Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 26, 2011

21st-Century Data Miners Meet 19th-Century Electrical Cables

Filed under: Data Mining,Machine Learning — Patrick Durusau @ 4:09 pm

21st-Century Data Miners Meet 19th-Century Electrical Cables by Cynthia Rudin, Rebecca J. Passonneau, Axinia Radeva, Steve Ierome, and Delfina F. Isaac, Computer, June 2011 (vol. 44 no. 6).

As they say, the past is never far behind. In this case, about 5% of the low-voltage cables in Manhattan were installed before 1930. The records of Consolidated Edison (ConEd) on its cabling and manholes to access it, vary in form, content and originate in different departments, starting in the 1880’s. Yes, the 1880’s for those of you who thing the 1980’s are ancient history.

From the article:

The text in trouble tickets is very irregular and thus challenging to process in its raw form. There are many spellings of each word–for instance, the term “service box” has at least 38 variations, including SB, S, S/B, S.B, S?B, S/BX, SB/X, S/XB, /SBX, S.BX, S&BX, S?BX, S BX, S/B/X, S BOX, SVBX, SERV BX, SERV-BOX, SERV/BOX, and SERVICE BOX.

Similar difficulties plagued determining the type of event from trouble tickets, etc.

Read the article for the details on how the researchers were successful at showing legacy data can assist in the maintenance of a current electrical grid.

I suspect that “service box” is used by numerous utilities and with similar divergences in its recording. A more general application written as a topic map would preserve all those variations and use them in searching other data records. It is the reuse of user analysis and data that make them so valuable.

Wargames, simulations, & exercises

Filed under: Wargames — Patrick Durusau @ 4:08 pm

Wargames, simulations, & exercises

Information about wargaming by professionals.

I wonder how they simulate semantic impedance?

Put another way, how would topic maps assist with Command, Control, Communications, and Computers Information Technology (C4I-IT)?

Given the need the reported lack of integration between intelligence services, I suspect there is ample opportunity for topic maps to play a role. (sorry)

regulations.gov

Filed under: Data Source,Government Data — Patrick Durusau @ 4:06 pm

regulations.gov

An easy source of US government regulations, which you can then use to demonstrate how your topic map application either maps the regulation into a legal environment or maps named individuals who win or lose under the regulation (in or out of government).

June 25, 2011

Hammock-driven Development

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Clojure — Patrick Durusau @ 8:51 pm

Hammock-driven Development

From the description:

Rich Hickey’s second, “philosophical” talk at the first Clojure Conj, in Durham, North Carolina on October 23rd, 2010.

The presentation reminded me of this story in Peopleware (p. 67):

In my years at Bell Labs, we worked in two-person offices. They were spacious, quiet, and the phones could be diverted. I shared my office with Wendl Thomis who went on to build a small empire as an electronic toy maker. In those days, he was working on the ESS fault dictionary. The dictionary scheme relied on the notion of n-space proximity, a concept hairy enough to challenge even Wendl’s powers of concentration. One afternoon, I was bent over a program listing while Wendl was staring into space, his feet propped up on the desk. Our boss came in and asked, “Wendl! What are you doing?” Wendl said, “I’m thinking.” And the boss said, “Can’t you do that at home?”

If you liked that story, you will like the presentation.

Everything that is said about software development is directly applicable to authoring topic maps and standards.

DBpedia Live

Filed under: DBpedia — Patrick Durusau @ 8:50 pm

DBpedia Live

From the website:

The main objective of DBpedia is to extract structured information from Wikipedia, convert it into RDF, and make it freely available on the Web. In a nutshell, DBpedia is the Semantic Web mirror of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia users constantly revise Wikipedia articles with updates happening almost each second. Hence, data stored in the official DBpedia endpoint can quickly become outdated, and Wikipedia articles need to be re-extracted. DBpedia-Live enables such a continuous synchronization between DBpedia and Wikipedia.

Important Links:

OK, so you have a live feed. Now how do you judge the importance of updates and which ones trigger alerts to the user? Or are important enough to trigger merges? (Assuming not all possible merges are worth the expense.)

Windows and HackReduce

Filed under: Conferences,MapReduce — Patrick Durusau @ 8:49 pm

I was reminded of Windows users who want to run Hadoop by this post:

At the #hackreduce Hadoop workshop

Has an algorithm for parsing internal links at Wikipedia.

Sounds like an interesting event.

HackReduce Data

Filed under: Conferences,Dataset,Hadoop,MapReduce — Patrick Durusau @ 8:49 pm

HackReduce Data

Data sets and instructions on data sets for Hack/Reduce Big Data. Hackathon.

Includes:

Always nice to have data of interest to a user community when demonstrating topic maps.

June 24, 2011

The White Man’s Burden (in the 21st Century)

Filed under: Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 10:55 am

Kipling (author of The White Man’s Burden in 1899) would have enjoyed the “about’ page for Technology for Transparency Network, where he would find:

The Technology for Transparency Network is a research and mapping project that aims to improve understanding of the current state of online technology projects that increase transparency and accountability in Central & Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union.

(and then jump to the final paragraph)

For years now there has been an ongoing debate about whether the Internet is good or bad for democracy. But we have few case studies and even fewer comparative research mappings of Internet-based projects that aim to improve governance, especially in countries outside of North America and Western Europe. Hopefully the Technology for Transparency Network will lead not only to more informed debate about the Internet’s impact on democracy, but also to more participation and interest in projects that aim to empower and improve the livelihoods of citizens who were previously excluded from political participation. (emphasis added)

Governments in North American and Western Europe may be releasing more data than other governments. Such as White House visitor lists that are incomplete, don’t show who was met or why, or the substance of the conversations or agreements. The released data is like a lollipop given to distract an unruly child. It may be really big and tasty, but the adult conversation continues while it is being consumed.

For example, what about the black hole that is the US military budget? True transparency would trace from the bill in congress to each branch of the service to each contact to each subcontract and subsubcontracts and thence to every state and employer in that state, along with reports on the usefulness of that particular item or service and then back to the member of congress who introduced it (more likely written by the prime contractor) into the budget. Or doing the same for the organized fraud that is the airport screening by the TSA, that since 9/11 has not caught a single terrorist, not one.

Or even better, all the diplomatic cables from North American and Western European governments while they mis-managed the last half of the 20th century? There are plenty of folks who are still alive who might have something to say about those discussions. Oh, people might be held accountable for betraying their countries and fellow citizens? Well, that is what transparency is all about, accountability.

Topic maps can be one part of a solution to help bring transparency and accountability to governments, no matter where they are located. Even including North America and Western Europe.

In part because diverse topic maps, using multiple national languages and views of the world, can be merged while retaining the integrity of those views. Which means users of the merged topic map, can look for absences as well as intersections of interest. To empower people to make demands to fill in the missing pieces.

PS: Any governments that are about to fall. Please post all diplomatic cables to a public ftp site. The other governments let you fall so you don’t owe them anything.

Clojure/core Reading List

Filed under: Clojure — Patrick Durusau @ 10:48 am

Clojure/core Reading List

Haven’t looked at all of them but the relational algebra with Clojure datatypes was excellent!

Good Machine Learning Blogs

Filed under: Machine Learning — Patrick Durusau @ 10:48 am

Good Machine Learning Blogs

Something to keep you off the streets for a while. 😉

The Smarter Computing Blog

Filed under: BigData,BigInsights — Patrick Durusau @ 10:47 am

The Smarter Computing Blog

An interesting IBM blog on “big data” and responses to it.

Looking for something more to say, I happened upon its “about” page. Judge for yourself but it took me back to the ’60’s, listening to Men and Molecules on a “pocket-size” transitor radio. Absolute faith in science and technology. Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep fondness for both, but I no longer automatically trust either one.

From the “about” page:

We are seeing dramatic shifts as our planet becomes smarter. These shifts are changing the way the world works. Cities are becoming smarter by transforming traffic systems, water systems, security—every possible form of municipal infrastructure. Business process is evolving across every industry—banking, trading, manufacturing. And we’re seeing changes in the way people live, enjoying advancements ranging from reduced congestion and pollution to new ways to communicate and collaborate. Every aspect of life is benefiting from the instrumentation, interconnection and infusion of intelligence into the systems of the world. Nothing is changing more than information technology: the way it’s accessed, the way it’s applied, and the way it’s architected. The opportunities for innovation have never been greater. Enterprises in every industry can use breakthroughs in technology to create new business models, find new ways of delivering technology-based services, and generate new insights from IT to fuel innovation and dramatically improve the economics of IT. New technology innovations signal that we are entering a new era of computing—smarter computing—the era of insight for discovery.

It’s official — the grand central EDW will never happen

Filed under: Data Warehouse,Enterprise Integration,Semantic Web — Patrick Durusau @ 10:46 am

It’s official — the grand central EDW will never happen

Kurt Monash cites presentations at the Enzee Universe conference by IBM, Merv Adrian (Gartner) and Forrester Research panning the idea of a grand central EDW (Enterprise Data Warehouse).

If that isn’t going to happen for any particular enterprise, does that mean no universal data warehouse, a/k/a, the Semantic Web?

Even if Linked Data were to succeed in linking all data together, that’s the easy part. Useful access has always been a question of mapping semantics and that’s the hard part. The part that requires people in the loop. People like librarians.

How to use Scala and Lucene to create a basic search application

Filed under: Lucene,Scala,Search Engines — Patrick Durusau @ 10:45 am

How to use Scala and Lucene to create a basic search application

From the post:

How to use Scala and Lucene to create a basic search application. One of the powerful benefits of Scala is that it has full access to any Java libraries; giving you a tremendous number of available resources and technology. This example doesn’t tap into the full power of Lucene, but highlights how easy it is to incorporate Java libraries into a Scala project.

This example is based off a Twitter analysis app I’ve been noodling on; which I am utilizing Lucene. The code below takes a list of tweets from a text file; creates an index that you can search and extract info from.

Nice way to become familiar both with Scala and Lucene.

SearchBlox Version 6.4 released

Filed under: Search Engines — Patrick Durusau @ 10:44 am

SearchBlox Version 6.4 released

From the post:

SearchBlox V6.4 is now available. This release has a few new features and some important bug fixes.

  • SearchBlox can now automatically detect text files on the files system and index them irrespective of their file extensions. This has been a long standing feature request. You will now be able to use SearchBlox to search across repositories of text files such as source code files and log files. To exclude files with specific file extensions being indexed, the Disallow Filters can be used.
  • The filename of the indexed document is now available as a separate tag in the XML search results
  • HTTPS indexing is now functional in the SearchBlox Server packages
  • Issue with indexing of some MS Office documents is now fixed
  • Foreign characters in search queries using the basic search form works correctly

Detection of text files without relying on file extensions is a welcome improvement!

Online Math Videos

Filed under: Mathematics — Patrick Durusau @ 10:44 am

Online Math Videos

Collection by Dave Richeson, which is described as:

The purpose of this page is to consolidate online mathematics lectures. Right now I am focusing on video and not audio, but I may expand in that direction eventually. This page is aimed at mathematics faculty and graduate students, but others may find useful links here too. I hope this can be a resource for people like me who want to keep abreast of current mathematics, but who are not at a research university that has regular seminars and colloquia.

langref.org

Filed under: Programming,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 10:43 am

langref.org

From the website:

Welcome to langref.org. This is a repository of some standard programming situations you might encounter and their solutions in a variety of languages. There are currently 1598 solutions to 87 problems in 16 languages.

This is a small but interesting collection of programming problems with solutions in several languages. Well, small when compared to the problems found in Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming. 😉

If you can stand the cries of: “why isn’t it finished yet?,” “why isn’t it more complete?,” “why doesn’t it cover X?,” etc., give me a poke if you would like to see something similar for semantic integration issues. For any semantic integration issue there are going to be any number of approaches, starting with: “Is this a problem you want to invest in solving?” If so, see step 2 (which will be various strategies with different costs and tradeoffs)

June 23, 2011

Big Data Could Be Big Pain Without Semantic Search To Help Filter It

Filed under: BigData,Filters,Searching,Semantics — Patrick Durusau @ 2:00 pm

Big Data Could Be Big Pain Without Semantic Search To Help Filter It

From the post:

Search Explore Engine leverages the core of its Cogito Focus technology to provides multiple ways to filter data with the help of semantic tagging and categorization. But it also includes a new interface that Scagliarini says makes it more accessible to less advanced users for intuitive, visual navigation of tags and facets, as well as interaction with search results to discover new connections and data.

One feature, the treemapgraphic, summarizes information included in a search data stream by representing each topic in a different color, using the size of squares to indicate the frequency of similar documents, and using shades of color tp distinguish recent news from older events.

“A big chunk of the innovation in Search Explore Engine is really to make it simple to integrate information,” he says. As an example, it provides an out-of-the-box geographic taxonomy for identifying specific geographic areas referenced in the dynamic information stream or licensed data streams, and enabling users to create ways to access that information using integration with maps. “So they can create an area of interest [on a map] and retrieve information mainly about that area. Or there’s the possibility to give a visualization of entity maps – all the entities included in a set of documents that you select have a visual representation that shows which kinds of entities are related to which kind of other entities, so you can use the map to filter down and identify your search criteria or your search intent,” he says.

The solution is initially targeted at advanced knowledge workers but Scagliarini says that the user base will expand pretty quickly. “This level of sophistication is done by the business analyst or the marketing managers or those dealing with extracting knowledge,” who will prepackage and distribute the information inside the organization, he says, “but we think progressively this need is broader in the organization. If you don’t have any kind of ways to filter more effectively all the information you have access to, you are already at a disadvantage and that can get only worse.”

I am torn between the two lines:

there’s the possibility to give a visualization of entity maps – all the entities included in a set of documents that you select have a visual representation that shows which kinds of entities are related to which kind of other entities, so you can use the map to filter down and identify your search criteria or your search intent (emphasis added)

or

If you don’t have any kind of ways to filter more effectively all the information you have access to, you are already at a disadvantage and that can get only worse. (emphasis added)

as to which one I like better.

The one on “entity maps” is talking about topic maps without using the term and the one about filtering captures one aspect of the modern information dilemma that topic maps can solve.

Which one do you like better?

British Library Makes Available 250,000 Digitized Books

Filed under: Books,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 1:58 pm

British Library Makes Available 250,000 Digitized Books

From the post:

The British Library is making available 250,000 texts through Google’s Books system.

As a legal deposit library,The British Library gets copies of all books produced in the U.K. and Ireland, as well as overseas books published in Britain.

The texts, some published in the 18th century, are in the public domain. Included in the collection will be books on mathematics, science, and engineering, which would serve as invaluable resources for historians of science and today’s scientists and researchers. It’s plausible that there is plenty of original thinking that’s been overlooked and forgotten–and which will soon be only a Google search away.

This comes on top of the British Library’s effort at bringing 60,000 digital copies of historic books to the general public as a free iPad app. At 150 million texts, the size of Library’s collection is second only to that of the Library of Congress.

See also the IPad, 60,000 Text Story.

The amount of available semantically diverse data grows everyday.

Bio4j – as an AWS snapshot

Filed under: Bio4j,Bioinformatics,Biomedical — Patrick Durusau @ 1:54 pm

Bio4j current release now available as an AWS snapshot

From the post:

For those using AWS (or willing to…) I just created a public snapshot containing the last version of Bio4j DB.

The snapshot details are the following:

  • Snapshot id: snap-25192d4c
  • Snapshot region: EU West (Ireland)
  • Snapshot size: 90 GB

The whole DB is under the folder ‘bio4jdb’.
In order to use it, just create a Bio4jManager instance and start navigating the graph!

Very cool!

Linked Data in Linguistics March 7 – 9, 2012, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

Filed under: Conferences,Linguistics,Linked Data — Patrick Durusau @ 1:53 pm

Linked Data in Linguistics March 7 – 9, 2012, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

Important Dates:

August 7, 2011: Deadline for extended abstracts (four pages plus references)
September 9, 2011: Notification of acceptance
October 23, 2011: One-page abstract for DGfS conference proceedings
December 1, 2011: Camera-ready papers for workshop proceedings (eight pages plus references)
March 7-9, 2012: Workshop
March 6-9, 2012: Conference

From the website:

The explosion of information technology has led to a substantial growth in quantity, diversity and complexity of web-accessible linguistic data. These resources become even more useful when linked. This workshop will present principles, use cases, and best practices for using the linked data paradigm to represent, exploit, store, and connect different types of linguistic data collections.

Recent relevant developments include: (1) Language archives for language documentation, with audio, video, and text transcripts from hundreds of (endangered) languages (e.g. Dobes). (2) Typological databases with typological and geographical data about languages from all parts of the globe (e.g. WALS). (3) Development, distribution and application of lexical-semantic resources (LSRs) in NLP (e.g. WordNet). (4) Multi-layer annotations (e.g. ISO TC37/SC4) and semantic annotation of corpora (e.g. PropBank) by corpus linguists and computational linguists, often accompanied by the interlinking of corpora with LSRs (e.g. OntoNotes).

The general trend of providing data online is accompanied by newly developing possibilities to link linguistic data and metadata. This may include general data sources (e.g. DBpedia.org), but also repositories with specific linguistic information about languages (Multitree.org, LL-MAP, ISO 639-3), as well as about linguistic categories and phenomena (GOLD, ISOcat).

Originally noticed this from a tweet by Lutz Maicher.

The Need For Immutability

Filed under: Immutable,Mapping,Proxies — Patrick Durusau @ 1:52 pm

The Need For Immutability by Andrew Binstock.

From the post:

It makes data items ideal for sharing between threads

Andrew recites a short history of immutability.

Immutability also supports stable mappings between subject representatives.

Six Drafts Published Related to XSLT, XQuery, XPath (21 June 2011)

Filed under: XPath,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 1:50 pm

Six Drafts Published Related to XSLT, XQuery, XPath (21 June 2011)

From the post:

Has anyone compared the addressing capabilities of XQuery to HyTime?

Personal Analytics

Filed under: Analytics,Conferences,Data,Data Analysis — Patrick Durusau @ 1:49 pm

Personal Analytics

An O’Reilly Online Strata Conference.

Free

July 12, 2011

16:00 – 18:30am UTC

From the website:

It’s only in the past decade that we’ve become aware of how much of our lives is recorded. From phone companies to merchants, social networks to employers, everyone’s building a record of us―except us. That’s changing. Once, recording every aspect of your life might have seemed obsessive. Now, armed with the latest smartphones and comfortable with visualizations and analytics, life-logging is no longer fringe behavior. In this Strata OLC, we’ll look at the rapidly growing field of personal analytics. We’ll discuss tool stacks for recording lives, and hear surprising stories about what happens when introspection meets technology.

O’Reilly Strata Online is a fast-paced, web-based conference series tackling the impact of a data-driven, always-on world. It combines thorough tutorials, provocative panel discussions, real-world case studies, and deep-dives into technology stacks.

This could be fun, not to mention a model for mini-conferences perhaps for topic maps.

Advanced Topics in Machine Learning

Advanced Topics in Machine Learning

Andreas Krause and Daniel Golovin course at CalTech. Lecture notes, readings, this will keep you entertained for some time.

Overview:

How can we gain insights from massive data sets?

Many scientific and commercial applications require us to obtain insights from massive, high-dimensional data sets. In particular, in this course we will study:

  • Online learning: How can we learn when we cannot fit the training data into memory? We will cover no regret online algorithms; bandit algorithms; sketching and dimension reduction.
  • Active learning: How should we choose few expensive labels to best utilize massive unlabeled data? We will cover active learning algorithms, learning theory and label complexity.
  • Nonparametric learning on large data: How can we let complexity of classifiers grow in a principled manner with data set size? We will cover large-­scale kernel methods; Gaussian process regression, classification, optimization and active set methods.

Why would a non-strong AI person list so much machine learning stuff?

Two reasons:

1) Machine learning techniques are incredibly useful in appropriate cases.

2) You have to understand machine learning to pick out the appropriate cases.

June 22, 2011

Computer Musings by Professor Donald E. Knuth

Filed under: Computer Science — Patrick Durusau @ 6:42 pm

Computer Musings by Professor Donald E. Knuth

From the website:

View Computer Musings, lectures given by Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. The Stanford Center for Professional Development has digitized more than one hundred tapes of Knuth’s musings, lectures, and selected classes and posted them online. These archived tapes resonate with not only his thoughts, but with insights from students, audience members, and other luminaries in mathematics and computer science. They are available to the public free of charge.

Knuth brings both clear understanding and expression to every subject he addresses.

Both are essential for a useful topic map.

structr – Features List (unordered and incomplete)

Filed under: Neo4j,structr — Patrick Durusau @ 6:41 pm

structr – Features List (unordered and incomplete)

Structr is a cms based upon Neo4j.

I don’t recall any feature lists admitting to being “unordered.”

Many claim to be incomplete, the implication there is more to see.

VoltDB Announces Hadoop Integration

Filed under: Hadoop,VoltDB — Patrick Durusau @ 6:41 pm

VoltDB Announces Hadoop Integation

From the announcement:

VoltDB, a leading provider of high-velocity data management systems, today announced the release of VoltDB Integration for Hadoop. The new product functionality, available in VoltDB Enterprise Edition, allows organizations to selectively stream high velocity data from a VoltDB cluster into Hadoop’s native HDFS file system by leveraging Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), which has SQL-to-Hadoop integration technology, Apache Sqoop, built in.

“The term ‘big data’ is being applied to a diverse set of data storage and processing problems related to the growing volume, variety and velocity of data and the desire of organizations to store and process data sets in their totality,” said Matt Aslett, senior analyst, enterprise software, The 451 Group. “Choosing the right tool for the job is crucial: high velocity data requires an engine that offers fast throughput and real-time visibility; high volume data requires a platform that can expose insights in massive data sets. Integration between VoltDB and CDH will help organizations to combine two special purpose engines to solve increasingly complex data management problems.”

See also: Cloudera – Apache Hadoop Connector for Netezza.

I can’t imagine a better environment for promotion of topic maps than “big data.” The more data there is processed, the more semantic integration issues will come to the fore. At least to clients paying the bills for sensible answers. It is sorta like putting teenagers in Indy race cars. It won’t take all that long before some of them will decide they need driving lessons.

Cloudera – Apache Hadoop Connector for Netezza

Filed under: Hadoop,Netezza — Patrick Durusau @ 6:40 pm

Cloudera Delivers Apache Hadoop Connector for Netezza

From the announcement:

Cloudera Inc., a leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, today announced the immediate general availability of the Cloudera Connector for IBM Netezza appliances. The connector allows Netezza users to leverage Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Enterprise services, support and management tools to derive highly articulated analytical insights from large unstructured data sets. The Cloudera Connector, which is the first of its kind for CDH and Cloudera Enterprise, enables high-speed, bilateral data transfer between CDH and Netezza environments.

“As the amount of data that organizations need to process, especially for analytics, continues to increase, Apache Hadoop is increasingly becoming an important data integration tool to enhance performance in reducing very large amounts of data to only what is needed in the data warehouse,” said Donald Feinberg, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Hadoop presents a viable solution for organizations looking to address the challenges presented by large scale data and has the potential to extend the capabilities of a company’s data warehouse by providing expanded opportunities for analysis and storage for complex data sets.”

See also: VoltDB Announces Hadoop Integration.

I can’t imagine a better environment for promotion of topic maps than “big data.” The more data there is processed, the more semantic integration issues will come to the fore. At least to clients paying the bills for sensible answers. It is sorta like putting teenagers in Indy race cars. It won’t take all that long before some of them will decide they need driving lessons.

Weave – Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment

Filed under: Analytics,Geographic Data,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 6:40 pm

Weave – Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment

From the webpage:

Weave (BETA 1.0) is a new web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. Weave is an application development platform supporting multiple levels of user proficiency – novice to advanced – as well as the ability to integrate, disseminate and visualize data at “nested” levels of geography.

Weave has been developed at the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research of the University of Massachusetts Lowell in partnership with the Open Indicators Consortium, a nine member national collaborative of public and nonprofit organizations working to improve access to more and higher quality data.

The installation videos are something to point at if you have users doing their own installations of MySQL, Java, Tomcat, or Flash for any reason.

I would quibble with the installation of Tomcat using “root” and “password,” as the username and password for the admin page of Tomcat. Good security is hard enough to teach without really bad examples of security practices in tutorial materials.

The visualization capabilities look quite nice.

Originally saw this in a tweet from Lutz Maicher.

Open Specification Interactive Pivot

Filed under: Indexing,Navigation,Silverlight — Patrick Durusau @ 6:39 pm

Open Specification Interactive Pivot

Uses Sliverlight technology to provide navigation across most of Microsoft’s Open Specifications (more are coming).

I had to switch to my IE (version 8) browser to get it to work but I guess it really didn’t need a “best if viewed with IE * or later” warning label. 😉

Impressive work and not just for the search/browsing capabilities. The more such information becomes available, the easier it is to illustrate the varying semantics even within one corporate development domain.

Not that varying semantics is a bad thing, on the contrary, they are perfectly natural. But in some cases we may need to overcome them for particular purposes. The first step in that process is recognition of the varying semantics.

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