Comment 1
Comment 2
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Muddiest Point 11/11/2008
I was wondering about Google's Page Rank Algorithm. Has anyone else tried to come up with a similar 'page ranking'? It seems like if it worked so well for Google, that others would try to put together one as well.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Week 11 Readings
Mischo, W. (July/August 2005). Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/mischo/07mischo.html
One point I really liked: there is a huge difference between providing access to discrete sets of digital collections and providing digital library services. This article addresses such issues.
The six University-led projects are great:
*The University of Michigan for research on agent technology and mechanisms for improving secondary education;
*Stanford University for the investigation of interoperability among heterogeneous digital libraries and the exploration of distributed object technology;
*The University of California-Berkeley for imaging technologies, government environmental information resources, and database technologies;
*The University of California-Santa Barbara for the Alexandria Project to develop GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and earth modeling distributed libraries;
*Carnegie Mellon University for the study of integrated speech, image, video, and language understanding software under its Informedia system; and
*The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the development of document representation, processing, indexing, search and discovery, and delivery and rendering protocols for full-text physics, computer science, and engineering journals.
Paepcke, A. et al. (July/August 2005). Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/paepcke/07paepcke.html
Since the Digital Libraries Initiative was launched, many issues have arisen. This article discusses concerns from viewpoints of librarians, computer scientists, and publishers. It was interesting to read discussions of how these three groups are affected, how they are connected, and how the initiative can fulfill their expectations.
One interesting term I had never heard of before, in this context anyway: The notion of collections is spontaneously re-emerging in the form of what computer scientists have named information 'hubs.' These new incarnations of collections are Web sites whose primary goal is to direct visitors to other Web sites that all specialize on the hub's topic focus. (The hubs' topic-specific target sites are called 'authorities' in the literature). Quality hubs require curation. This type of curation differs from its traditional cousin in that it must cope with sometimes ephemeral material, and in that it requires a different underlying skill set. The spirit of this function, however, remains.
Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html or, rather:
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/
We've had many changes in recent years: online storage costs dropped (so repositories are affordable), new standards are in place (such as the open archives metadata harvesting protocols), the need for digital preservation is now recognized and clear, and an increase in free and publicly accessible journal articles in research areas (among others). These have all helped lead to having university-based institutional repositories, which in turn offers the community (and institution) access to their digital materials. These could house the intellectual works of students and scholars within their institution. This is a great thing to accomplish--not only would these works be preserved, but access to them would be greatly increased.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/mischo/07mischo.html
One point I really liked: there is a huge difference between providing access to discrete sets of digital collections and providing digital library services. This article addresses such issues.
The six University-led projects are great:
*The University of Michigan for research on agent technology and mechanisms for improving secondary education;
*Stanford University for the investigation of interoperability among heterogeneous digital libraries and the exploration of distributed object technology;
*The University of California-Berkeley for imaging technologies, government environmental information resources, and database technologies;
*The University of California-Santa Barbara for the Alexandria Project to develop GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and earth modeling distributed libraries;
*Carnegie Mellon University for the study of integrated speech, image, video, and language understanding software under its Informedia system; and
*The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the development of document representation, processing, indexing, search and discovery, and delivery and rendering protocols for full-text physics, computer science, and engineering journals.
Paepcke, A. et al. (July/August 2005). Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/paepcke/07paepcke.html
Since the Digital Libraries Initiative was launched, many issues have arisen. This article discusses concerns from viewpoints of librarians, computer scientists, and publishers. It was interesting to read discussions of how these three groups are affected, how they are connected, and how the initiative can fulfill their expectations.
One interesting term I had never heard of before, in this context anyway: The notion of collections is spontaneously re-emerging in the form of what computer scientists have named information 'hubs.' These new incarnations of collections are Web sites whose primary goal is to direct visitors to other Web sites that all specialize on the hub's topic focus. (The hubs' topic-specific target sites are called 'authorities' in the literature). Quality hubs require curation. This type of curation differs from its traditional cousin in that it must cope with sometimes ephemeral material, and in that it requires a different underlying skill set. The spirit of this function, however, remains.
Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html or, rather:
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/
We've had many changes in recent years: online storage costs dropped (so repositories are affordable), new standards are in place (such as the open archives metadata harvesting protocols), the need for digital preservation is now recognized and clear, and an increase in free and publicly accessible journal articles in research areas (among others). These have all helped lead to having university-based institutional repositories, which in turn offers the community (and institution) access to their digital materials. These could house the intellectual works of students and scholars within their institution. This is a great thing to accomplish--not only would these works be preserved, but access to them would be greatly increased.
Week 10 Readings
David Hawking , Web Search Engines: Part 1 and Part 2 IEEE Computer, June 2006. http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menuitem.5d61c1d591162e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1055&path=computer/homepage/0606&file=thingswork.xml&xsl=article.xsl&;jsessionid=G3nJ1tNBGT7hHN4hLhySlzJ4JnrH42kkmWrNhdrllpkGnMp2nC8N!-1182277384 and http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menuitem.5d61c1d591162e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1055&path=computer/homepage/0806&file=howthings.xml&xsl=article.xsl&
I liked this reading. It is interesting how much more data search engines are indexing now than when they first started (1000 times as much). Many issues I had never given a great deal of thought to before, such as regarding crawlers: speed, "politeness," excluded content, duplicate content, continuous crawling, and spam rejection.
Among their 'Final Crawling Thoughts': Crawlers are highly complex parallel systems, communicating with millions of different Web servers, among which can be found every conceivable failure mode, all manner of deliberate and accidental crawler traps, and every variety of noncompliance with published standards... It is not uncommon to find that a crawler has locked up, ground to a halt, crashed, burned up an entire network traffic budget, or unintentionally inflicted a denial-of-service attack on a Web server whose operator is now very irate.
Part II. This section reviewed the algorithms and data structures needed for indexing huge amounts of web page text and delivering high-quality results millions of times a day. Although interesting, this part was more difficult for me to follow (definitely couldn't read it as quickly). I particularly liked their 'term lookup' capabilities. For speeding things up: skipping, early termination, clever assignment of document numbers, and caching.
Shreeves, S. L., Habing, T. O., Hagedorn, K., & Young, J. A. (2005). Current developments and future trends for the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting. Library Trends, 53(4), 576-589.
I think that the Open Archives Initiative is great. I agree with what they are doing and what their intentions are. Increasing the access to information is always a good thing.
MICHAEL K. BERGMAN, “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-01/bergman.html
Wow, this article is quite content-rich (not a quick read). I like his analogy to the ocean at the beginning: Searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean. While a great deal may be caught in the net, there is still a wealth of information that is deep, and therefore, missed. The reason is simple: Most of the Web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, and standard search engines never find it. A lot of interesting facts are brought up and discussed. (One example: Deep Web documents (13.7 KB mean size; 19.7 KB median size) are on average 27% smaller than surface Web documents.) Overall, this is a great article.
I liked this reading. It is interesting how much more data search engines are indexing now than when they first started (1000 times as much). Many issues I had never given a great deal of thought to before, such as regarding crawlers: speed, "politeness," excluded content, duplicate content, continuous crawling, and spam rejection.
Among their 'Final Crawling Thoughts': Crawlers are highly complex parallel systems, communicating with millions of different Web servers, among which can be found every conceivable failure mode, all manner of deliberate and accidental crawler traps, and every variety of noncompliance with published standards... It is not uncommon to find that a crawler has locked up, ground to a halt, crashed, burned up an entire network traffic budget, or unintentionally inflicted a denial-of-service attack on a Web server whose operator is now very irate.
Part II. This section reviewed the algorithms and data structures needed for indexing huge amounts of web page text and delivering high-quality results millions of times a day. Although interesting, this part was more difficult for me to follow (definitely couldn't read it as quickly). I particularly liked their 'term lookup' capabilities. For speeding things up: skipping, early termination, clever assignment of document numbers, and caching.
Shreeves, S. L., Habing, T. O., Hagedorn, K., & Young, J. A. (2005). Current developments and future trends for the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting. Library Trends, 53(4), 576-589.
I think that the Open Archives Initiative is great. I agree with what they are doing and what their intentions are. Increasing the access to information is always a good thing.
MICHAEL K. BERGMAN, “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-01/bergman.html
Wow, this article is quite content-rich (not a quick read). I like his analogy to the ocean at the beginning: Searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean. While a great deal may be caught in the net, there is still a wealth of information that is deep, and therefore, missed. The reason is simple: Most of the Web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, and standard search engines never find it. A lot of interesting facts are brought up and discussed. (One example: Deep Web documents (13.7 KB mean size; 19.7 KB median size) are on average 27% smaller than surface Web documents.) Overall, this is a great article.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Muddiest Point 11/04/2008
My muddiest point this week is regarding webpages. When I work with my webpage in Nvu, the heading is centered (using the 'center' button), but when I view my webpages, some of them don't appear centered above the other items on the page, and I can't figure out why. Also, on my Links page, one of the addresses also appears down below (a second time, but not as a link); this has me perplexed, because in Nvu that address is not there a second time! Any thoughts?
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