BuildingSkyNet for Science
Discovering New FrontiersUsing Embedded Knowledge
Richard AkermanNISO Discovery Tools Forum
March 27, 2008
Stanley
How can we better serve the machines?
The machines don’t speak our language
We must become knowledge translators
To Serve Machine
• Produce information in formats that machines can understand, in parallel with formats that are human readable
• Every web resource its machine reader
• Have a limited number of formats, keep them simple, and enable easy interchange of information
• Save the time of the machine
Bibliographic Metadata as a First Class Citizen
• OpenURL (ANSI/NISO Z39.88 - 2004)
• COinS
Tools
• OCLC/Openly OpenURL Referrer
• LibX
• Zotero
Unique Identifiers
• authors
• institutions
• text content
• data
To Serve Human
• Delicious Library
• LibraryThing
• Machines can process and analyze information, but only humans can use and savour information (for now...)
The Social Life of Humans
• Formal categorization
• Reviews
• Ratings
• Connections / Relatedness
• Informal categorization (tags, folksonomies)
• Use (frequency, time...)
• Groups (colleagues, friends, work groups...)
The Social Life of Machines
• Feature extraction
• Similarity (count-based, vector-based)
• Impact factor / PageRank
• Context (location, others)
• Numbers numbers numbers
• Machines love unique identifiers
Use Case
• Find me the best relevant information
• Without me asking for it?
• Wherever and whenever?
Every Book Its Reader
• The WebOPAC is not a discovery interface
• Build a discovery layer over the catalogue metadata
Open Data
There is more to heaven and earth
• Licensed content and access
• Organization content
• The entire biblioverse and Internet
Is there “too much” information?
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=11793
There is too much information poverty
http://www.flickr.com/photos/w_franklin/51297912/
Seeing the forest - licensed content
• Federated search
• Local indexing
Seeing the forest - repositories
• CARLCore Metadata Application Profile
• OAI-PMH
• OAI-ORE
I see... everything
• XML, RDF, RSS, GeoRSS...
• Microformats - Embedded knowledge
• Aggregators
• Recommender APIs
Glen Newton
Experiment on Humans
• CISTI Lab
• British Library Labs
• National Library of Australia Labs
• MIT Libraries Betas
• many others...
Free the Humans!
Richard AkermanNRC-CISTI
http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/nisodiscovery2008
© 2008 Government of CanadaLicensed in the Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/
