Monday, December 16, 2002

Book Recommendation--XML Databases and the Semantic Web by Bhavani Thuraisingham Another helpful book that takes a very broad view of semi-structured databases, XML, and the semantic web from the perspective of eCommerce and eBusiness; the author attempts to inform managers and administrators about the subject rather than IT specialists. Some quotations: "Digital libraries are essentially digitized information distributed across several sites. The goal is for users to access this information in a transparent manner. The information could contain multimedia data such as voice, text, video, and images. The information could also be stored in structured databases such as relational and object-oriented databases" (p. 25). "Structured data means data that has a well-defined structure such as data represented by tables, with each element belonging to a data type such as integer, string, real, or Boolean. However, with multimedia data, there is very little structure. Text data could be many characters with no structure. Images could be a collection of pixels. Video and audio data also have no structure, or no organized way to represent such multimedia data. These types of data have come to be known as unstructured data. It is nearly impossible to represent unstructured data. Therefore, to better represent such data, one introduces some structure. For example, text data could be represented as title, author, affiliation, and paragraphs. Such data are called semi-structured data, or data that are not fully structured like relational structures, but they have partial structure" (p. 30). 6:04:13 PM    COMMENT []

Book Recommendation--Metadata Solutions by Adrienne Tannenbaum If you sometimes feel lost, as I do, in the forest of information about metadata, XML, databases, and digital repositories this book may be of help. The author, Adrienne Tannenbaum, provides a very helpful flyover of the most important ideas and methods related to Metadata Solutions from the perspective of an IT consultant to corporations. The subtitle of the book is "Using Metamodels, Repositories, XML, and Enterprise Portals to Generate Information on Demand." Anyone who can explain abstruse terms such as "meta-metadata" is a worthy guide; sometimes it's valuable to take a long view of a subject before returning to the detailed solution efforts. Here are a few quotations from the book: "Information. The set of available data, whether internal or external, numeric, textual, graphic, visual, audio, and so on, that when combined with an set of manual or mechanical processes and integrated with pre-existing information, assists the decision maker" (p. 6). "... information is merely a frame of mind ..." (p. 20). "Meta-metadata. The descriptive details of metadata; metadata qualities and locations that allow tool-based processing and access; the basic attributes of metadata solutions" (p. 179). "Repository. An integrated, 'virtual' holding area with vendor-independent input, access, and structure, used to directly store metadata and/or the metadata-based gateways to external metadata" (p. 208). 11:10:49 AM    COMMENT []

The Weblogging Multiplier Effect Some thoughts about the significance of weblogging for instruction and scholarship. 8:07:06 AM    COMMENT []