Free Culture Archiving Planet

Planet Linked Data: links for 2008-11-18

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:05:11 +0000

Information Aesthetics: Emergence Project: Representing a Textual Discourse

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:46:18 +0000

The Emergence Project [emergenceproject.org] is a "software art" installation exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center's digital building facade gallery. It is based on the ideas and textual discourse that emanated out of the Chicago Humanities Festival: its presentations, performances, and panel discussions were captured, analyzed, and processed into a set of dynamic data visualizations that evolve dynamically over time.

The generative data artwork uses simple morphological rules to animate word clusters, based on linguistic proximity, similarity, and difference. It deliberately utilizes computer-generated animation to chart how complex patterns arise out of a multiplicity of simple interactions, a phenomenon known as "emergence".

Via Visual Complexity.

Semantic MediaWiki Forms: Version 1.3.6 - further support for SMW 1.4

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:06:24 +0000

Hi everyone,
Version 1.3.6 of Semantic Forms has just been released. This version has the
following changes and additions:
- further support was added for Semantic MediaWiki 1.4, which is due to be
released sometime very soon. The previous version of SF worked with the
then-alpha version of SMW 1.4, but since then many changes had been made,

Tesseract: Ancient Greek OCR training data

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:22:28 +0000

I have uploaded Ancient Greek OCR training data at [link]

Ubiquity: Problems with Jquery.ajax()

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:22:18 +0000

I have this:
aux=0;
jQuery.ajax({
type: "get",
url: url,
data: params,
dataType: "text",
error: function(msg) {
alert("problem");
},
success: function(response) {
if(response)
if(response==1){
aux=response;

Public Library of Science: New Academic Editor Interview - Niyaz Ahmed

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:17:47 +0000

At the end of October 2008, Niyaz Ahmed (PLoS ONE Section Editor for Microbiology and Genomics) passed the milestone of 50 papers handled for PLoS ONE and by the time I caught up with him to congratulate him, he had reached almost 60. Given this great achievement, I thought it would be a perfect excuse to interview him for our ongoing series of ‘Discussions with PLOS ONE Editors”.

Niyaz is a group leader, in charge of a team of 10, at the “Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics” in Hyderabad, India. His lab is interested in the molecular basis of the acquisition and adaptation of chronic pathogens to their host niches, and the outcome of that adaptation in the long run. He kindly took time out of his schedule to speak to me at 11.30 in the evening (just 9 am in San Francisco, with a 13 ½ hour time difference) - this was a time when he would normally be working on PLoS ONE submissions!

PB: Niyaz – tell me what it is like to do research in India?

NA: Being based in India is a huge advantage for my work. India is unfortunately a hot spot for infections such as TB and enteric diseases where my main interests lie. In addition, there is a great deal of cultural and genetic diversity here that broadly influences the acquisition, maintenance and eradication of the diseases. . Therefore, my location is important from a host point of view as well as from a pathogen’s point of view. In addition, in the post genomic era there is a great deal of resources and collaborative interests percolating through to India. My group extensively collaborates with laboratories in Europe and elsewhere and we have a long term collaborative program running at the University of Sassari, Italy.

PB: What do you feel makes PLoS ONE relevant to scientists?

NA: I have spoken to many of the young leaders in science, and most of them think that PLoS ONE is making new headway in science communication, and that its’ most important function is to provide an inclusive forum (by which I mean one can publish topics between the disciplines and across the disciplines). This is the main thing that makes PLoS ONE so distinct. I would also highlight the tools that it provides for rating, evaluation, and post publication commenting, as well as the journal clubs. It is a very open, very inclusive, and yet very smart independent system of publishing – that is what attracts the attention of the new generation. Also some people are very interested in the swift speed at which papers are published. So I think the inclusive scope, the speed and being a platform for discussion are three of the most important things in my opinion.

PB: And tell me about your blog that you write - BLoG ONE

NA: I felt that I would like to air my own ideas about the papers that I am accepting and that I should somehow put what I feel about each particular paper on the web. And that is how I started the blog – as a way to highlight the best of those papers that I have been accepting. This was my way to advocate for PLoS ONE, and each post clearly links back to PLoS ONE. But I don’t just highlight papers that I handle, I also highlight many of the other PLoS ONE papers that are published every week. Although the sole intention of the blog is to advocate for PLoS ONE, I do feel that it highlights the contemporary approach to the OA debate that PLoS ONE represents.

PB: Well, we thank you for doing this – your blog is a very nice example of how to re-promote Open Access content. And what is your opinion on our acceptance criteria?

NA: As a journal we are promoting article level evaluation in the light of new generation, post publication metrics (cites, trackbacks, blog posts, media coverage, ratings, social bookmarking and journal clubs). Impact Factor only matters for the journal level evaluation of the literature. Here, we are inclusive in the sense that if the research is sound, it has adhered to the community standards, and it has been performed with a rigorous methodology then it should be accepted in the literature. So long as the research qualifies to be included in the literature, then we are not worried about its impact because its impact will be determined by the readers and the community. In this way, it is our part to let the content go before the readers and the community and only then to sit and analyze the trends.

PB: How many hours a week would you say you devote to PLoS ONE?

NA: Mostly in the evenings, after I come back from the lab I will be working on my editorial assignments. I typically spend 2 hours a day on my tasks as Section Editor and then for manuscripts that I am personally reviewing, I may work on them for more than a week before being able to submit a review. My institute gives me the freedom to make myself available for this work. They consider my time spent on editorial activities to be part of professional activity, and that is very supportive of them.

PB: What would you say is the ‘best’ paper you have handled and why?

NA: Well, all the articles that I accept are carefully considered after a rigorous peer review. The most noteworthy, however, is the case of a set of two related manuscripts on the topic of coral reef conservation (by Dinsdale and colleagues and Sala and colleagues) that I edited in February this year. My impression is that these papers would have been otherwise published in any of the frontline science journals if they were not fielded in PLoS ONE. Both the articles were based on the Scripps Institute expedition findings and were enthusiastically received by the international media. A commentary on these articles was simultaneously published in PLoS Biology and the articles were evaluated in Faculty of 1000. I have separately indicated why I have recommended publication of these articles and why I liked to handle these articles.

PB: And finally, what would you say is the thing about Open Access that most excites you?

NA: Developing countries are in great need of Open Access. The fruits of the scientific and technological revolution are not reaching them because they have to pay to receive the content. In an Indian case scenario, while the library budgets are dwindling, internet access has become affordable for masses, thanks to our technology driven economy. And that is where OA comes to enhance research productivity as well as the pace of discovery. Finally, I will say, that knowledge should not be kept bound. Knowledge is created to be open. It’s a free world!

PB: That is a great note to end on. Thank you for your time Niyaz, and congratulations again on handling so many papers for PLoS ONE.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.plos.org/cms/trackback/420

Open Access: Nov/Dec issue of D-Lib

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:35:38 +0000

The November/December 2008 issue of D-Lib is now available. See especially these articles:

Andreas Aschenbrenner, et al., The Future of Repositories? Patterns for (Cross-)Repository Architectures
Priscilla Caplan, Repository to Repository Transfer of Enriched Archival Information Packages
Peter A. Zuber, A Study of Institutional Repository Holdings by Academic Discipline
Carol Tenopir and Donald W. Kin, Electronic Journals and Changes in Scholarly Article Seeking and Reading Patterns (see especially "Figure 2. Sources used by U.S. science faculty to obtain article they last read by number of readings in 1977 and 2005")

Open Access: Blog notes on SPARC repositories meeting

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:08:08 +0000

Some blog notes on the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting (Baltimore, November 17-18, 2008):

Dorothea Salo: Professional schizophrenia, John Wilbanks keynote, In which I happily eat crow
Marcus Banks: Brief Notes, Innovation Fair

Open Access: OCLC fighting OA to bibliographic data

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:56:21 +0000

There's been a dust-up lately over a policy change announced by the Online Computer Library Center for the terms of use for WorldCat, the union catalog of bibliographic records contributed by OCLC member libraries.

It's disputed whether OCLC provides OA to the full WorldCat data: Open Library's Aaron Swartz says it doesn't; OCLC's Karen Calhoun says it does.

The new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records supercedes the earlier Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of OCLC-Derived Records, last revised in the pre-Web era. (Karen Coyle points out that the Guidelines were themselves a response to an earlier attempt by OCLC to claim copyright in WorldCat records. The new policy avoids the term copyright, but does make an oblique reference to "the intellectual property rights [in WorldCat or WorldCat Records]".) The new policy is slated to go into effect in February 2009.

Aside from the name change (from "guidelines" to "policy", implying enforceability), key points of the new policy include prohibitions on commercial or "unreasonable" use. (An earlier version of the policy also required attribution to OCLC in each record re-used; in the latest version, the attribution requirement has been weakened to a recommendation.) The "reasonableness" standard is summarized as:

Use must not discourage the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat or substantially replicate the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat.

The restriction has drawn the ire of Open Library, which is building an OA bibliographic catalog. (In a blog post, Open Library's Aaron Swartz also claims that OCLC has "been trying to kill [Open Library] from the beginning -- threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the press, and putting pressure on member libraries not to cooperate.")

See this page on the code4lib wiki of links to commentary on the changes (including defenses by OCLC), and Aaron Swartz's petition against the changes.

See also our past post on OA to bibliographic data, or all post posts on WorldCat (especially the Open WorldCat project) and Open Library.

EFF: Bogus IP Claims Quash Debate Over Future of NYC Landmark

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:37:57 +0000

New York - A New York City community organizer is fighting back in court after her parody website challenging redevelopment efforts in New York City's historic Union Square was shut down with bogus claims of copyright infringement and cybersquatting.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing Savitri Durkee, an activist concerned with preserving the character of Union Square and Union Square Park. As one part of her education campaign, Durkee created a website parodying the official website of Union Square Partnership (USP), a group backing extensive redevelopment of the area. In response, USP sent Durkee's Internet service provider a notice pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act improperly asserting that her parody site infringed USP's copyright, leading to the shutdown of the site. USP then filed a copyright lawsuit against Durkee and later filed a claim with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) seeking to take control of the parody site's domain name.

EFF today filed a response to USP's complaint on Durkee's behalf, pointing out that Durkee's parody is protected under the First Amendment and fair use doctrine. The response includes counterclaims asking the court to declare that her site does not infringe USP's trademarks and to prevent USP from taking control of Durkee's domain name, as well as to find that USP's complaint was intended to stifle legitimate political speech. Durkee is also seeking compensation for the abridgement of her speech.

"Union Square is where the U.S. labor movement was born and where abolitionists, suffragettes, civil rights activists and many others have fought for and exercised their First Amendment rights," said Durkee. "It's ironic that USP is now trying to keep me from using my parody website to speak out about the future of Union Square."

In the WIPO proceedings, USP has argued that Durkee's website copied elements of USP's website and that users are likely to be confused into thinking the parody site is actually USP's site.

"Ms. Durkee's site is a parody, so of course it mimicked USP's site to some extent. That's how parodies work," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "The parody site is plainly a fair use and protected by the First Amendment. This is a case about censoring speech, not about infringement."

In addition to filing her answer and counterclaims, Durkee today filed a letter with the court asking for a prompt hearing on her fair use defense. Durkee asked the court to convene a conference as soon as possible to set a schedule for briefing and a hearing.

The law firms Mayer Brown LLP and Gross & Belsky LLP are co-counsel in this case.

For the full answer and counterclaim:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/usp_v_durkee/Answer%20and%20Countercla...

For more on USP v. Durkee:
http://www.eff.org/cases/usp-v-durkee
Contacts:

Michael Kwun
Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
michael@eff.org

Corynne McSherry
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
corynne@eff.org

Open Access: More on helping researchers understand their OA options, and more on Harvard's OA plans

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:35:26 +0000

Jennifer Howard, For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 21, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

"Rapidly changing" is the term most often used these days to describe the landscape of scholarly communication. Scholars have to clear new and higher hurdles as they bump up against copyright and fair-use issues, open-access mandates, and a baffling array of publication and dissemination models.

How much of his own published work can a scholar post on a personal Web site without raising his publisher's ire? How much of someone else's work can he use in his course pack without trampling on fair use and risking a fine or legal action? How does a researcher upload her work to her institution's repository, and are there consequences if she opts out? Those are just some of the questions that professors may find themselves tripping over.

Where can researchers find a guide to lead them through this 21st-century obstacle course?

The library, of course.

More institutions are creating or beefing up offices and programs in scholarly communication or hiring librarians with expertise in copyright and intellectual property....

[Harvard's Stuard Shieber] told The Chronicle that just about all of Harvard's dozen or so faculties are considering open-access policies. "Each school has its own characteristics, and the policies need to be responsive to the differences among the schools," he says. "The process has to be faculty-based and consensual. But the [Office of Scholarly Communication] can help by advising and serving as a source for information."

Ambitions don't stop there. Mr. Shieber expects the office to evolve as "a laboratory for expanding and evolving scholarly communication practices." Perhaps its most important objective focuses on something of concern to librarians and scholars alike: figuring out a system to support authors who want to publish in open-access journals "by underwriting reasonable publication charges for those journals." ...

Open Access: Preliminary approval of Google settlement

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:23:06 +0000

Larry Neumeister, NY judge tentatively OKs Google copyright deal, Associated Press, November 17, 2008. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Excerpt:

A judge has tentatively approved a settlement of lawsuits between Google and book authors and publishers that may put millions of out-of-print texts online.

The settlement was announced by Google and the publishing industry in October. Final court approval is still needed.

Federal Judge John Sprizzo in Manhattan gave initial approval Friday. His order was put in the public record on Monday.

Sprizzo set a June hearing date for a final settlement and hearing to decide if the deal is fair, reasonable and adequate....

Comments

I'm a little surprised, in part because there are many serious objections to the settlement (alongside many serious endorsements), and in part because the settlement is so large and complicated that I would not have thought a judge could read it with the care required for a preliminary judgment, and weigh up its vast array of pros and cons, this soon after its release. The settlement was released on October 28, and Judge Sprizzo files his preliminary approval on November 15, just 19 days later.
See my own comments on the settlement and my four collections of comments by others (1, 2, 3, and 4).

BioMed OA: Italian Journal of Pediatrics broadens its horizons

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:03:53 +0000

Italian Journal of Pediatrics today moved to BioMed Central’s open access publishing platform, with the goal of increasing its global author and readership.

Publishing since 1975 under the title Rivista Italiana di Pediatria, Italian Journal of Pediatrics was soon playing a pivotal role in keeping Italian pediatricians informed of the latest research and developments in the field. With the high visibility and wide accessibility provided by BioMed Central, Italian Journal of Pediatrics is now able to offer this invaluable resource to pediatricians world-wide.

Italian Journal of Pediatrics will continue to publish new research in all areas of pediatrics. The journal Editor-in-Chief Sergio Bernasconi, aims to build on Italian Journal of Pediatrics’ previous success to create a publication at the forefront of pediatrics. For further information on the journal, please read the launch Editorial or visit the About page. Prof Bernasconi looks forward to receiving your high quality submissions or general feedback.

Open Access: Creative Commons annual drive

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:55:15 +0000

A letter from Lawrence Lessig, CC blog, November 17, 2008. Excerpt:

...I’m writing today to ask you to think again about one of those projects that will always be important to me — Creative Commons. We’re in the middle of our annual drive. The success of this drive is essential to our ability to run. The vast majority of CC’s supporters, including of course its Board, and current CEO, are volunteers. But the organization depends upon a small number of wildly underpaid staffers, as well as modest infrastructure to keep the system alive.

This is a tough year to ask for support, I know. All of us are facing difficult decisions about what we can really afford to do....

Whatever you can give is important....

Please support Creative Commons today.

Comment. I don't run ads, but I do have opinions and make recommendations. And I recommend CC. It's a non-profit that needs your support and will use your money well. Many non-profits directly support OA, such as the ATA, and when more of them have annual drives I'll recommend more of them for your annual consideration. But this year CC is alone in the field, and very worthy. Please give what you can. I did.

Open Access: More on self-selection and the OA impact advantage

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:51:58 +0000

Patrick Gaule and Nicolas Maystre, Getting cited: does open access help? CEMI Working Paper, November 12, 2008. (Thanks to Phil Davis.)

Abstract: We reexamine the widely held belief that free availability of scientific articles increases the number of citations they receive. Since open access is relatively more attractive to authors of higher quality papers, regressing citations on open access and other controls yields upward-biased estimates. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find no significant effect of open access. Instead, self-selection of higher quality articles into open access explains at least part of the observed open access citation advantage.

Open Access: Anticipating SCOAP3, EPL converts to no-fee OA for some topics

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:18:06 +0000

Another journal to offer Open Access while waiting for SCOAP3, an announcement from CERN's SCOAP3 project, November 18, 2008. Excerpt:

Europhysics Letters announced that it will "offer open access free of charge to all authors submitting experimental and theoretical letters in [the subjects of] 'Physics of Elementary Particles and Fields' and 'Nuclear Physics'[,] two research areas focussing on the High-Energy Physics community".

EPL is published under the scientific policy and control of the European Physical Society by EDP Sciences, IOP Publishing and the Italian Physical Society (SIF) for a partnership of 17 European physical societies.

With this offer, EPL joins Springer's European Physical Journal C, which offers Open Access free of charges for all articles in experimental High-Energy Physics, and Elsevier's Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B, which will publish Open Access without any author fees the first articles describing the physics results of the LHC.

Some other Open Access options in HEP are those of SISSA/IOPP, where libraries of institutions active in HEP can have a yearly institutional membership and provide Open Access to all articles produced by their scientists; APS, where authors can pay fees to make their articles Open Access through the free to read scheme; and full Open Access journals such as the New Journal of Physics and PhysMath Central Physics A, supported by author fees.

Those steps signify the engagement of publishers towards Open Access in HEP, which is the ultimate scope of the SCOAP3 initiative. SCOAP3 target is universal and sustainable Open Access for all articles in the discipline without any direct financial burden for scientists nor additional costs for libraries.

From the EPL announcement:

...EPL is delighted to offer open access free of charge to all authors submitting experimental and theoretical letters in PACS codes 10 and 20. This offer will remain open until the SCOAP3 agreement at CERN takes effect.

Authors submitting any article to EPL will continue to be offered the opportunity to make their published letter open access for a one-off payment. However, with effect from 1 November 2008, any author who submits work related to subject areas within PACS 10 and 20 will benefit from open access at no charge, meaning their published article will be available free to all readers, forever....

Open Access: Comparing publication lag at OA and TA journals

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:10:11 +0000

Peng Dong, Marie Loh,and Adrian Mondry, Publication lag in biomedical journals varies due to the periodical's publishing model, Scientometrics, November 2006. Only the abstract and page one are free online, at least so far:

Abstract: Research manuscripts face various time lags from initial submission to final publication in a scientific periodical. Three publishing models compete for the market. Professional publishing houses publish in print and/or online in a “reader-pays” model, or follow the open access model of “author-pays”, while a number of periodicals are bound to learned societies. The present study aims to compare the three business models of publishing, with regards to publication speed. 28 topically similar biomedical journals were compared. Open access journals have a publication lag comparable to journals published by traditional publishers. Manuscript submitted to and accepted in either of these two types of periodicals are available to the reader much faster than manuscripts published in journals with strong ties to specialized learned societies.

Comments

I won't comment on the overall argument, since I don't have access to the article. But even the abstract shows that the authors presuppose that all OA journals charge publication fees when, in fact, most charge no fees at all.
Here are some comments from Charlie Mayor, who was able to read the piece:
...Though their method is marred by small sample sizes in the open access group, time from receipt to publication online compared well between traditional-publication and OA articles. Nature Publishing Group titles were selected as representative of the traditional model. However, I would have liked to have seen data for other titles - Nature publishes every week and is the biggest academic journal in the world. It may not be entirely typical in its editing processes and timeliness. Nature titles took on average 120 days from receipt to online publication. Open access titles from BioMed Central took on average 139 days....

Open Access: OA v. commercialization of research in Australia

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:54:40 +0000

Bernard Lane, No gags in new rules for CSIRO, The Australian, November 19, 2008. Excerpt:

The federal Government has promised not to "interfere improperly" in the scholarly work of the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation], but new charters for public research agencies also warn scientists not to trespass on the politicians' policy turf.

Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr said it was the first time that the liberties and duties of these agencies had been set out in charter form....

The CSIRO charter endorses "open communication and dissemination of the findings of research" as a general principle, but makes this subject to contractual arrangements or other legal or moral obligations.

The Government defers to its agencies as independent managers of research dissemination, allowing them to strike a balance between open access to knowledge and commercial exploitation of research results....

Asked about the tension between open access and commercialisation, Senator Carr said: "I have a preference for encouraging the highest levels possible of open access (but) there are some commercial implications in terms of IP that we are still examining (for the innovation white paper)."

Broadly similar charters have been signed with the CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

PS: Also see Colin Steele's February 2007 argument for OA at CSIRO.

Open Access: Twidox repository now in private beta

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:46:13 +0000

Twidox launches private beta, CC blog, November 17, 2008. Excerpt:

Twidox, “a free, user generated online library of ‘quality’ documents,” launched their private beta today. The “private” beta can be accessed with a beta-code, which virtually anyone can obtain by registering. For readers of this blog, you can simply type in the beta-code “creativecommons” to check out Twidox.

Twidox is a content repository where anyone can upload and publish their work under a Creative Commons license, donate it to the public domain, or retain “all rights reserved” copyright. They have built in CC licensing, so you can easily tag your resources under the license of your choosing. Twidox’s focus is on:

academic papers and articles

research material

professional and industry specific documents

coursework and dissertations

data and statistics...

Twidox...“[does] not see [other OA repositories] as competitors.” They state that “Rather than trying to compete with organisations such as the ‘Max-Planck Institute’ and ‘Frauenhofer Institute’, for example, we see them as potential co-operation partners and welcome partnerships.” They also differ from other content repositories in that they are working to [gather] content on a wider scale by collaborating with various European organizations, versus simply hosting individually contributed materials. So far, Twidox is working with the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking and also their Office on Drugs and Crime.

Twidox was founded by Nicholas and Daniel MacGowan von Holstein and Jan Deppe. The idea for Twidox began in a university when they began “discussing the difficulty of searching for relevant quality documents for research purposes (access to knowledge). The greatest obstacle lay in the relevance of search results returned from search engines, getting access to subscription-paying sites that did have relevant information and the vast number of websites from different organisations that held documents on the same subject.”

PS: Also see our past posts on Twidox.

Open Access: More on the quality of OA journals

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:41:00 +0000

Matthew Elbeck and Jean Mandernach, Expanding the value of scholarly, open access e-journals, Library & Information Science Research, December 2008. Neither the text nor an abstract is free online, at least so far, but the journal does offer a TOC (with each link pointing to a pay-per-view screen):

1. Accessing OA e-journals
2. Measuring journal quality
3. Alternative measures of journal quality
3.1. Shortcomings of quality indicators for e-journals
4. Online versus terrestrial article quality
5. The pivotal role of article quality
6. Designing a solution to strengthen e-article quality
6.1. A method to expand scholarly e-article quality
7. Author/s contribution
8. Reviewers' contribution
9. Readers' contribution
10. Advantages
References

Open Access: OA to geo-coded biodiversity information in the Himalayas

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:29:01 +0000

Today's Nepal News has a report on conference, Linking Geodata with Biodiversity Information in the Himalayas (Kathmandu, November 15-16, 2008). Excerpt:

A two-day workshop "Linking Geodata with Biodiversity Information in the Himalayas" organised by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and the Global Mountain Biodiversity Programme (GMBA) concluded on Sunday (Nov 16) with a call to create a mountain biodiversity information network in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region for mutual benefit and trans boundary cooperation....

ICIMOD and GMBA shared their experiences in developing GIS-enabled biodiversity portals as a gateway for biodiversity information and demonstrated the benefit of geo-referenced biodiversity data for integrated analysis and spatial visualisation of biodiversity information in relation to climate, land use, physiography, and other important parameters. The workshop participants deliberated on ways of improving the biodiversity database at the national and local levels, the need for standardisation and harmonisation for data exchange, and providing a way to facilitate easy and open access to geo-coded biodiversity information....

Open Access: OA to 60 years of the J of the Polynesian Society

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:20:14 +0000

The Journal of the Polynesian Society has provided OA to the first 60 years of its 100+ year backrun.

FRBR: Ecce RDA!

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:31:12 +0000

The full draft of Resource Description and Access (RDA), the new set of cataloguing rules, is available. You can download the whole thing from the “constituency review” page. I don’t know how long RDA is … but the table of contents is 74 pages. You might also want to look at thing like RDA Core Elements and FRBR User Tasks (57 KB PDF),

I’m going to look at some of this but let’s be honest, I’m not going to read every word of it. I’m interested in the FRBR side of it, especially how relationships are identified and recorded, but I’m not a cataloguer or a masochist. To keep up with what the cataloguers are saying you’ll want to read Planet Cataloguing, which will soon be abuzz with RDA chatter.

Planet Linked Data: links for 2008-11-17

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:45:33 +0000

EFF: RIAA Wins, Campuses Lose as Tennessee Governor Signs Campus Network Filtering Law

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:28:29 +0000

Last week, the RIAA celebrated the signing of a ridiculous new law in Tennessee that says:

Each public and private institution of higher education in the state that has student residential computer networks shall:

[...]

[R]easonably attempt to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the institution's computer and network resources, if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 within the preceding year.

While the entertainment industry failed to get "hard" requirements for universities in the Higher Education Act passed by Congress earlier this year, the RIAA succeeded in Tennessee (and is pushing in other states) with this provision that gives Big Content the ability to hold universities hostage through the use of infringement notices. Moreover, the new rules will cost Tennessee a pretty penny -- in the cost review attached to the Tennessee bill, the state's Fiscal Review Committee estimates that the new obligations will initially cost the state a whopping $9.5 million for software, hardware, and personnel, with recurring annual costs of more than $1.5 million for personnel and maintenance. Not a penny of this will go to artists, nor to any of the record labels RIAA represents.

Unfortunately, the entertainment industry lobby seems to be succeeding, bit-by-bit, in persuading legislators to coerce universities into buying "infringement suppression" technologies -- expensive technologies that won't stop file sharing on campus networks. Even if the technologies did work (magical thinking in light of encryption), does anyone think they would somehow force students back into record stores or the iTunes Store? After all, today students on campus can swap multiple gigabytes hand-to-hand for pennies (see, e.g., blank DVD-R disks, or the price of portable hard drives, as well as the ease of copying from iPod to iPod).

It makes no sense to force universities to spend millions on technologies that will hobble innovation on campus while failing to stop file-sharing. Why not use those millions to compensate creators and copyright owners, and thereby make file-sharing legal, instead? Now, more than ever, the universities need to come forward with a collective licensing proposal that will protect their campus communities and their own bottom lines.

Meanwhile, universities under the gun should make sure to shun the hype of network filtering when possible and seek solutions more amenable to teaching and academic freedom -- our whitepaper on copyright infringement technologies on campus networks is a good place to start. For more detail, EDUCAUSE has in-depth resources on P2P, file sharing, and the Higher Education Act.

Information Aesthetics: Geocoding Genes for Cartographic Comparisons

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:13:34 +0000

Guest-blogging on infosthetics.com is a tricky proposition. Since my last post the majority of things I've wanted to talk about have already been covered by our diligent host, Andrew.

Thankfully I stumbled upon this gem [flickr.com] from the charts and graphs group at Flickr. It shows a 2D plot of genetic similarity across Europe, colour-coded by country, alongside a political map of Europe using the same colours. A simply striking way to illustrate the complex process of reducing a multi-dimensional data set.

Sadly though, my (admittedly brief) attempts to find more information were confounded by pay-walls, landing pages and press releases. At least the latter provides a large format image for download! It's been a while since I was in academia, but I recall fondly being able to navigate the websites of scientific journals relatively freely from a university network, and being surprised when the same links failed at home. It's a shame so much good work is done behind closed doors, and that it's difficult for those of us outside the science community to correctly attribute and follow-up on interesting research.

I did find one publicly accessible article [technologyreview.com] though, and I'd love to read more. The methodology seems to be related to the antigenic cartography project, which thankfully has lots of information available to the public, and was written about on the O'Reilly Radar blog earlier this year after being presented at the ETech conference.

The use of side-by-side maps also reminds me of this recent map [pin-the-tail.com] showing the correspondence between increases in Democrat votes in the 2008 US election and cotton production in the 1860s. Again, an effective visual comparison presented casually on the web but it's almost impossible to follow up and find more. Strange Maps has expanded on it a little bit, including matching up the maps for a closer look at the correlation.

Guest blogger Tom Carden is an interaction designer at Stamen Design. He has recently contributed to several successful visualization projects including MSNBC's Hurricane Tracker, Trulia Snapshot and mySociety's travel time maps.

Music Brainz: The BBC has hired a full time MusicBrainz server developer!

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:37:00 +0000

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Wood, the BBC has officially hired Jason Emmett to work full time on the MusicBrainz server!

Jason, who will be working in the BBC offices in London will be working with Oliver to finish the port to Template Toolkit branch. After that both of them will tackle the Release Groups that we’ve deemed to be a worthy intermediary step. A few weeks ago the MusicBrainz server had only table scraps of love, moving it along quite slowly. Today we have nearly 1.5 full time people working on the server source code. This gives me tons of hope that we can shoot for doing 3-4 releases in 2009.

Thank you so much for all of your efforts, Matthew Wood. Thank you for all of your support BBC! Welcome on board Jason!

EFF: Judge Allows Bogus Jones Day Trademark Claims to Go Forward

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:00:46 +0000

In a decision that could have significant negative consequences for online speech and commerce, Judge John Darrah of the Northern District of Illinois has refused to dismiss some of the most preposterous trademark claims we've ever seen (and that's saying something).

The defendant in the case, BlockShopper.com, provides information about recent real estate transactions, including publicly available information about buyers and sellers. After BlockShopper published articles referring to two Jones Day attorneys who had recently bought homes (with links to their bios on the Jones Day firm website), the law firm sued BlockShopper, alleging that using the term "Jones Day" to refer to the firm in a headline and linking to the Jones Day website could lead to confusion over the sponsorship of the site. With amicus support from EFF, Public Citizen, Public Knowledge and the Citizen Media Law Project, BlockShopper.com argued that the uses were fully protected by fair use and the First Amendment, and that no Internet user would imagine that Jones Day was affiliated with or sponsored BlockShopper based solely on a link or a reference to the firm in a headline.

This case was a perfect candidate for early dismissal. It is based on the erroneous belief that trademark owners can prevent others from using their marks, accurately, in the ordinary course of communication, to refer to the owners themselves. Trademark law has never given a mark owner veto power over all uses of its mark, and for good reason. Online and off, trademarks—words, symbols, colors, etc—are also essential components of everyday language, used by companies, consumers and citizens to share information. If Jones Day were correct, no news site or blog could use marks to identify markholders, or links to point to further information about the markholders, without risking a lawsuit. But that is not the law, and Jones Day should know it.

We're disappointed that a respected law firm like Jones Day started this outrageous litigation, but we're even more disappointed that the court didn't take this opportunity to nip it in the bud. The court said that it could not end the case at this stage because it is required to take Jones Day's allegations as true. That's not precisely so; on an early motion like BlockShopper's, a court is required to accept facts as true, but not (implausible) legal conclusions. That's because deciding the facts is up to a jury. But interpreting the law is exactly what the judge is supposed to do, and it's disheartening to see the court let this case go any further.

At any rate, by allowing the case to go forward, the court has made BlockShopper's defense much more expensive, even if BlockShopper is confident (as it should be) that it will win in the end. Thus, the court has sent a signal to news sites and blogs everywhere: no matter what the Lanham Act says, if you link to a trademark owner's site, or use a mark in a headline or post, you'd better have a pretty decent legal budget.

Open Access: OA for health researchers in developing countries

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:13:07 +0000

Joanna Adcock and Edward Fottrell, The North-South information highway: case studies of publication access among health researchers in resource-poor countries, Global Health Action, November 13, 2008. (Thanks to Peter Byass.) Abstract:

... More than half of the respondents (n=12, 52%) expressed dissatisfaction with their access to print and online journals, directly relating this to inadequate university and research budgets. ...

[Barriers to publishing in a peer-reviewed journal included] insufficient access to existing information on the research subject.

Thirteen respondents (56%) were opposed to the author-pays model of publishing. Seventeen respondents (78%) stated that they would be unwilling or unable to pay a fee to publish their work, although 4 of these individuals stated that they would be willing to publish in an author-pays journal if their employer or funder paid the fees. ...

The impact of new open-access initiatives on [the lack of access to up-to-date literature] will be an important outcome measure of their overall effectiveness. ...

Current open-access and aid-based initiatives are invaluable and have undoubtedly improved access to information. However, based on views expressed by study respondents, the author-pays model of open access appears to fall short of successfully overcoming unidirectional information flow. ... Further investigation into the knowledge and attitudes of academics from resource-poor settings in relation to open-access and author-pays models is important ... Whatever the cause, however, there is a danger that this unwillingness or inability to pay to publish may perpetuate the imbalance of a North to South information flow, in that academics in resource-poor countries are still not contributing to academic literature ...

[A] powerful message from the preliminary findings presented here is a need for more direct editorial support, coupled with efforts to improve access to academic literature, in order to open up bidirectional information flow. More innovative thinking around the entire publication process is therefore needed. Along the lines of AuthorAID and INASP, models offering author mentoring schemes (scientific as well as editorial) combined with low publication fees and open access platforms whilst maintaining scientific rigour are likely to play a significant role in addressing the gross inequality between North and South. ...

Open Access: Case study in open notebook science

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:45:10 +0000

Jean-Claude Bradley, From ONS to Peer Review: our JoVE Article is Published, Useful Chemistry, November 13, 2008.

Our article "Optimization of the Ugi Reaction Using Parallel Synthesis and Automated Liquid Handling" is now published on the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). I am very pleased with this because it showcases some interesting approaches to communicate science that were not possible not so long ago.

First, and foremost, this demonstrates that lab notebook pages and blog posts can be used to support claims made in a peer reviewed article. ... When providing a reference for a melting point or spectrum, nothing is more relevant that the lab notebook page where the specific batch of product was obtained and characterized.

Second, we have demonstrated that it is possible carry out research under Open Notebook Science conditions, write an article openly on a wiki, post it on a pre-print server (like Nature Precedings) and finally publish it in an peer reviewed journal. ...

Third, this is a good example of the use of video to enhance the communication of a protocol for a chemical reaction. ...

Finally, JoVE is an example of an Open Access journal with some Web2.0 capabilities, like the ability to leave comments and label them as agreeing or disagreeing with the authors. The final article can now also serve as a location for continuing the scientific conversation.

Open Access: OA discussion list at U. Toronto school of education

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:34:12 +0000

Open Access @ OISE is a discussion list for students, faculty, and staff at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Thanks to Stian Haklev, who notes:

... To me personally, a long-term goal might be an institutional mandate, similar to what the Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and the Faculty of Education at Stanford, have come up with. ...

Open Access: Intro video to DSpace

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:20:34 +0000

DSpace has released a brief introductory video to its repository software. See the November 5 announcement. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)

Open Access: More blog notes on Berlin 6 conference

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:15:29 +0000

Cornelius Puschmann has posted a round-up of blog notes on the Berlin 6 Conference (Düsseldorf, November 11-13, 2008). See especially the posts by Kaitlin Thaney (which we posted previously), Cornelius Puschmann, Mark Liberman, and Robert Forkel.

Open Access: Voting for best OA content in anthropology

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:02:06 +0000

The blog Savage Minds is now accepting votes for the best OA content in anthropology, with categories for best blog, best journal, and best digital miscellany. (We previously posted the call for nominations.) Winners will be announced at the American Anthropological Association conference this weekend.

Open Access: Journal issue on very large digital libraries

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:49:59 +0000

The International Journal on Digital Libraries has a special issue on very large digital libraries. See especially these articles:

J. Cousins, et al., Uncovering cultural heritage through collaboration (only an abstract is OA, at least so far)
W. Ryan Richardson, et al., Knowledge discovery in digital libraries of electronic theses and dissertations: an NDLTD case study (only an abstract is OA, at least so far)
Herbert Van de Sompel, et al., The aDORe federation architecture: digital repositories at scale (see also this OA self-archived version)

Open Access: Journal issue on the Neuroscience Information Framework

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:18:39 +0000

A special issue of Neuroinformatics is dedicated to the Neuroscience Information Framework, an NIH project to develop a framework for identifying and locating neuroscience resources. The theme issue is OA. See also the press release on the theme issue. (Thanks to Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.)

We previously posted an article from the issue, on Textpresso for Neuroscience.

Open Access: More on OA to CRS reports

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:38:22 +0000

Shirl Kennedy, Resources of the Week: One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, ResourceShelf, November 17, 2008.

Regarding the public availability of Congressional Research Service reports…maybe the situation will be different in the new administration. Maybe these valuable, taxpayer-funded documents will finally be posted online by the Congressional Research Service as they are issued. In our opinion, there is no logical reason for the hoop-jumping necessary to pry these things loose from the CRS.

Granted, access is a lot better than it used to be, thanks to the tireless efforts of various academic and nonprofit organizations to corral as many of these reports as possible and make them freely available online. ...

The sheer volume of government information now available online is amazing, and has made life infinitely easier not only for researchers, but for the average citizen. We have not yet heard a compelling reason why the Congressional Research Service — a division of the Library of Congress — remains a black hole. This Washington Post story, from February 2007, blames “a wall erected by lawmakers” who regard the agency “as an extension of” their own staff.

We’re not buying that excuse. Equivalent agencies in other countries routinely place their reports online: [links to reports by various parliamentary research services from around the world] ...

See also our past posts on OA to CRS reports.

Open Access: Protesting US bishops' decision to require use of a TA text in mass

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:22:04 +0000

Jeffrey Tucker, A Serious Issue on the Revised Grail Psalter, New Liturgical Movement, November 16, 2008. Excerpt:

Last week, CNS [Catholic News Service] reported that the USCCB [U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops] has voted in favor of incorporating into the English translation of the Mass the "Revised Grail Psalter," and there is speculation that this translation will become the universal Psalter in the English-speaking world....

[A comment on Tucker's blog pointed out] the emerging problem:

The copyright on the new psalter is held jointly by the Conception Abbey and The Grail. GIA Publications, Inc., is proud to serve as the worldwide agent and pledges to administer the rights in an efficient and impartial manner. The first publication of the new text will occur in the form of a book containing the complete text and will be available as soon as the formal imprimatur is received.

Think of what this means. A private, commercial publisher --whose budget and financial dealings is entirely hidden from public view because it is said to be a religious nonprofit-- has struck a deal with another huge institution that has the power to mandate the text that all Catholics in the United States use at Mass. This private publisher will control the rights to use the text, charging whatever price they deem suitable and preventing independent composers from setting the Psalms for Mass....

[I]t is not too early to raise alarm bells about what this new-found power of GIA could portend.

2. All money to pay the royalty fees will be paid by Catholic parishes and other publishers, which raises barriers to entry into the market and gives a monopolistic privilege to GIA over everyone else. The money paid for these royalties comes directly out of the pockets of faithful Catholics in the pews, who will be charged money just for the privilege of singing the Psalms....

4. This is a major threat to Catholic composers, who might be prevented from posting their Psalm settings online for paid or even free download, without jumping through whatever hoops the GIA wants to set up....

7. It is of interest to know precisely what kind of financial arrangements that the USCCB has made with GIA in order to bring this result about. Did the GIA pay the USCCB in some form or any form to bring this result about? If not, a flat denial would be a good way to start. If there was some sort of arrangement, Catholics have a right to know what it was. After all, the USCCB has no money that it didn't gain from the voluntary gifts of Catholics in the pews. Everyone has an interest in knowing more about this.

8. What would be the downside of having the USCCB purchase the whole rights to these Psalms...and making them public domain, free for anyone to use? ...

10. We must never forget that the very idea of copyright is an invention of positive law,...first under the rule of Queen Elizabeth in England, who used the copyright power as a tool for enforcing religious adherence to the Church of England....Meanwhile, we see the Catholic Church making use of these state institution[s] to variously include and exclude people from the field of religious publication and composition....It is long overdue for the Catholic Church to detach itself from the old forms for enforcement and embrace the new world of digital and rivalrous publication and composition....

This of it: A private company using a legal monopoly to sell at a profit the Psalms we are mandated to sing and using the state to crack down on all who attempt to compete or give them away for free. The GIA and the USCCB are playing with fire here. The Reformation was prompted by injustices less egregious. All Catholics must stand up and insist that this must not be allowed to happen. If the Church is going to authorize the Revised Grail, access must be efficient and impartial in the only way it can be: the rights to the texts must be completely open access.

PS: Also see Tucker's call for OA to English translations of public-domain Latin texts required by US bishops for use in mass.

Tesseract: Functions to recognize words

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:16:09 +0000

Hello!

I have to do a project on OCR. I have chosen tesseract and I have to
add some functionalities or change some parameters to do several
tests. The problem is that I can't find where exactly in the code the
functions to change are. I have already looked in ccmain/baseapi.cpp,
control.cpp and tesseractmain.cpp but I don't see what to modify.

Open Access: Bioline seeks members and sponsors

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:02:51 +0000

Bioline International has launched a membership and sponsorship program. From today's announcement:

Currently, the world’s research knowledge base is incomplete. Research carried out in the developing world is little known and under-used.

A joint initiative between the Centre for Environmental Research Information in Brazil and the University of Toronto Scarborough, Bioline International has as its main goal the global exchange of essential research information published in developing countries, thereby improving the South to North and South to South flow of research knowledge. To this end, it is launching a major drive towards sustainability by inviting international Membership and Sponsorship by organizations and individuals supporting its aims.

Bioline currently provides access to 70 journals from 15 countries published in the developing world. Subject areas focus on issues of global importance, including medical research, emerging infectious diseases, global public health, climate change, food security and biodiversity. In 2007, a further 70 new journals applied to join Bioline International in order to take advantage of open access to their publications. These publishers have taken note of the greatly increased usage of existing journals on the system 3.5 million full text downloads were recorded in 2007.

In order to meet this high demand for Bioline’s services, Bioline must now establish a long-term, sustainable funding model which includes support from the worldwide community. “ Too often we think of scientific knowledge and the developing countries in terms of what ‘we’ can do for ‘them’, ” says Lynn Copeland, Dean of Library Services and University Librarian, Simon Fraser University Library, Canada. “We need to nurture the organizations and initiatives that challenge this limiting point of view, enriching the international scholarly community with important research and neglected perspectives from the developing world.”

By participating in the new Bioline Membership and Sponsorship program, libraries and research organizations can express their support for the publication of open access journals, ensure continued access to valuable and unique content, and help bring new titles to the Bioline International website. As no charges are made to publishers, all fees and donations are used directly to support the website and document enhancement costs.

Institutional membership fees are set at the modest level of $500/year to enable widespread support. Foundation and special sponsorship fees may be negotiated on an individual basis....

Open Access: More on data sharing in biomedicine

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:28:04 +0000

Heather A. Piwowar and Wendy Chapman, Identifying data sharing in biomedical literature, AIMA Annual Symposium Proceedings, November 2008. Since the 2008 proceedings are not yet online (OA or TA) at the AIMA web site, I'm linking to the abstract at PubMed.

Abstract: Many policies and projects now encourage investigators to share their raw research data with other scientists. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of these initiatives because data can be shared in such a variety of mechanisms and locations. We propose a novel approach to finding shared datasets: using NLP techniques to identify declarations of dataset sharing within the full text of primary research articles. Using regular expression patterns and machine learning algorithms on open access biomedical literature, our system was able to identify 61% of articles with shared datasets with 80% precision. A simpler version of our classifier achieved higher recall (86%), though lower precision (49%). We believe our results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and hope to inspire further study of dataset retrieval techniques and policy evaluation.

PS: See our blog post linking to two OA versions of the preprint.

BioMed OA: PsycINFO extends coverage of BioMed Central titles

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:23:50 +0000

The American Psychological Association has recently increased its coverage of BioMed Central journals, accepting the following 5 titles for inclusion in its abstracting database PsycINFO:

A full list of all our journals indexed by PsycINFO is available from our website.

These journals are amongst our cluster of neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry journals being promoted at the current Neuroscience 2008 meeting in Washington; if you are attending please drop by the BioMed Central stand for more information.

Planet Linked Data: DBpedia version 3.2 released including the new DBpedia Ontology

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:54:36 +0000

we are happy to announce the release of DBpedia version 3.2.

The new knowledge base has been extracted from the October 2008 Wikipedia dumps. Compared to the last release, the new knowledge base provides three mayor improvements:

1. DBpedia Ontology

DBpedia now features a shallow, cross-domain ontology, which has been manually created based on the most commonly used infoboxes within Wikipedia. The ontology currently covers over 170 classes which form a subsumption hierarchy and have 940 properties. The ontology is instanciated by a new infobox data extraction method which is based on hand-generated mappings of Wikipedia infoboxes to the DBpedia ontology. The mappings define fine-granular rules on how to parse infobox values. The mappings also adjust weaknesses in the Wikipedia infobox system, like having different infoboxes for the same class (currently 350 Wikipedia templates are mapped to 170 ontology classes), using different property names for the same property (currently 2350 template properties are mapped to 940 ontology properties), and not having clearly defined datatypes for properties. Therefore, the instance data within the infobox ontology is much cleaner and better structured than the infobox data within the DBpedia infobox dataset which is generated using the old infobox extraction code. The DBpedia Ontology currently contains about 882.000 instances.

More information about the ontology is found at http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Ontology

2. RDF Links to Freebase

Freebase is an open-license database which provides data about million of things from various domains. Freebase has recently released an Linked Data interface to their content. As there is a big overlap between DBpedia and Freebase, we have added 2.4 million RDF links to DBpedia pointing at the corresponding things in Freebase. These links can be used to smush and fuse data about a thing from DBpedia and Freebase.

For more information about the Freebase links see
http://blog.dbpedia.org/2008/11/15/dbpedia-is-now-interlinked-with-freebase-links-to-opencyc-updated/

3. Cleaner Abstacts

Within the old DBpedia dataset it occurred that the abstracts for different languages contained Wikpedia markup and other strange characters. For the 3.2 release, we have improved DBpedia’s abstract extraction code which results in much cleaner abstracts that can safely be displayed in user interfaces.

Access the new DBpedia knowledge base

The new DBpedia release can be downloaded from:

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Downloads32

and is also available via the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint at

http://dbpedia.org/sparql

and via DBpedia’s Linked Data interface. Example URIs:

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin
http://dbpedia.org/page/Oliver_Stone

Lots of thanks to everybody who contributed to the Dbpedia 3.2 release!

Especially:

1. Georgi Kobilarov (Freie Universität Berlin) who designed and implemented the new infobox extraction framework.
2. Anja Jentsch (Freie Universität Berlin) who contributed to implementing the new extraction framework and wrote the infobox to ontology class mappings.
3. Paul Kreis (Freie Universität Berlin) who improved the datatype extraction code.
4. Andreas Schultz (Freie Universität Berlin) for generating the Freebase to DBpedia RDF links.
5. Everybody at OpenLink Software for hosting DBpedia on a Virtuoso server and for providing the statistics about the new Dbpedia knowledge base.

Have fun with the new DBpedia knowledge base!

Open Access: OA as reparation

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:05:55 +0000

Ancestry.co.uk now hosts an OA database of Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1812-1834. There's an unusual story here, reported by Ligali.org:

A campaign to get free community access to the register of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean has borne fruit after the intervention of petitioner Martin Booth, community worker Arthur Torrington and over 9000 supporters.

Several months ago the [UK] Prime Minister rejected a petition to “Give African descendants free access to slavery records” arguing that the original versions of these records are available for anyone to go and see, free of charge, at The National Archives’ reading rooms in Kew.

In response, Arthur Torrington, secretary of the Equiano Society and the Windrush Foundation wrote a letter to the government stating; “Free online access may be regarded as a form of reparation for the cruelty and injustice by the British in the era of African enslavement. Saying that the government considered that free access “would incur significant cost” highlights the disregard for the hurt felt by our ancestors and their descendants at the hands of the British. Your statement ignores the many billions of pounds (£) earned by British traders/traffickers who relied on the forced labour of African prisoners. This country’s wealth was built on that labour.”

The website requires users to register with its American parent company [Ancestry.com] that owns the data but after that access is free....

Comments

The Ligali story says that the data are owned by Ancestry.com. But I don't understand that. The data must be in the public domain, and it appears that the original paper documents are in the custody of the UK National Archives. I can't tell in what sense Ancestry.com has an ownership claim here, although I can understand why it might require registration in exchange for hosting the files.
The Ligali story also suggests, without quite asserting, that the UK government paid to digitize the records. Can anyone confirm that UK taxpayers footed the bill? If so, why aren't the files hosted by the UK government with no access restrictions for users, perhaps as another OA collection of the National Archives?

Tesseract: How to use tesseract-2.03

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:04:19 +0000

i am new to ocr tesseract. i want know how to install tesseract-2.03.
how to java application.

thanks
sam

Open Access: Test driving repository deposits with SWORD

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:37:29 +0000

Stuart Lewis reports that the SWORD 2 project has launched a test repository. Excerpt:

Have you ever wanted to try out SWORD, but don’t yet have a repository that supports it? As part of the JISC funded ‘SWORD 2? project, we have now made available a test DSpace repository....

If you’ve not used SWORD before, and want to give it a go, here’s what you’ll need to [take the following 6 steps]....

You’ll have seen from going through this process that a really good client is needed to make SWORD easy to use by all users....Clients need to be user friendly, work in the way that users expect them to, and work in the environments that users want them to. The Microsoft Office SWORD deposit tool is a good first example of this.

Watch out for the launch of a new easier to use and more fully featured SWORD deposit client that also deals with the packaging issue in the next 24 hours whilst I’m at the SPARC digital repositories meeting.

Open Access: New OA journal of wetlands

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:30:59 +0000

The Journal of Wetlands Ecology is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the Wetland Friends of Nepal. (Thanks to Otterman speaks.) The inaugural issue now online.

Open Access: Open knowledge definition now in Greek

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:27:17 +0000

The Open Knowledge Definition has been translated into Greek.

Open Access: Ireland's Digital Humanities Observatory

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:25:40 +0000

The EU Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) has launched the Irish Digital Humanities Observatory. From the DHO site:

...The DHO has in a few short months begun to effectively establish its presence and deliver on its pledge to become a knowledge resource providing outreach and education on a broad range of digital humanities topics. As a digital repository it positioning itself to provide data management, curation, and discovery services supporting long-term access to, and greater exploitation of, digital resources in the creation of new models, methodologies, and paradigms for 21st century scholarship.

Activities of the DHO include organising the very successful first Digital Humanities Summer School in Ireland; a series of internationally-recognised speakers during its autumn speaker series; and delivering workshops on topics including digital project management, text encoding, and digital imaging. Over the coming months the DHO will launch a community-focused web portal and Database of Research and Projects in Ireland (DRAPIer). DRAPIer will help to raise the visibility of digital humanities projects throught the island and connect researchers and resources in the humanities in Ireland and throughout the world. An article about the DHO by Dick Ahlstrom, The Irish Times Science Editor, appeared in The Irish Times on Thursday 23 October....

According to the Irish Times article cited above, some of the DHO contents will be TA, but "a growing amount of this material is being made freely available to the public over the internet."

Information Aesthetics: Chocolate Fudge Pie Chart

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:01:59 +0000

After the pizza box pie chart and the pie chart already eaten, now more pie chart craziness in form of a cleverly divided chocolate fudge cake [maryandmatt.net], made of out of exactly 70% milk, 20% dark and 10% white chocolate. If there is anything else in this world that is circular, eatable and proportionable, I am sure we will see it soon in form of a chart.

Via Swissmiss.

Tesseract: Can't open file to get path

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:18:06 +0000

Hi,
I build the tesseract.exe under cygwin. However, when I invoke is from
the command line
like

tesseract phototest out

it produces the error message below:

[/cygdrive/tesseract-2.03/ccma in] tesseract phototest out
main:Error:Can't open file:out to get path
8 [sig] tesseract 3616 _cygtls::handle_exceptions: Error while

OCRopus: XYCUTS Segmentations

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:38:17 +0000

Hi All,

I am currently using version 0.2 and try out the new XYCUTS page
segmentation algorithm make_SegmentPageByXYCUTS(), however I found
that after segmentation the intarray didn't pass the
check_page_segmentation() function, therefore I can not use it for
RegionExtractor, did anyone had the similar problem?