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.

• La Wikinovela: un proyecto de creación hipertextual, colectiva y multilingüe en internet. In Observatorio para la cibersociedad. Retrieved 10:22, October 14, 2009, from http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2006/gts/comunicacio.php?&id=658
• Escritura colaborativa y nuevas narrativas: la wiki-novela. In Educ.ar. Retrieved 10:18, October 14, 2009, from http://portal.educ.ar/debates/educacionytic/inclusion-digital/escritura-colaborativa-y-nuevas-narrativas-la-wikinovela.php
• Novelistas somos todos (03/02/2007). In El Pais. Retrieved 10:25, October 14, 2009, from http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Novelistas/somos/todos/elpepucul/20070203elpepucul_1/Tes

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.

• Author. (2009, September 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:20, September 29, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Author&oldid=311786491 
• Hypertext and Hypermaps (Resources). (2003). In Washington University. Retrieved 12:40, September 29, 2009, from http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/projects/hyperbiblio.html
• María Jesús Lamarca (2009). The author and authority in the digital world. Retrieved 12:52, September 29, 2009, from http://artesadigital.blogspot.com/2009/02/el-autor-y-la-autoria-en-el-mundo.htm
• Jakob Nielsen. Multimedia and hypertext: the internet and beyond. (1995). Retrieved 13:00,  September 29, 2009, from http://books.google.es/books?id=KgZXCCfP0rQC&dq=Jakob+Nielsen.+Multimedia+and+hypertext:+the+internet+and+beyond&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=OEqm_1KoDq&sig=6_7ZpZ3mMyKQ-h9jquw2o9ZAEds&hl=es&ei=z7u_SuOjIMHajQf8gf1F&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

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:

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  

• Spell checker. (2009, June 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:10, June 19, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spell_checker&oldid=294623136
• About grammar checerks. In Free Online Grammar Checker. Retrieved 14:20, June 19, 2009, from http://www.yourdictionary.com/dictionary-articles/free-online-grammar.html

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.

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

• Projects. In Language Technology World. Retrieved 13:47, June 19, 2009, from: http://www.lt-world.org/
• Language Technology Lab, completed projects. Retrieved 13:54, June 19, 2009, from: http://www.dfki.de/lt/completed_projects.php

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/

 

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.

• Martin Kay. (2008, June 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:35, March 23, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Kay&oldid=217746063
• Martin Kay (2004, October 21). In Stanford Department of Linguistics, Retrieved 14:41, March 20, 2009, from: http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/people/pages/kay.shtml

• Gianni Lazzari (2006, may). Project TC-STAR – Technology and Corpora for Speech-to-Speech Translation. Project Manager: Gianni Lazzari – IST-2002-FP6-506738  Retrieved 12:30, March 16 from http://www.tc-star.org/pubblicazioni/D17_HLT_ENG.pdf
• Language technology. (2008, April 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:31, March 18, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Language_technology&oldid=202607020
• Human Language Technologies (HLT).  Meraka Institute, the African Advanced Institute for Information and Communication Technology. Retrieved 12:29, March 22, 2009, from http://www.meraka.org.za/humanLanguage.htm

First of all let’s define these two concepts: On the one hand, according to Wikipedia, Web 1.0 is a retronym that refers to the state of the World Wide Web, and any website design style used before the advent of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. It is the general term which has been created to describe the Web before 2001, which is seen by a lot of people as a turning point for the internet.

On the other hand we have got Web 2.0. Also according to the webpage Wikipedia, it is defined like a term which describes the changing trends in the use of WWW technology and web design that aim to enhance communications, creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web – culture communities and hosted services. We can appreciate the following examples social – networking sites, wikis and blogs, video sharing sites and folksonomies.

Moreover, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. It is considered the border between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The term of Web 2.0 began with a conference brainstorming session between Tim O’Reilly and MediaLive International.

• Web 1.0. (2009, February 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 09:47, February 4, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_1.0&oldid=268421998
•  Web 2.0. (2009, February 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 09:48, February 4, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_2.0&oldid=268435745

• What is web 2.0 (2005, September, 30)  from Tim O’Reilly’s webpage, retrieved 04/02/2009, 10:59 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

RSS is a format based on XML which permits us to find the best information for anybody who is looking for something on the Internet. It also offers us the possibility of finding that information on a quickier way.

There are three kind of RSS formats:

However, according to Wikipedia, RSS is part of the family of Web feed formats, which are usually used to publish frequently updated works, for example: blog entries, news headlines, audio and video. They are updated in a standardized format.

Moreover, there are some RSS documents; each of these documents can be also called “feed”, “web feed” or “channel”. They include full or summarized texts. Web feeds or RSS documents benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

RSS solves problems for surfers who regularly use the web. It does allow us to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest updates from the sites we are interested in. With these format we don’t need to visit each site individually.

References

• RSS. (2009, January 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:23, January 22, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RSS&oldid=265667297
•  Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS from What Is RSS? RSS Explained. Retrieved  2009/01/22 16:29 from http://www.whatisrss.com/
• ¿Qué es el RSS? Retrieved 2009/01/16:30 from http://es.geocities.com/rss_guia_facil/que_es_rss.html

On the one hand and according to the Webpage http://www.w3.org/ and the scientist Ted Nelson, the meaning of  Hypertext (a concept, not a product) is a text which contains links and isn’t constrained to be clear. However, Wikipedia says that the Hypertext text on a computer that will lead the user to other, related information on demand. Hypertext is a representation of  a relative recent innovation to user interfaces.

On the other hand,Roland Barthes points out that the hypertext is an ideal text that precisely matches. As I said before, it consist on a text composed of an amount of words or images linked electronically. They are also perpetually unfinished.

Hypertext is a text that branches and allows choices to the reader, such as the possibility of taking differet pathways to read the text the reader wants to. Hypertext also denotes a medium information, which links verbal and non – verbal information.

• Hypertext. (2009, January 3). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:29, January 14, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hypertext&oldid=261678198 

• The Definition of Hypertext and Its History as a Concept (Pages 3-4 in print version. © the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) from cyberartsweb retrieved 14/01/2009 20:33 http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/jhup/history.html#1 

• What is HyperText? retrieved 14/01/2009 20:35 http://www.w3.org/WhatIs.html