Marta

Google Books

Marta Retuerto — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:45:45 +0000

It is a service offered by Google which was created in December, 2003. Its main aim is to offer the users information about the content of some books online. That’s why Google started scanning many books, no matter if they have copyright or they haven’t.

The reason of the Copyright or not in some books is that nowadays works, all of them have copyright, but when the author of the work is dead, the Copyright will last for 75 years, at least in Spain. After all these years, the work will be “free”. Those books which are free of Copyright, are complete in Google Books and you can download them in PDF, like El Quijote, de Cervantes.

But they also show some pages of works with Copyright, and many authors, artists, publishing houses are against this service as it breaks the law of Copyright.But in November of 2009 they settle an agreement between Google, Editors and Authors. Here there is more information.

Although it sometimes breaks the law, this is a very useful service, furthermore its use is very simple, you just have to write the title, or specific words and many books related with your search will appear.It is a very useful tool in academic researches, when you’re looking for quotations etc.

SOURCES:

GoogleBooks. (2010) In GoogleDirson. Retrieved 10:45, January 27, 2010, from http://google.dirson.com/post/2787-libros-google-formato-pdf/
GoogleBooks Settlement Agreement (2010). In GoogleBooks. Retrieved 10:48, January 27, 2010, from http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/agreement/

CiteULike

Marta Retuerto — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:59:57 +0000

It is a free online service to organize academic publications. It has been on the Web since October 2004 when its originator was attached to the University of Manchester, and was the first Web-based social bookmarking tool designed specifically for the needs of scientists and scholars.

CiteULike provides metadata for all publications in RIS and BibTeX, providing a solution to the ‘‘Get Metadata’’ problem described in the previous section Metadata: You can’t Always GET What You Want, because every CiteULike URI for a publication has metadata associated with it in exactly the same way.

It is a service whose main aim is social bookmarking and to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers with specific tools developed for that purpose, in the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with del.icio.us) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share information on academic papers .

You can import to your CiteULike library books from GoogleBooks through GoogleScholar thanks to BibTeX easily.

SOURCES:

CiteULike. (2010, January 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:20, January 18, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteULike
CiteUlike, Gestor de Referencias Sociales (2010). In SlideShare. Retrieved 18:15, January 18, 2010, from http://www.slideshare.net/jalonsoarevalo/citeulike-gestor-de-referencias-sociales
CiteULike. (2010) In CiteULike. Retrieved 18:25, January 18, 2010, from http://www.citeulike.org/

Markup languages

Marta Retuerto — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:35:59 +0000

A markup language is a system for annotating a text in a way which is syntactically distinguishable from that text.The first language to make a clear and clean distinction between structure and presentation was Scribe, developed by Brian Reid. Scribe was revolutionary in a number of ways, not least that it introduced the idea of styles separated from the marked up document, and of a grammar controlling the usage of descriptive elements. Scribe influenced the development of Generalized Markup Language (later SGML) and is a direct ancestor to HTML and LaTeX.

However, IBM researcher Charles Goldfarb is more commonly seen today as the “father” of markup languages. Goldfarb hit upon the basic idea while working on a primitive document management system intended for law firms in 1969, and helped invent IBM GML later that same year. GML was first publicly disclosed in 1973.

Presentation Semantics specify how a piece of formal language is represented in a way that is accesible and easy to human vision. Some of the markup languages contain this type of presentation (HTLM) but there are other which do not contain it (XML).

Presentation Semantics and Style Sheets are related in a way that the last ones describe the semantics presentation of a document in Markup Language. Its principal application is in some HTML or XHTML web pages. These sheets enable to distingish the content from presentation. Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. W3C has actively promoted the use of style sheets on the Web since the Consortium was founded in 1994.

Here we have a resumed list of the main markup languages and a little explanation:

TeX

TeX concentrated on detailed layout of text and font descriptions in order to typeset mathematical books in professional quality. This required Knuth to spend considerable time investigating the art of typesetting. However, TeX has a steep learning curve, so that it is mainly used in academia, where it is the de facto standard in many scientific disciplines. A TeX macro package known as LaTeX provides a descriptive markup system on top of TeX, and is widely used.

HTML and XML

Some markup languages, like HTML have presentation semantics, meaning their specification prescribes how the structured data is to be presented, but other markup languages, like XML, have no predefined semantics.

In XML we can distinguish three different types:

XHTML

(Extensible HyperText Markup Language) The language specification requires that XHTML Web documents must be well-formed XML documents – this allows for more rigorous and robust documents while using tags familiar from HTML.

TEI

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. It is used in two projects of the University of Deusto.

RDF/RSS

An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs.

SOURCES:

Markup Languages (2009, October 18). In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:12, October 21, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Markup_language&oldid=320609469

HTML. (2009, October 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:48, October 24, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HTML&oldid=321857681

HTML. (2009) In WebEstilo. Retrieved 10:57, October 24, 2009, from http://www.webestilo.com/html/

TEI (2009) In TEI. Retrieved 15:32, October 23, 2009, from http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml

RSS. (2009, October 27). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:24, November 14, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RSS&oldid=322398208

Tema 5 (2010) In Wiki Littera. Retrieved 12:26, January 28, 2010, from http://wiki.littera.deusto.es/en/index.php/Edicion0910/Tema5

PresentationSemantics. (2009) In Wikipedia, the Free Enclyclopedia. Retrieved 18:23, October 25, 2009 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_semantics

Style Sheets. (2009) In Web Style Sheets. Retrieved 18:56, October 25, 2009, from: http://www.w3.org/Style/

Digital Libraries

Marta Retuerto — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:19:53 +0000

The Furness Shakespeare Collection is a library of the University of Pennsylvania whose curator of Research Services, Annenberg Rare Book & manuscript is Daniel Traister. Michael Ryan is the director of this poject but many Professors have helped in its development.

The Darlington Digital Library was created from the first major collection of books, manuscripts, atlases, and maps donated to the University of Pittsburgh. Most of the credit for assembling the Darlington Collection rightly goes to William M. Darlington, an attorney by profession who was born in Pittsburgh in 1815. Nevertheless, all those books, or at least most of them, are available on the web of the University of Pittsburg .

For that project of digitalization the University Library System (ULS) made a strategic internal investment of its own resources to provide the necessary staffing and equipment for the project.

While many library departments are involved in different phases of the project, the primary digitization responsibility falls on the ULS Digital Research Library (DRL). The DRL commenced scanning books from the Darlington library in the summer of 2006 and will continue its digitization activities for some time.

The DRL comprises three librarians, three scanning technicians, and several University of Pittsburgh graduate students enrolled in the School of Information Science. They have allocated 90 hours of scanning time per week on several different devices.

The result of their work, the current collection is 5 atlases, 1680 books, 51 broadsides, 1825 imaged and 853 maps.

SOURCES:

* The Furness Shakespeare Collection.(2009) In University of Pennsylvania Library. Retrieved 13:02, October 14, 2009, from http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/furness/

* The Darlington Digital Library (2009). In University of Pittsburg. Retrieved 13:04, October 14, 2009, from http://digital.library.pitt.edu/d/darlington/

Characteristics of E-books

Marta Retuerto — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:22:46 +0000

An E-book is an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a PC or with an Ebook reader, for instance, Sony Reader PRS-505 or Papyre.

The electronic book has many advantages. They are economic since many ebooks can be found on the Web for free in some web pages such as the project Gutenberg, in which we can find nearly 30,000 ebooks in different languages. We can also listen to some of them.

Their storage is easier, as they don’t need as much space as traditional books do, they are storaged on computers. This is important in libraries, which used to have problems with storaging all the books but nowadays it has changed due to the ebooks.

Another advantage is that they are ecologic, since they are read on PC or on a Ebook Reader, even in some PDA (Personal Data Assistant) and they are not printed in paper. The advantages of these devices are portability, readability of their screens in bright sunlight, and long battery life. Nevertheless, these electronic devices have also negative consecuences: they are usually expensive, around $259.00, and although the bright of the screens is special for the eyes, they tire them more than the books do.

SOURCES:

* Project Gutenberg Main Page (2009). In Gutenberg. Retrieved 13:05, October 6, 2009, from http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

* List of e-book readers. (2009, October 3). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:02, October 7, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_e-book_readers&oldid=320687807

*Ebook readers (2009). In Amazon. Retrieved 15:45, October 5, 2009, from http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=292565

Cyberplagiarism

Marta Retuerto — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:24:59 +0000

Until the Romanticism, it was not important who had written certain books or plays as the figure of the author was not relevant. However, in this period this changed radically. Owing to this, the rights of the author have been preserved with dedication by the Intellectual Property Organization, which refers to creations of the mind -inventions, literary and artistic works,symbols, names, images-, for the last 2 centuries

As it’s known, there had been plagiarism before, but it is a fact that with Internet, specifically with the WWW, it has increased due to many reasons.

Internet has expanded the number of resources and contents, being their access easy, free and rapid, now more than ever. On the one hand, all this information given by Internet is very useful in education, since it makes the learning process easier due to the fact that anyone with a computer and internet can have access to a lot of information. On the other hand, its use makes plagiarims easier.

This is a problem at Universities because students usually take information from the Internet without verifying it and without saying the author or the source of that idea, what is plagiarism. It’s important to verify the information taken since in Internet everyone, with criteria or without it, can participate.

In order to decrease plagiarism in Universities, they punish students. The consecuences of these activities can be from rewriting the essay to the expulsion of the University. In the English-Speaking countries (USA, Canada, Australia, UK…) is where plagiarism is more controlled and pursued.

SOURCES:

* Ciber-Plagio Académico, Una aproximación al estado de los conocimientos.(2007) In Revista TEXTOS de la CiberSociedad, 10, by Comas, Rubén & Sureda, Jaume, Temática Variada. Retrieved 17:34, September 26,2009, from http://www.cibersociedad.net and http://www.cibersociedad.net/textos/articulo.php?art=121

* What is Intellectual Property? (2009). In World Intellectual Property Organization. Retrieved 16:58, September 26, 2009, from http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/index.html

* Plagiarism. (2009, September 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:25, September 26, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plagiarism&oldid=317393272

Editoriales

Marta Retuerto — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:15:15 +0000

En el siglo 18 surge la Ilustración y a su vez una nueva clase social media, la burguesía. Esta clase social tenía bastante tiempo libre y bastante dinero para gastarlo en ocio. Sabían leer y escribir por lo que es normal el auge de la novela en esta época y como consecuencia, de las editoriales también.

Uno de los primeros éxitos editoriales tras la aparición de la imprenta fue la Enciclopedia francesa, gracias en buena medida a los Burgueses, quienes eran de los pocos que podían permitirse el lujo de comprarla pese a su elevado precio.

La Enciclopedia Francesa fue escrita por Denis Diderot y Jean Le Rond d’Alambert colaboró en su elaboración. El objetivo de esta obra era difundir las ideas de la Ilustración por lo que muchos filósofos, ecritores ilustrados como: Voltaire, Rousseau, Toussaint, entre otros, también dieron su aportación. La Enciclopedia consistía de 17 volúmenes escritos entre 1751 y 1772.

Desde entonces hasta ahora, las editoriales han aumentado su poder e influencia, moviendo cantidades enormes de dinero (sobre un 3% del PIB). Un buen ejemplo es El Grupo Planeta, líder en el sector editorial en España, Portugal, Francia y Latinoamérica, que desde hace mas de 50 años ha absorbido editoriales como Seix Barral, Booket, Espasa, entre otros.

Bibliografía

* Grupo Planeta. (2009). En Planeta. Fecha de consulta: 16:28, 23 de septiembre , 2009 de http://www.planeta.es/esp/asp/areasnegocioa3e3.html?codarea=01

* L’Encyclopédie. (2009, 20 de septiembre). En Wikipedia, La enciclopedia libre. Fecha de consulta: 16:25, 23 de septiembre , 2009 de http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=L%27Encyclop%C3%A9die&oldid=30205921.

* La Enciclopedia, Diccionario razonado de las ciencias, las artes y de los oficios.(2009) Por Manuela Fernández Mayo, A. Tomás García Corral y Mª Ángeles López Peña. F echa de Consulta: 16:35, 23 de septiembre , 2009 de http://thales.cica.es/rd/Recursos/rd99/ed99-0257-01/enciclo.html

Question Answering Systems

Marta Retuerto — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:32:27 +0000

Question Answering (QA) is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language.

QA research attempts to deal with a wide range of question types including: fact, list, definition, How, Why, hypothetical, semantically-constrained, and cross-lingual questions. Search collections vary from small local document collections, to internal organization documents, to compiled newswire reports, to the World Wide Web.

They are important because they allow you to ask for an exact part of concept or whatever you are asking instead of the whole concept.

However, this system has a limited structure. This means that it can only recognise a concret kind of question.

A common Question Answering open-domain system is www.answers.com. There you have many answers and questions about subjects such as history, religion, society, legal issues, etc. For example, if you want to know who is Tom Cruise married to, you ask about it and then they show you directly the answer: Katie Holmes.

Another type of QA is question answering closed-domain system. An example of this system is Anna, from Ikea.

SOURCES:

Question answering. (2009, June 13). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:48, June 19, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Question_answering&oldid=296213100

Answers.com (2009). In Answers.com. Retrieved 12:39, June 19, from http://www.answers.com
Who is Tom Cruise married to (2009). In Wikianswers.com. Retrieved 12:50, June 19, from http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who%20is%20Tom%20Cruise%20married%20to
Ikea Help Centre (2009). In Ikea. Retrieved 12:55, June 19, from http://193.108.42.79/ikea-esen/cgi-bin/ikea-esen.cgi

Machine Translation

Marta Retuerto — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:06:27 +0000

Machine translation, whose abbreviation is MT, is one of the most interesting, useful and complete HLT application.

It is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer softwaretranslate text or speech from one natural language to another to. Using corpus techniques, more complex translations may be attempted, allowing for better handling of differences in linguistic typology, phrase recognition, and translation of idioms, as well as the isolation of anomalies.

There are many online automatic translators such as OpenTrad, Reverso, Lucy or Systran.

Even though these automatic translators make the translation easy for everyone, they have consequences. They translate directly, and, as a result of that, sometimes the translation loses its sense as some words have different meaning depending on the context that the average translator cannot understand.

SOURCES:

Machine translation. (2009, June 12). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:12, June 16, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_translation&oldid=295950237
Questionnaire 3 (2009). In Wiki Littera Deusto. Retrieved 10:15, June 16, 2009, from http://wiki.littera.deusto.es/en/index.php/Hlt0809#Questionnaire_3

Reverso (2009). In Reveerso: Online Translator. Retrieved 10:34, June 17, 2009, from http://www.reverso.net/text_translation.asp?lang=EN

A Flexible Language and Grammar Checker

Marta Retuerto — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:18:22 +0000

The manager of this project is Hans Uszkoreit and it lasted from January 1,1997 to March 31, 2000 .

A Grammar Checker is a program, or part of a program, that attempts to verify written text for grammatical correctness. Grammar checkers are most often implemented as a feature of a larger program, such as a word processor, but are also available as stand-alone application that can be activated from within programs that work with editable text. Some examples of Grammar Checkers are: Language Tool, Microsoft Word grammar checker.

The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence defines this reseach project as a project aimed at developing grammar and controlled language checking technologies using state-of-the-art natural language processing technologies.

This project, FLAG use two techniques in combination to provide enough information for reliable diagnosis and user-mediated correction of a broad set of errors.That set of errors is motivated by corpus investigation.

The two techniques are :

Statical taggers and partial parsers
Rule-based parsing

It is clear that grammar checkers are very useful. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget about some flaws in grammar checkers as it is very difficult for a machine to learn in a correct way a language such as english. They may miss important errors, for example missing preposition and sometimes they offer inaccurate corrections.

SOURCES:

Grammar checker. (2009, June 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:40, June 7, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grammar_checker&oldid=294964099

FLAG, A Flexible Language and Grammar Checker. (2000. March 31). In German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, by Hans Uszkoreit. Retrieved 17:05, June 15, 2009, from http://www.dfki.de/lt/project.php?id=Project_366&l=en
Free Online Grammar Checker(2009). In Yourdictionary.com. Retrieved 14:54, June 14, 2009, from http://www.yourdictionary.com/dictionary-articles/free-online-grammar.html
Language Tool Open Source Language Checker (2009).In Language Tool. Retrieved 14:59, June 14, 2009, from http://www.languagetool.org/