Saturday, May 19, 2001

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Nature: Web Debates Evolution and scientific literature: towards a decentralized adaptive web
"As our systems grow more sophisticated, we will see applications that support not just links between authors and papers but relationships between users and information repositories, and users and communities. What is required is a mechanism to enable communication between these relationships that leads to information exchange, adaptation and recombination. A new generation of information-retrieval tools and applications are being designed that will support self-organizing knowledge on distributed networks driven by human interaction (see Active Recommendation Project at Los Alamos. For example, to support trans-disciplinary science we stimulate different databases to learn new terms and adapt existing keywords to the categories recognized by different communities. This capability would allow a physicist or chemist to collaborate with colleagues in the life sciences without having to learn an entirely new vocabulary.

Through the use of these new tools, we will derive a shared knowledge structure that is based on users and usage in addition to that provided by author citations. Thus, the aggregated connections that readers make between papers and concepts will provide an alternative conceptualization of a given knowledge space. Such techniques will be coupled with classical search and retrieval methods, and these capabilities have an obvious utility for discovering and supporting evolving knowledge from these networks."

The New York Times Web Archive Opens a New Realm of Research
[requires 'free' registration]
"To overcome his personal difficulties, Mr. Motl could only call upon what turned out to be a remarkable internal resiliency. But his scientific challenges had a more straightforward solution: an electronic, Web-based archive centered at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The archive is transforming the quality of scientific research at institutions that are geographically isolated and, in many cases, small and financially precarious. It nurtures top-flight research in countries as disparate as Bulgaria, Colombia, Cuba, Ukraine, Iran, India, Romania, Russia, Israel, the Czech Republic and Zambia."

The Open Archives Initiative Overview
"The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. As a result, the Open Archives Initiative is currently an organization and an effort explicitly in transition, and is committed to exploring and enabling this new and broader range of applications. As we gain greater knowledge of the scope of applicability of the underlying technology and standards being developed, and begin to understand the structure and culture of the various adopter communities, we expect that we will have to make continued evolutionary changes to both the mission and organization of the Open Archives Initiative."

redux [09.20.00]
BioMedCentral Freedom of Information Conference: The impact of open access on biomedical research
"How should biomedical research be communicated? How should research be assessed and validated?"

"Below are abstracts, transcripts, and biographies from the conference. Some presentations did not lend themselves to transcription. Where possible we have supplemented them with editorials from the speakers.

We have also commissioned editorial articles from several speakers and delagates at the meeting.

All thoughts, comments, and suggestions are welcome on our email discussion list"

Advogato Open[Source]ing the Doors for Contributor-Run Digital Libraries
"What if you could wave a wand, in this very Harry Potter decade, and make libraries - at least digital libraries - more open, more easy to manage, cheaper, and even more eclectic and democratic? What if content contributors could submit, catalog, index, manage, rate and rank materials in large collections themselves? I believe that, thanks to the innovations from the Open Source community and perhaps more importantly the Free Software community, that we can have a contributor-run library at this very moment.

In fact, there are several very successful examples from which we can draw not only best practices, but also - that grail of the programmer - working code. But better still, these projects are also examples of vibrant, lively, noisy, democratic communities. "

Council on Library and Information Resources Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional Authority Files
"Librarians are increasingly called upon not only to collect information in electronic form but also to organize it into digital libraries. The materials may be created and held locally, or they may be created and accessed in a distributed fashion as a virtual library. Digital libraries can provide material on a variety of topics, from children's games to high-energy physics. Their scope may be local, national, or even international; the audience may be a small group with specialized interests or the broader public. Essential to the successful implementation and use of any digital library is the organization of that library, either directly or indirectly, by one or more knowledge organization systems (KOS).

The term knowledge organization systems is intended to encompass all types of schemes for organizing information and promoting knowledge management. Knowledge organization systems include classification and categorization schemes that organize materials at a general level, subject headings that provide more detailed access, and authority files that control variant versions of key information such as geographic names and personal names. Knowledge organization systems also include highly structured vocabularies, such as thesauri, and less traditional schemes, such as semantic networks and ontologies. Because knowledge organization systems are mechanisms for organizing information, they are at the heart of every library, museum, and archive. "