Usually, in each blog article, the readers have the possibility to write comments and the author also can answer them, in such a way that it is possible to establish a dialogue. Nevertheless, it is essential to know that this is an option which depends on the decision of the author, since the tools permit to design blogs in which not all the internet users  are allowed to participate.  The use or the subject of each blog is particular. There are personal blogs, journalistic blogs, enterprising blogs, educative bolgs (edublogs), political blogs…

Blogs or Weblogs has become more popular as time has gone by. Nowadays, we can find on the Internet more than 100 million of blogs. These blogs are not simple diaries; they are also used to talk about politics, business and many other topics.

The phenomenon of blogging will become still more potent than it is nowadays. Anyone of us has the possibility to create a blog due to the easy tools which are obtainable on the Internet.

HOW TO DIFFERENCE A BLOG FROM OTHER WEBSITES

To make that differentiation we have to take into account the following characteristics of a blog:

*The content is published chronologically.

*The content is updated periodically.

*Readers can leave comments on blogs.

*Authors of other blogs have the possibility to interrelate by means of trackbacks and pingbacks.

*The content is unionized by through RSS feeds.

Finally, we have to bear in mind that an online forum also can offer an RSS feed, but the fact of having  this characteristic doesn’t mean that it is a blog. What we have to take into account is that if a web page is a blog, it must have all the characteristics mentioned above.

REFERENCES:

*Blog. (2010). In Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia. Retrieved 13: 47, January 27, 2010, from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

*What is a blog? (2005).By Darren Rowse. In Problogger. Retrieved 13: 52, January 27, 2010, from:  http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/02/05/what-is-a-blog/

*What is a blog? By Susan Gunelius. In About.com: Web Logs. Retrieved 14: 04, January 27, 2010, from:  http://weblogs.about.com/od/startingablog/p/WhatIsABlog.htm

*What is a blog? By Daniel Scocco. In Daily Blog Tips. Retrieved 14:19, January 27, 2010, from: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/what-is-a-blog/

]]> http://amaiaris.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/the-blog/feed/ 0 Amaia Aristondo http://amaiaris.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/citeulike-and-google-books-2/ http://amaiaris.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/citeulike-and-google-books-2/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:31:50 +0000 Amaia Aristondo http://amaiaris.wordpress.com/?p=292 ]]> CiteUlike:

CiteUlike is a famous free online service which is used to arrange academic publications. It was put on the Internet in 2004; exactly by the time its creator was enclosed to the University of Manchester. CiteUlike is designed concretely for the necessities of both, scholars and scientists. The site is maintained by Richard Cameron, in the University of Manchester.

It is a system which is open to any person who permits to maintain, negotiate and share on the internet references of scientific and technique documents. The references are captured by means of a marker of favorites which is installed on the navigator and that extracts the bibliographic data which appears on a particular web page.

The character of CiteUlike is purely academic. It is useful to share scientific references that are visible for everybody. Besides, CiteUlike allows us to work with Bibtex or Endnote and to file private comments on the references.

Google Books:

‘Google Books’ is a service which catalogues information contained within thousands of printed books. This service called ‘Google Books’ was born in 2003 so as to allow users to find any piece of information inside these books.

In order to index this information, Google has developed a specific technology to scan them and to classify their information.

According to ‘The New York Times’, by 2007 Google had digitalized about one million of books. And two years later, in 2009, Google annunciated that the sum of scanned books was over ten million.

Besides, Google also offers the complete contents of some books. Those can be detected selecting the option of ‘entire books’ in the option of ‘advanced search’.

REFERENCES:

.Google Books. In Google Dirson, noticias de google en español. Retrieved 12:30, December 23, 2009, from: http://google.dirson.com/o.a/google-books

.Google Books. In Google Dirson, noticias de google en español. Retrieved 12: 35, December 23, 2009, from: http://google.dirson.com/post/2787-libros-google-formato-pdf/

.CiteUlike. (29 November,  2009). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 13: 07, December 23, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteULike

.CiteUlike. In Slideshare. Retrieved 14:05, December 23, 2009, from: http://www.slideshare.net/jalonsoarevalo/citeulike-gestor-de-referencias-sociales

Otherwise, we can find different types of markup: presentational, procedural, descriptive, referential, metamarkup and punctuational.

• Presentational: This type indicates the format of the text. It is used to make up the presentation of a certain document for its lecture.
• Procedural: it is focused towards the presentation of the text. However, it is also visible for the user who edits the text. The program which represents the document must interpret the code in the same order in which appears. Some of the examples of the procedural type of markup are: nroff, troff, TeX and PostScript.
• Descriptive: it uses tags for describing the different fragments of the text. But we have to take into account that they do not specify how they must be represented and organized. The languages that are designed for generating descriptive markup are the following: SGML and XML.
• Punctuational: it is centered in the utilization of a closed collection of marks. Its objective is to give above all, syntactic information about written statements.
• Referential: this type alludes to entities which are external to the document. During the process, it is substituted by those entities. Besides, it is also used for device-dependent punctuation and for abbreviations. Finally, we have to bear in mind that it also alludes to entities which are stored in different computing systems.
• Metamarkup: it gives to authors and support personnel a easiness to control the decodification of markup and to spread the vocabulary of descriptive markup languages.

To end up with this article, I will make a comment referring to Web Style Sheets:

They tell us how documents are displayed on screens, in print, etc.  The Web Style Sheets offer many advantages. They are designed independently from the HTML document, they can be applied to any document we want. This enables the consistence and the homogeneity on the design and the image of the web page. Otherwise, the Web Style Sheets can be adapted to the different means of documents presentation. The user also has the possibility to choose the type of design which he/she prefers to visualize in the same document. Another advantage is that the loading time of the web pages on the computer is reduced.

REFERENCES:

.Lenguaje de marcado. (2009 September 27). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:00, November 08, 2009, from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenguaje_de_marcado

.Markup systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing. By James H. Coombs, Allen H. Renear and Steven J. DeRose. In Cover Pages, Online resource for markup language technologies. Retrieved 13:32, November 08, 2009, from: http://xml.coverpages.org/coombs.html

.Web Style Sheets. (2009 October 12). By Bert Bos. In W3C. Retrieved 14:29, November 08, 2009, from:  http://www.w3.org/Style/

.Hojas de estilo (CSS). (2009 September 07). By María Jesús Lamarca Lapuente. In Hiper Texto. Retrieved 14:46, November 08, 2009, from : http://www.hipertexto.info/documentos/css.htm

There are many digital libraries all around the world. They all are very well known but in this article I’m going to mention only on two of them:  on the one hand, The British Library (BL) and on the other hand, the Darlington Digital Library; in which I’m going to center the most.

The British Library (BL): the national library of the United Kingdom

The British Library is one of the biggest research libraries in the world. It is situated in the city of London. It possesses over 150 million articles which are in different languages and formats (books, journals, newspapers, sound and music recordings, magazines, maps, etc.).

The Darlington Digital Library

As it is said in its web: “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”.

The Darlington Digital Library has at its disposition: three librarians, three scanning technicians and also, some graduate students who are studying Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

It has digitalized materials which are divided into the following categories: atlases, books, broadsides, images, manuscripts and finally, maps.

• Atlases: it is possible to find more than one hundred volumes embracing from world travel and exploration to state atlases with county maps.
• Books: William M. Darlington stored works which were related to: the settlement of colonial America, local history, and the behavior and habits of American Indians. Moreover, he also collected some books about Pittsburgh and other ones written by different authors from Pittsburgh.
• Broadsides: we can find items or articles of a great historical value. Among those items, it is possible to find a statement made by George Washington (the first president of the United States of America). Among these broadsides, we can also find some ads from theaters in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
• Images: in regards to this category, we can find:   engravings, lithographs, and photographs. As if it were not enough, we also have the opportunity to contemplate images of royalty, of political leaders, inventors and also religious and military figures; most of them from the United States or Europe. These figures are for example: Marie Antoinette, Oliver Cromwell, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, etc. This collection also includes images of a wide range of historical events like the Battle of Champlain, the Battle of New Orleans…
• Manuscripts: there are many letters which are connected with some considerable figures of the history of the USA. But also, letters which are written by famous military figures, political leaders and businessmen.
• Maps: many of them, are maps of states, colonies and bigger regions of the USA. It’s important to bear in mind, that most of them are printed and enriched through watercolor painting.

Some specifications:

As it is correctly explained in the official web page of THE DARLINGTON DIGITAL LIBRARY:

“Depending on the material’s nature, this is digitized at 400ppi, or at 8-bit grayscale. Besides, digital master files are saved as uncompressed TIF images.

Metadata which supports the online books and atlases are based on the Text Encoding Initiative Document Type Definition. While metadata for the broadsides, images, manuscripts and maps are based on the Dublin Core and local practices.”

REFERENCES:

.The British Library. In The British Library, explore the world’s knowledge. Retrieved 15:30, October 10, 2009, from:  http://www.bl.uk/

.British Library. (2009 October 9). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:47, October 10, 2009, from:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Library

.List of digital library projects. (2009, September 17). In Wikipedia, the Free encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:33, October 10, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_digital_library_projects&oldid=314516494

.The Darlington Digital Library. (2007). In The Darlington Digital Library. Retrieved 16:55, October 10, 2009, from: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/d/darlington/

On the one hand, the e-book is the electronic or digital version of a book. They are generally read on personal computers, on smart phones, on e-Readers and on e-book devices. There are also some mobile phones which can be used to read e-books.

But on the other hand, the e-book is also considered a device which is used to read this digital version of a book. In this case, any device that posses memory and a screen can be used as a electronic book.

The main differences between an e-book and a printed book:

Firstly, I want to point out that he printed book or the traditional book, is easier to use than the electronic book; taking into account that the last one has certain limitations due to the screen whereby we read the text. In addition, it’s important to bear in mind that the electronic book promotes the hipertextuality. Owing to this fact, we can carry out a more interesting and entertaining reading of a book. Through the phenomenon of the hypertext, we can go by from one text to another without any limit. Besides,the digital book can be used to carry through investigations and achieve different information.

Another divergence between these different types of book, is that the traditional book is static and passive (it doesn’t operate on cognitive processes) whereas the printed one is dynamic (it updates and adapts the reader’s profile) and also intelligent (it processes, elaborates, selects, translates…).

The advantages of the e-book are the following:

.It is downloadable; you don’t have to buy it.

.You can print it in your printer the parts in which you are interested.

.E-books are cheaper than printed books.

The advantages of the printed book are:

.They are easier to read; taking into account that they are professionally printed.

.They are easily portable.

.They can be put away on the shelf, along with other books.

.They are easy to use for people who are not used to work with computers.

REFERENCES:

.The difference between our print books and e-books. In Multidiet. Retrieved 15:30,  08 october 2009 from: http://www.multidiet.com/adm/p-vs-ebook.htm

.Panorama de la edición digital. In Slideshare. Retrieved 16:00 08 october 2009from: http://www.slideshare.net/JosebaAbaitua/panorama-de-la-edicin-digital

.Libro electronico. (2009) In Wikipedia, the free enciclopedia. Retrieved 16:14 08 october 2009 from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_electr%C3%B3nico

.The benefits and advandages of Ebooks. In SucessConsciousness. Retrieved 14: 23 08 october 2009 from: http://www.successconsciousness.com/ebooks_benefits.htm#

La enciclopedia es el conjunto de 17 volúmenes que se editaron en París, en 1751-1772. Esto fue llevado a cabo gracias a Denis Diderot y Jean Le Rond d’Alambert. El objetivo era divulgar las ideas de la Ilustración francesa.  Las ideas de la Ilustración francesa, defienden la crítica y el uso de la razón ante todos los campos del saber.

En la enciclopedia francesa entre muchas otras cosas, se manifestaba: la crítica y la acometida contra los prejuicios, la ignorancia y el error, el cuidado al hora de definir y fijar de forma adecuada los conceptos; la defensa de las libertades (como la libertad de expresión); el escepticismo y el empirismo.

Por otra parte, tenemos que tener en cuenta que la historia ha considerado la enciclopedia  como: el escaparate de las ideas de la ilustración francesa y también como una de las obras más libres del pensamiento.

La prensa: The Tatler and The Spectator

“The Tatler” fue fundado por Richard Steele. Según este, el periódico incluiría: “ relatos de cortesía, placer y entretenimiento”. Al principio incluía reseñas sobre duelos pero con el tiempo esto fue condenado y el periódico empezó a debatir por “una civilización más humana”. Durante los primeros años el periódico llamado “The Tatler” fue escrito básicamente por Issac Bickerstaff (el seudónimo de Steele y Joseph Addison).

“The Spectator” un periódico de los años 1711-1712, que fue fundado por Joseph Addison y Richard Steele en Inglaterra; también contribuyó en el proyecto un primo de Addison llamado Eustace Budgell.

La finalidad de este periódico era: “dar vida a la moralidad con ingenio, y moderar el ingenio con moralidad… para así sacar la filosofía fuera de los armarios y las librerías, escuelas y colegios, con el objetivo de aposentarse en clubes y asambleas, etc.” Una de sus funciones era alimentar a los leyentes con temas de conversación cultos y de actualidad y también, aconsejar sobre como llevar a cabo conversaciones y interacciones sociales de una manera educada. Además, de acuerdo con los valores de la filosofía de la época, los autores del periodico “The Spectator” promovían la familia, el matrimonio y la cortesía.

REFERENCES:

.La Enciclopedia, Diccionario razonado de las ciencias, las artes y de los oficios. In Sociedad Andaluza De Educación Matemática Thales. Retrieved 17:00, October 01, 2009, from: http://thales.cica.es/rd/Recursos/rd99/ed99-0257-01/enciclo.html

.The Tatler. In Espartacus Educational. Retrieved 17:30, October 01, 2009, from: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jtatler.htm

.The Spectator (1711). (2009, September 26). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:25, October 01, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator_(1711)

]]> http://amaiaris.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/el-siglo-xviii/feed/ 0 Amaia Aristondo http://amaiaris.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/tim-berners-lee/ http://amaiaris.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/tim-berners-lee/#comments Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:24:21 +0000 Amaia Aristondo http://amaiaris.wordpress.com/?p=247 ]]>  Son of prototypical computer geeks, Tim Berners-Lee was born in 1955, in the United Kingdom, concretely in the city of London. He studied at The Queen’s College. There, he was given a first-class degree in Physics.

Furthermore, it’s important to bear in mind that he is considered as the father of the web, so it’s clear that he inherited the interest that his parents had in computer technology. We can clearly see reflected this interest in the words that once said: “Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.”

He had the necessity to give out and exchange information about his researches in a more effective way, so he developed the ideas which are part of the web. Tim, along with his team created the HTML Language (HyperText Markup Lanugage), the HTTP protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and the URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Two years after his graduation, in 1978, he worked in D.G. Nash Limited where he wrote an operating system. Afterwards, in 2001, he became patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust. Three years later, in 2004, he started working at the school of electronics and information technology of the University of Southampton (United Kingdom). There, he worked on the project of the Semantic Web.

The World Wide Web

When Tim worked as a scientist at CERN in 1989, he invented the famous World Wide Web, better known as: WWW. The main objective of the Web was to gather the request for automatic information sharing between different scientist from different universities and institutes all around the world.

The essential purpose of the World Wide Web (WWW) was to join personal computers’ technologies, computer networking and hypertext at the location of a potent and simple global information system which is simple to use.

 References:

.Tim Berners-Lee. (2009, September 22). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:08, September 25, 2009, from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

.Tim Berners-Lee biography. (2009). In Buzzle. Retrieved 17:10, September 25, 2009, from: http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/4-5-2005-68128.asp

.Where the web was born. (2008). In CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research. Retrieved 15:30, September 25, 2009, from: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/Web-en.html

.Mará Jesús Lamarca (2009). El autor y la autoría en el mundo digital. Retrieved 15:40, September 25, 2009, from: http://artesadigital.blogspot.com/2009/02/el-autor-y-la-autoria-en-el-mundo.html

.Ramón Pérez Parejo (2004). La crisis de la autoría: desde la muerte del autor de Barthes al renacimiento de aninimia en Internet. Retrieved 15:55, September 25, 2009, from: http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero26/crisisau.html

According to Hans Uszkoreit : “human language technology comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech.” Apart from that, he also points out that we have to take into account that: “these systems must be based on some knowledge of human language. Therefore language technology defines the engineering branch of computational linguistics.”

We could also find another definition or explanation of what “human language technology” (HLT) is, in the official web of Meraka Institute. As this institute says: “human language technology makes it easier for people to interact with machines. This can benefit a wide range of people-from illiterate farmer in remote villages who want to obtain relevant medical information over a cellphone, to scientists in state-of-the-art laboratories who want to focus on problem-solving with computers.”

Otherwise, The “Language Technology Documentation Centre in Finland” (FiLT), states that: “language technology is a multidisciplinary field, which studies technical means and methods that can be used to process natural language with computers.”

Moreover, as this Documentation Centre says, some famous implementations of natural language technology (HLT) are for instance automatic authoring tools and also speech recognition. But Natural Language Technology has also other  application areas. Those are introduced in the “Technologies section” and in “Language Technology World” too.

References:

.What is Language Technology? (2009). Hans Uszkoreit. In German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 20:07, March 01, 2009, from http://www.dfki.de/lt/lt-general.php

.Human Language Technologies. (2008, April 1). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . Retrieved 11:59, June 17, 2009, from http://www.wordmagicsoft.com/diccionario/en-es/joined.php

.Human Language Technologies. (2007). In Meraka institute. Retrieved 12:09, June 17, 2009, from http://www.meraka.org.za/humanLanguage.htm

.What is Language Technology? (2008). In Language Technology Documentation Centre in Finland (FiLT). Retrieved 19:18, June 18, 2009, from https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/FiLT/FiLTWikiEn

Ni beti izan naiz izaera lasai eta trankilekoa, orain berriz egunak joan egunak etorri, nire lasaitasun haren tokia etorri berri den urduritasunezko sentimendu batek bereganatu du; lehoiak, bere presa, bere atzamar handi eta indartsuen bitartez harrapatzen duen moduan. Horrela jokatu du demoniozko urduritasun honek ere; gupidarik gabe alegia. Baina bisita egitera etorri zitzaidan etsai bakarra ez da urduritasun desatsegin hau izan, ez jauna! Urduritasuna etorri eta hurrengo egunean, tristura etorri zen bihotz joka. Bisitari honek ezustean harrapatu ninduen eta arrapaladan sartu zen barrura, prisa izango balu bezala. Joateko aldiz, ez zuen inolako prisarik izango, alderantziz baizik; gustura sentitzen zela eta nirekin geldituko zen luzaroan, betirako ez esateagatik. Baina, ez da hau guztia, beste hainbat bisitari ere izan bainituen, denak nirekin gelditzeko nolabaiteko esperantza zutelarik: atsekabea, estresa, goibeltasuna, mina, depresioa, ahuldura eta azkenik heriotza.

Azken bisitari hau, ezberdina zen gainontzekoengandik. Besteak baino ilunagoa eta kaltegarriagoa iruditu zitzaidan hasieran, baina ondoren jabetu nintzen agian berak izango zuela nire mina sendatzeko balioko zuen botika bakarra.

Gau batean, bisitari misteriotsu honek nire gelako atea jo zuen. Ni hasieran izuturik agertu nintzen, bere itxura desatseginaz ikaratuta. Ondoren… ez!! Egia esan behar badut ez naiz ondo oroitzen gero gertatutakoaz beraz ez naiz gauza gertatu zena zehatz-mehatz kontatzeko. Dakidan gauza bakarra zera da, bisitari guztiak berehala desagertu egin zirela, beno… azkeneko hura noizean behin ikusten dut baina ez diot garrantzia handirik ematen. Dakidan gauza bakarra zera da orain, beste bisitari malapartatu haien ordez beste hobeago batzuk etortzen zaizkidala bisita egitera; beraien besoetan opari ederrak dakartzatela: alaitasuna, edertasuna, lasaitasuna, indarra, energia, animoak eta guztietan gogokoena, ASKATASUNA!

Question answering, well known as QA, is the assignment of answering a question which is presented in natural language. The QA computer have to answer to the posed question; for that matter, the QA computer program will use a pre-structured database or a collection of natural language documents. Both options are possible.

Question answering research makes a shot at dealing with an ample coverage of question types including fact, list, definition, how, why, hypothetical, semantically-constrained, and cross-lingual questions.

We have to distinguish “Closed-domain” question answering and “Open-domain” question answering.

The first one, “Closed-domain” question answering does a deal with questions under a particular field (for instance, medicine), while the second one, the “Open-domain” question answering does a deal with inquiries about almost everything. The “Open domain” question answering can solely trust in general ontologies and also in world knowledge.

On the Web we have the opportunity to find many Question Answering systems; some of the most important and famous are:

• Powerset: http://www.powerset.com/
• Assimov the chat bot: http://asimovsoftware.com/
• AnswerBus: http://www.answerbus.com/index.shtml
• NSIR: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair/NSIR/html/nsir.cgi
• START (The first question answering  system): http://start.csail.mit.edu/

REFERENCES:

.Question Answering. (2009, March 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:59, April 01, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering

.Question Answering. (2008, May 7). In Universia. Retrieved 20:29, June 16, 2009, from http://biblioteca.universia.net/html_bura/ficha/params/id/23711.html

. Powerset. Retrieved 20:07, March 31, 2009, from http://www.powerset.com/

.Asimov the Chatbot. In Chatbots. Retrieved 20:13, March 31, 2009, from http://asimovsoftware.com/

.AnswerBus, Question Answering System. (2001-2008). Retrieved 11:59, April 01, 2009, from http://www.answerbus.com/index.shtml

.NSIR, Question Answering System. (2002). Retrieved 21:04, April 01, 2009, from http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair/NSIR/html/nsir.cgi

.START, Natural Language Question Answering System. (1993 December). Retrieved 21:11, April 01, 2009, from http://start.csail.mit.edu/