Blogs

According to Wikipedia, a blog, thecontraction of the term “web log”,  is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art which are named as Art blog; others, however, focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

Appart from that, there are some multitopic spanish – blogs which are known as “Microsiervos”.

We could also notice that we have the opportunity to find a huge diversity of definitions of the word “blog”, such as “A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc”. or “A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly”. As we will be able to see in one of the references, there are lots of definitions of this word.

References:

Add comment Enero 28, 2010

CiteULike vs. Google Books

On the one hand, we could start talking about CiteULike, which is a free online service. Its main objective is to organize academic publications, now run by Oversity. It has been on the Web since October 2004 when its originator was attached to the University of Manchester, and was the first Web – based social bookmarking tool designed specifically for the needs of scientists and scholars.

In the style of other popular social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, it allows users to bookmark and “tag” URIs with personal metadata using a Web browser; these bookmarks can then be shared using simple links such as those shown below. The number of articles bookmarked in CiteULike is more than 3 million (as shown on CiteULike’s homepage). While the CiteULike software is not open source, part of the dataset it collects is currently in the public domain Publication.

CiteULike is based on the principle of social bookmarking and is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and del.icio.us) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools developed for that purpose.

On the other hand, however, we have Google Books. It’s a service that allows people search and find information about any book they want by internet. In the 2003 Google began scanning thousands of works whether copyrighted or not for easy access to readers. By the year 2009 Google had already scanned over ten millions of books. We can also find some entire books if we select the option of  ‘entire books’ on the advanced search. The aim of GoogleBooks is to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge and also to promote the democratization of knowledge. However, it is worth to say that this service has been critized for copyright violations.

References:

Add comment Enero 28, 2010

HTML and Markup Languages

  • Text annotating systems

According to Wikipedia, an annotation is a syntexsix made of information in a book, document, online record, video, software code or other information. It is commonly used in different ways or cases such as in draft documents, where another reader has written notes about the quality of a document at a certain point, “in the margin”, or perhaps just underlined or highlighted passages.  Annotated bibliographies, however, give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument. Creating these comments, usually a few sentences long, establishes a summary for and expresses the relevance of each source prior to writing.

  • Markup languages

According to Wikipedia, Markup Language is a system for annotating a text in a way which is syntactically distinguishable from that text. Examples include revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors’ manuscripts, typesetting instructions such those found in troff and LaTeX and structural markers such as XML tags. Markup is typically omitted from the version of the text which is displayed for end-user consumption. Some markup languages, like HTML have presentation semantics, meaning their specification prescribes how the structured data is to be presented, but other markup languages, like XML, have no predefined semantics.

A well-known example of a markup language in widespread use today is HyperText Markup Language (HTML), one of the document formats of the World Wide Web. HTML is mostly an instance of SGML (though, strictly, it does not comply with all the rules of SGML) and follows many of the markup conventions used in the publishing industry in the communication of printed work between authors, editors, and printers.

  • Presentation semantics

According to Wikipedia, when we talk about computer science, particularly in human-computer interaction, presentation semantics specify how a particular piece of a formal language is represented in a distinguished manner accessible to human senses, usually human vision. For example, saying that <bold> ... </bold> must render the text between these constructs using some bold typeface is a specification of presentation semantics for that syntax. An example of interactive presentation semantics is defining the expect behavior of a hypertext link on a suitable syntax.

Many markup languages like HTML, CSS, DSSSL, XSL-FO or troff have presentation semantics; however, other ones like XML, XLink and XPath do not have anypresentation semantics.

References:

Add comment Enero 28, 2010

Digital libraries

A digital (or virtual, both of them are possible) library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media). These collections are accessible by computers, so that we will always have the opportunity to access to them whenever or any time we have got a computer. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. A digital library is a type of information retrieval system.

The World Digital Library (also known as WDL) is an international digital library operated by UNESCO and the United States Library of Congress. It ,the WDL, makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

  • Promote international and intercultural understanding;
  • Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
  • Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
  • Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

The World Digital Libray was launched last year (the 21 of April) in the “sede” of the Unesco in Paris. It has also have lots of collaborators which have made possible its creation, such us Microsoft or Google, or the Wellcome Collection (United Kingdom) and the United States Library of Congress.

As of launch, the library has 1,170 items, and the interface is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

References:

Add comment Enero 28, 2010

La Wikinovela

La Wikinovela es un proyecto de creación colectiva, un proyecto multilingüe y no lineal, que se basa en la tecnología wiki y que tiene licencia Creative Commons. A su vez ha sido desarrollado dentro de la facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Deusto entre abril y julio del año 2006.

La principal característica de la wikinovela es que puede ser editada en cualquier momento y por cualquier usuario. De esta manera, podemos decir que no tiene un mero autor, uno sólo, sino un autor colectivo, esto es, todos y cada uno de los usuarios que la editan.

Por otra parte, los antecedentes de la wikinovela podemos encontrarlos en  Penguin Books, editorial inglesa quye anteriormente creo un proyecto de escritura colectiva denominado wikinovela.

 

Add comment Octubre 14, 2009

The figure of the author after the creation of the hypertext

As everybody knows, the author is the person who gives existance to anything and creates or originates something. This figure has changed and evolutioned all along the human history, beginning with the trobadors and poets in the Middle Age, going through the printing and arriving to nowadays and the hypertext.

Appart from that, to be able to understand the text of a book and what it means, the reader must try to comprehend the ego and intentions of the author, try to think what he wanted us to comprehend. In hypertext, these roles are reversed, and this is the essential intellectual challenge for the authors.

The hypertext and the World Wide Web is a colectively written universal text. Moreover, we could say that we are talking about a huge – dimensioned text, which is growing up everyday, thanks to the text and every single written thing made by author all along the world. 

But, we could also say that the Hypertext is “killing” this figure of the author, making it lost its own power. This happens in when a text is published on the Internet, so that way it becomes available to all the Internet surfers and nowadays anyone can copy a document as if it was made or written by him or her.

 

Add comment Septiembre 29, 2009

Spell Checking (Q. Number 2)

When we are talking about computing, a spell checker (or spell check) is an application program that flags words in a document which may not be spelled in a correct way. However,  when a word which is not within the dictionary is encountered most spell checkers provide an option to add that word to a list of known exceptions that should not be flagged. Spell checkers may be stand – alone capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

 

Appart from that, there are other kind of checkers, such us grammar checkers.  These ones are supoosed to works as normal spell checkers. Those are, however, some negative points of them:

  • A grammar checker may miss important errors.
  • A grammar checker may accidentally suggest corrections that are inaccurate.
  • A grammar checker may flag grammatically correct text as incorrect.

    •  

    There are many common grammar errors that computer software struggles to find. For example, one recent study comparing the effectiveness of common grammar checkers found that these programs will typically miss the following errors:

    • No comma after an introductory element in a sentence
    • Missing preposition
    • Comma splice
    • No comma in a compound sentence
    • Vague pronoun references
    • Tense shift
    • Incorrect use of the possessive apostrophe
    • Pronoun agreement error
    • Run-on sentence
    • Sentence fragment  

     

     

     

    Moreover, simple spell checkers operate on individual words by comparing each of them with the words which appear on the dictionary, possibly performing stemming on the word. If the word is not found, it is considered as an error, and an attempt may be made to suggest a word that was likely to have been intended.

    Add comment Junio 19, 2009

    List of topics (Q. Number 2)

    These are the topics I have chosen:

    1. Spell Checking
    2. Emotion recognition
    3. Morphological Analysis
    4. Natural Language Generation
    5. Summarisation 
    6. Categorisation
    7. Multimedia Retrieval 
    8. Language Checking 
    9. Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotions
    10. Multilingual Content for Flexible Format Internet Premium Services
    11. Disclosure of video material on the basis of sub-titles
    12. Test Suites for Natural Language Processing

     

    Add comment Junio 19, 2009

    Research centres for Human Language Technologies in Europe (Q. Number 1)

    There are three main research centres for Human Language Technologies in Europe. One of them is located in Dublin, Ireland. It conducts research into the processing of human language by computers, such as speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, human-computer interfaces, information retieval and extraction, the teaching and learning of languages using computers and software localisation and globalisation.

    The second outstanding research centre is in Germany and it’s called National Centre for Language Technology. Their main objective is to reach the improvement of language technology through novel computational techniques for processing text, speech and knowledge. They also want to be able to reach a deeper understanding of human language and thought, studying the true needs of the end user and the demands of the market.

    Finally, the third main research centre we can find is the Edinburgh Language Technology Group, which is in Scotland, UK. It’s a research and development group and it’s members have been working in the area of natural language engineering since 1990. This group was originally founded as part of the Human Communication Research Centre; actually, it’s based in the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems of the Division of Informatics of thesity of Edinburgh, which is one of the largest communities of natural language processing specialists in Europe.

    They focus on building practical solutions to real problems in text processing. Furthermore, they have worked in all areas of large-volume text handling, from text annotation through markup architectures and from information extraction to automatic or computer – assisted generation of text.

     

    • National Centre for Language Technology.(2002, July 12). In Dublin City University. Retrieved 19:55, March 25, 2009, from http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/areas.html
    • German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (2008). Language Technology Lab (DFKI Germany). Retrieved 20:07, March 7, 2009, from http://www.dfki.de/lt/index.php
    • Edinburgh Language Technology Group (Scotland, UK). (2006, June 30). Retrieved 20:19 March 25, 2009, from http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/

      •  

    Add comment Marzo 25, 2009

    Martyn Kay (Q. Number 1)

    Martyn Kay, who is a scientist specialiced in computers, is mainly known for his work in computational linguistics. He was born and grown in Great Britain and, in 1961 he was given his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, However, in 1958 he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, which was one of the earliest centers for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics. In 1961, he went to work to to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he  became head of research in linguistics and machine translation in a very short period of time. He left Rand in 1972 to become Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. In 1974, he moved to the Xerox Palo Alto Researc Center as a Research Fellow. In 1985, while he was retaining his position at Xerox PARC, he joined the faculty of Stanford University half – time. Actually, he is Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University.

    According to Stanford Department of Linguistics, Martyn  Kay was responsible for introducing the notion of chart parsing in computational linguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics commonly. On the other hand, while he was working with Ron Kaplan, he was pioneer of finite-state morphology. He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation. Also, while he was Permanent Chairman of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics, Kay was a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until 2002.

     

    Add comment Marzo 25, 2009

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