inkdroid

I just saw Diane Vizine-Goetz demo OCLC’s Terminology Services at the CENDI/SKOS meeting and was excited to see various things out on the public web. For example, the LCSH concept “World Wide Web” is over here:

http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004

At the moment it’s not the most friendly human readable display, but that’s just a XSLT stylesheet away (assuming TS follows the patterns of other OCLC Services). I’m not quite sure what the default namespace urn:uuid:D30A7E67-31BF-40A3-9956-9668674FCD84 is. But the response looks like it indicates what resources are related to a given conceptual resource.

1. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.html
2. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.json
3. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.marcxml
4. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.meta
5. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.skos
6. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.stats
7. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.zthes

And LCSH is just one of the vocabularies available through the pilot service, if you examine the XML you’ll see references to FAST, TGM and MESH + SRU services for each.

I think this is way cool, and a step in the right direction…particulary because they are going to make vocabularies available for free as long as the original publisher has no problem with it. My only complaint is that the URIs for the concepts don’t appear to do content-negotiation for application/rdf+xml. It looks like text/html and application/javascript (isn’t it application/json?) work just fine though. Try them out:

curl --header "Accept: application/javascript" http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004
curl --header "Accept: text/html" http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004

But not application/rdf+xml:

curl --header "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004

It seems like it would be a pretty easy fix, and pretty important for being able to follow your nose on the semantic web.

If you’ve ever harbored any interest in reading (or re-reading) The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs please consider joining some of the books4code folks as we work through the SICP MIT OpenCourseWare (free) course. Chris McAvoy has set up a wiki-page with details, and a calendar to subscribe to, to keep us honest. The book is available for free, and so are video lectures, notes, exercise answers, etc … Thanks Jason for getting us to take this up again :-)

w00t!

If you are reading Everything is Miscellaneous like me then you might be interested in watching a talk David Weinberger did a few days ago at Google.

I only wish I had more time to ingest all the good content that comes in through the GoogleTech Talks feed.

In case you missed it in your overstuffed RSS reader Jon Udell recently interviewed John Price-Wilkin who is coordinating the University of Michigan’s joint digitization project with Google.

The interview covers interesting bits of history about the University of Michigan Digital Library,
Making of America, JSTOR (didn’t realize there was a book), and of course the project with Google.

The shocker for me was that while the UMDL has been able to digitize 3000 books per year, Google is doing approximately that number a day. Wilkin wasn’t able to go into details about just how Google is doing this, but he does talk about details such as resolutions used, destructive vs non-destructive digitization, and how federations of libraries could work with this data.

Wilkin has been at the center of digital library efforts for as long as I’ve been working with libraries and technology, so it was really fun to hear this interview.

So I’ve been dabbling with that four letter word at $work to create a hierarchical journal/volume/issue/article browser. Le rails and scriptaculous make it pretty easy indeed.

I figured I’d be a good developer and try to understand what’s actually going on behind the scenes, so I picked up a copy of Ajax in Action [Illustrated] and am working through it.

There is so much hype surrounding Ajax that I had pretty low expectations–but the book is actually very well written and a joy to read. I noticed before diving in that there was an appendix on object-oriented JavaScript. I’ve been around the block enough times to know that JavaScript is actually quite a nice functional language; but apart from DHTML I haven’t really had the opportunity to dabble in it much. This appendix really made it clear how JavaScript is really quite elegant, and for someone who has done object-oriented-programming in Perl the idioms for doing OOP in JavaScript didn’t seem quite that bad.

Anyhow, I quickly wanted to start fiddling around with the language with a JavaScript interpreter so I downloaded Rhino and discovered that you can:

frizz:~/Projects/rhino1_6R4 edsu$ java -jar js.jar
Rhino 1.6 release 4 2006 09 09
js> print("hello world");
hello world
js>

Pretty sweet :-)

When I find the time I’m enjoying reading The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks which (so far) details a many-species galactic civilization in 4034 AD. The milieu includes an amorphous ancient species known as the Dwellers who live for millions of years on gas giant planets (like Jupiter) and have very, very long memories…and the best archives which other beings ocassionaly ‘delve’ into. It’s the usual Banksian genius. Last night on pages 100-101 I couldn’t help laughing at this segment that discusses standards bodies in the future. Apologies to Mr Banks for the extended quote…

The official was speaking the human version of Standard, the galaxy’s lingua franca. Standard had been chose as an inter-species, pan-galactic language over eight billion years ago. Dwellers had been the main vector in its spread, though they made a point of emphasising that it was not theirs originally. They had one very ancient, informal vernacular and another even more ancient formal language of their own, plus lots that had survived somehow from earlier times or been made up in the meantime. These latter came and went in popularity as such things tended to.

‘Oh no, there was a competition,’ the Dweller guide/mentor Y’sul had explained to Fassin on his first delve, hundreds of years ago. ‘Usual thing; lots of competing so-called universal standards. There was a proper full-scale war after one linguistic disagreement — a grumous and a p’Liner species, if memory serves — and after that came the usual response: inquiries, missions, meetings, reports, conferences, summits.’

‘What we now know as Standard was chosen after centuries of research, study and argument by a vast and unwieldly committee composed of representatives of thousands of species., at least two of which became effectively extinct during the course of the deliberations. It was chosen, astonishingly, on its merits, because it was an almost perfect language: flexible, descriptive, uncoloured (whatver that means, but apparently it’s important), precise but malleable, highly, elegantly complete yet primed for external-term-adoption and with an unusually free but logical link between the written form and the pronounced which could easily and plausibly embrace almost any set of phonemes, scints, glyphs or pictals and still make translatable sense.’

‘Best of all, it didn’t belong to anybody, the species which had invented it having safely extincted itself themselves millions of years earlier without leaving either any proven inheritors or significant mark on the greater galaxy, save this sole linguistic gem. Even more amazingly, the subsequent conference to endorse the decision of the mega-committee went smoothly and agreed all the relevan recommendations. Take-up and acceptance were swift and widespread. Standard became the first and so far only true universal language within just a few Quick-mean generations. Set a standard for pan-species cooperation that everybody’s been trying to live up to ever since.’

Too funny. I love how the ‘perfect’ language was created by a race that extincted themselves. Just goes to show that perfection ain’t everything…

The Dalai Lama has an op-ed on science and faith in yesterdays New York Times. There are some delightful descriptions of his encounters with science as a child, which I imagine are excerpts from his recent book. I also like how he intertwingles religion and science–not making one higher up in a hierarchy.

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

And the converse:

Just as the world of business has been paying renewed attention to ethics, the world of science would benefit from more deeply considering the implications of its own work. Scientists should be more than merely technically adept; they should be mindful of their own motivation and the larger goal of what they do: the betterment of humanity.

The impact of science and our way of life on our environment is something I’ve been reading about in Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. I haven’t finished it yet but the essential message so far is that we need to design objects in our environment so that they can reveal information about how they fit into the environment. This information amounts to links to databases that can track the history of the object, how to get customer support, history of ownership, manufacturing origins, internal components, details on customizing and interfacing, etc. Sterling calls these objects spimes and if you are interested his speech at SIGGRAPH has more details.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m mentioning both Spimes, Buddhism and Ted Nelson in the same breath. I suppose all three focus the attention on just how deeply interconnected we all are with each other and with the world around us. Sometimes these interconnections can be overwhelming. Meditating on this inter-connectedness, and building tools to manage the connections responsibly are two worthwhile things I’d like to work on.

I recently checked out Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance after reading Kevin’s piece about how the book informed his practice of library cataloging. I am enjoying it a lot more this time around, and have found it really informs my practice of computer programming as well. Unfortunately I only made it half way through before it needed to be returned to the library, and the local superbookstores oddly enough don’t seem to carry it…So, I’ve got a copy on order from a used bookstore I found through Amazon. Anyhow here’s one nice quote I jotted down before I had to return the book:

At first the truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That’s a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn’t move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull’s eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unepected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.

I’m not entirely sure why this resonated with me. I think the idea of “lateral thinking” reminds me of how IRC and web surfing often informs my craft of writing software. While many universities offer computer “science” programs, I’ve found a large component of writing software is more artistic than scientific. Of course I’m hardly the first person to comment on this…but Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is full of good advice for writing and tuning your programs. Hopefully I’ll get to write more about them in here when I get my copy in the mail.