vanderwal.net

Success lost in the translation

Problems of information use are high-lighted in NY Times Op/Ed "Lost in Translation at the F.B.I.", which to me is a horrifying look at the lack of understanding of what information gathering and analysing skill are needed to do the job.

Standard Data Vocabularies Unquestionably Harmful

Must come back to this when my mind is fresh, Standard Data Vocabularies Unquestionably Harmful over at O'Reilly Net. This seems right up the alley for an IA.

Blosxom offers RSS aggregation with perl

Blosxom is a Perl RSS blog aggregator that works well on Mac OS X.

Paul gets SCRAPI

Paul is on a streak with his rogue API explaination and Bookwatch. The API discussion is very intriguing. Paul has build an Amazon information scraper to add information to his bookwatch. A great idea. The downside is Amazon is always changing its interface, but the current version of the scraper seems to work well for Paul. This shows what can be done with a machine readable Website.

Internet Archive a information mess

The Chron focusses on the lack of organization of the Internet Archive. This would be a dream to organize for some folks I know (or at least I think it would be). The problems at hand for this project rule out library science approach (too much human touch needed) and search engines as their design is not conducive. A great read to get the wheels turning.

InfoWorld has an interview with the executive director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Dan Reed discussing the computing grid. This is somewhat like having an electric grid but the commodity is data. The grid's biggest hurdle is interacting with differing data types for essentially similar data. This he explains is bridged using metadata. The metadata needs are enormous. Understanding the information and data is paramount to the task and getting the system right.

I am constantly digging out Chris Wetherell's portal. Now I have a way back. He make use of RSS to track the information on other's sites and pulls them to his portal. Not a novel idea, but a solid presentation and a good selection.