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

December 9, 2012

BigMLer in da Cloud: Machine Learning made even easier [Amateur vs. Professional Models]

Filed under: Cloud Computing,Machine Learning,WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 5:19 pm

BigMLer in da Cloud: Machine Learning made even easier by Martin Prats.

From the post:

We have open-sourced BigMLer, a command line tool that will let you create predictive models much easier than ever before.

BigMLer wraps BigML’s API Python bindings to offer a high-level command-line script to easily create and publish Datasets and Models, create Ensembles, make local Predictions from multiple models, and simplify many other machine learning tasks. BigMLer is open sourced under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

“…will let you create predictive models much easier than ever before.”

Well…., true, but the amount of effort you invest in a predictive model has a relationship to the usefulness of the model for some given purpose.

It is a great idea to create an easy “on ramp” to introduce machine learning. But it may lead some users to confuse “…easier than ever before” models with professionally crafted models.

An old friend confided their organization was about to write a classification system for a well know subject. Exciting to think they will put all past errors to rest while adding new capabilities.

But in reality librarians have labored in such areas for centuries. It isn’t an good target for a start-up project. Particularly for those innocent of existing classification systems and the theory/praxis that drove their creation.

Librarians didn’t invent the Internet. If they had, we wouldn’t be searching for ways to curate information on the Internet, in a backwards compatible way.

November 30, 2012

Linking Web Data for Education Project [Persisting Heterogeneity]

Filed under: Education,Linked Data,WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 3:48 pm

Linking Web Data for Education Project

From the about page:

LinkedUp aims to push forward the exploitation of the vast amounts of public, open data available on the Web, in particular by educational institutions and organizations.

This will be achieved by identifying and supporting highly innovative large-scale Web information management applications through an open competition (the LinkedUp Challenge) and dedicated evaluation framework. The vision of the LinkedUp Challenge is to realise personalised university degree-level education of global impact based on open Web data and information. Drawing on the diversity of Web information relevant to education, ranging from Open Educational Resources metadata to the vast body of knowledge offered by the Linked Data approach, this aim requires overcoming substantial challenges related to Web-scale data and information management involving Big Data, such as performance and scalability, interoperability, multilinguality and heterogeneity problems, to offer personalised and accessible education services. Therefore, the LinkedUp Challenge provides a focused scenario to derive challenging requirements, evaluation criteria, benchmarks and thresholds which are reflected in the LinkedUp evaluation framework. Information management solutions have to apply data and learning analytics methods to provide highly personalised and context-aware views on heterogeneous Web data.

Before linked data, we had: “…interoperability, multilinguality and heterogeneity problems….”

After linked data, we have: “…interoperability, multilinguality and heterogeneity problems….” + linked data (with heterogeneity problems).

Not unexpected but still need a means of resolution. Topic maps anyone?

October 21, 2012

The personal cloud series

Filed under: Cloud Computing,Users,WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 9:52 am

The personal cloud series by Jon Udell.

Excellent source of ideas on the web/cloud as we experience it today and as we may experience it tomorrow.

Going through prior posts now and will call some of them out for further discussion.

Which ones impress you the most?

August 18, 2012

Creating Your First HTML 5 Web Page [HTML5 – Feature Freeze?]

Filed under: HTML,HTML5,WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 4:06 pm

Creating Your First HTML 5 Web Page by Michael Dorf.

From the post:

Whether you have been writing web pages for a while or you are new to writing HTML, the new HTML 5 elements are still within your reach. It is important to learn how HTML 5 works since there are many new features that will make your pages better and more functional. Once you get your first web page under your belt you will find that they are very easy to put together and you will be on your way to making many more.

To begin, take a look at this base HTML page we will be working with. This is just a plain-ol’ HTML page, but we can start adding HTML5 elements to jazz it up!

But that’s not why I am posting it here. 😉

A little later Michael says:

The new, simple DOCTYPE is much easier to remember and use than previous versions. The W3C is trying to stop versioning HTML so that backwards compatibility will become easier, so there are “technically” no more versions of HTML.

I’m not sure I follow on “…to stop versioning HTML so that backwards compatibility will become easier….”

Unless that means that HTML (5 I assume) is going into a feature/semantic freeze?

That would promote backwards compatibility but I am not sure is a good solution.

Just curious if you have heard the same?

Comments?

Does Time Fix All? [And my response]

Filed under: Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library,WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 3:51 pm

Does Time Fix All? by Daniel Lemire, starts off:

As an graduate, finding useful references was painful. What the librarians had come up with were terrible time-consuming systems. It took an outsider (Berners-Lee) to invent the Web. Even so, the librarians were slow to adopt the Web and you could often see them warn students against using the Web as part of their research. Some of us ignored them and posted our papers online, or searched for papers online. Many, many years later, we are still a crazy minority but a new generation of librarians has finally adopted the Web.

What do you conclude from this story?

Whenever you point to a difficult systemic problem (e.g., it is time consuming to find references), someone will reply that “time fixes everything”. A more sophisticated way to express this belief is to say that systems are self-correcting.

Here is my response:

From above: “… What the librarians had come up with were terrible time-consuming systems. It took an outsider (Berners-Lee) to invent the Web….”

Really?

You mean the librarians who had been working on digital retrieval since the late 1940’s and subject retrieval longer than that? Those librarians?

With the web, every user repeats the search effort of others. Why isn’t repeating the effort of others a “terrible time-consuming system?”

BTW, Berners-Lee invented allowing 404s for hyperlinks. Significant because it lowered the overhead of hyperlinking enough to be practical. It was other CS types with high overhead hyperlinking. Not librarians.

Berners-Lee fixed hyperlinking maintenance, failed and continues to fail on IR. Or have you not noticed?

I won’t amplify my answer here but will wait to see what happens to my comment at Daniel’s blog.

February 26, 2012

December 4, 2011

Digital Methods

Filed under: Graphs,Interface Research/Design,Web Applications,WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 8:16 pm

Digital Methods

From the website:

Welcome to the Digital Methods course, which is a focused section of the more expansive Digital Methods wiki. The Digital Methods course consists of seven units with digital research protocols, specially developed tools, tutorials as well as sample projects. In particular this course is dedicated to how else links, Websites, engines and other digital objects and spaces may be studied, if methods were to follow the medium, as opposed to importing standard methods from the social sciences more generally, including surveys, interviews and observation. Here digital methods are central. Short literature reviews are followed by distinctive digital methods approaches, step-by-step guides and exemplary projects.

Jack Park forwarded this link. A site that merits careful exploration. You will find things that you did not expect. Much like using the WWW. 😉

Curious what parts of it you find to be the most useful/interesting?

The section on digital tools is my current favorite. I suspect that may change as I continue to explore the site.

Enjoy!

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