For example, even if
the Wellcome Trust is right that OA journals would cost much less to
produce than Elsevier journals of comparable quality, "it's hard to see
what the benefit to the scientific community might be." Given this,
it's hard to trust his commentary on anything else.) [Open Access News]
8:31:59 AM Google It!.
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Optical illusions. 
In 1832, the Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker discovered his
famously ambiguous cube, which seems to jump back and forth between two
orientations. Given the same raw data -- a particular arrangement of a
dozen line segments -- our brains find different ways to interpret it.
... The real integration challenge resides inside our heads. There is
no single frame of reference for data. [Full story at Infoworld.com]
Apparently I've used this Necker analogy before. But it aptly describes what we see happening this week, for example, as Doug Purdy, Ted Neward, Dare Obasanjo, and others bat around the implications of DataSets, doc/literal SOAP messages, and hierarchical vs. relational storage.
... [Jon's Radio]
8:28:57 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2004 Bruce Landon.
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