Digital libraries

I’m going to do an explanation of two libraries that I though to be the best, and I’m going to review some of their characteristics:

•  British library:  It is in the United Kingdom. It holds over 150 millon items in a lot of languages and formats. This library  offers more than 100 million items for researchers and library patrons worldwide which were previously unavailable outside the Library due to soem copyright restrictions. In line with a government directive that the British Library must cover a percentage of its operating costs, a fee is charged to the user. However, this service is no longer profitable and has led to a series of restructures to try to prevent losses. When Google Books started, the British Library signed an agreement with Microsoft  to digitise a number of books from the British Library for its  project. This material was only available to readers in the USA, and closed in May 2008.
•  European Library: It is an Internet service that offers acces to 47 European national libraries. This librari has  digital and non-digital  resources, including books, magazines, journals, audio recordings, etc. This library offers a free searching and delivers metadata records as well as digital objects: some free, others at cost. The global management of The European Library is based on a group of 23 national libraries, these group of libraries are used to maintain and develop the services.

 

                   This library, was initiated  on 17 , March 2005.  But the European Library took a further step towards its enlargement with EDLproject, that consist of    adding digital objects and items of the remaining EU & EFTA national libraries into the European Library. This project  has the cooperation of Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Sweden. EDLproject was also responsible for 2 successful workshops looking at the technical and political issues of bringing other cultural heritage digital repositories together as a European digital library.

                     This project, was financially supported by the European Commission.

 

 REFERENCES:

  European Library. (2009, August 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:24, October 19, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=European_Library&oldid=309715218

British Library. (2009, October 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:25, October 19, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=British_Library&oldid=318866413

 Bristish Librarie. ( 209). In Orex. October, 19, 2009, from http://www.orex.es/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4&Itemid=20&lang=es

ebook and paper book

An ebook is a digital book, is a equivalent of a traditional printed book. E-books are found in personal computers, movil phones or hardware deviced known as e-Readers.

 There are a lot of differences between an e-book and a printed book, some of them are:

 An e-book can be with you at all moment a cause of it can be purchased, and used immediately , however, a book can’t be use as easily because firstly, it must be bought in a bookshop and the it must be carried on with you in a bag if you don’t have a bag it’s more difficult to carry it and sometimes it’s prefered to leave it at home.

  Another difference E-books are cheaper than traditional books. Apart from that a normal book needed more space than an e-book that can be kept in a computer or a movil phone.Also, when you have finished a e-book you can delete it, in normal books you can’t.

 Furthermore, e-books contains a lot of animated images, unlike printed books that have many few images and most of them are very small.

There are a lot of differences between these two types of books, but the main difference and more favorable reason  to prefer the e-boks is that these ones not consume paper, so there are not a damage to the environment.

   The great majority of the people prefer e-books, and in a close future, printed books will be remplaced by e-books.

  REFERENCES:

E-book. (2009, October 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 09:42, October 15, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=E-book&oldid=319916027

E-book and printed book. ( 2009 ). In O`Reilly. Retrieved ( October 15, 2009). From http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/07/ebooks-and-print-books-are-not.html

Developmental linguistics

 The acquision of a language, is only used by the human beings, because language is the main characteristic that differences  humans from  animals. During the childhood, the period in which we live between infancy and adulthood, we develop our first human  characteristics;  speaking, walking, and understanding, to name but a few ones.

  For language  adquision to develop successfully, it must be an enviroment that allows to communicate socially in that language.

 For the development of a language it’s necesary to know the four main components of a languge: fonology, semantics, grammar, morphology and pragmatics. With all these components, we can use a language correctly and develop it in a good way.

 According to Piaget, the knowledge of the language by a human being depends on his knowledge of the world. And taking the idea of Skiner, the father of the behaviorism: “ L anguage is learned through operant conditioning (reinforcement and imitation).”

 REFERENCES:

• Language development. (2009, September 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:13, October 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Language_development&oldid=312423408
• The development of the language. ( 2005, March, 20). In Hyperhistory.Retrieved 13:17, Octover, 5, 2009. From http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/cot/t0w02language.htm

Tim Berners-Lee

This man is a British engineer and computes scientist . He is credited because he invented the World Wide Web, in 1989. Then he became director of the Word Wide Web consortium, a organization that develops interoperable technologies to leas the web all its potential.

On 1990 he tried to improve the communication between HTTP client and server via in the Internet.

He is also a professor in the Computer  Science Department at the University  of Southampton, UK. In 2006, he started The Web Science Research Initiative,  help to create a programme the first multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web, and offer solutions  needed to help guide its future use and desing.

   Nowadays he is focus on the Word Wide Web Foundation , started in 2008 to fund and coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humany.

References:

Tim Berners-Lee. ( 2009,09,21)  In w3.org. Retrieved: (2009,09,29). From:http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/#Bio

Cientifico inventor de le word wide web. (2009) . In navegante.com. Retrieved: ( 2009, 09, 29). From: http://www.elmundo.es/navegante/personajes/bernerslee.html

Enciclopedia francesa

                                                  

 Entre 1751 y 1772 en Francia, Diderot y D‘alambert, crearon un conjunto de 17 volúmenes  cuyo objetivo era difundir las ideas de la ilustración francesa.

 El nombre de ” enciclopedia” tal y como lo conocemos en la actualidad, no  aparecio hasta el siglo XVII.

 La enciclopedia tuvo muchos colaboradores, todos ellos ilustrados: filósofos como Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke; escritores e historiadores.

 En la enciclopedia se hace una síntesis de todos los conocimientos humanos , dividiendo las facultades del hombre en: memoria (historia), razón ( filosofía) e investigación( poesia).

 La enciclopedia ha sido considerada como el aparador de las ideas de la ilustración francesa y una de las obras más libres del espíritu humano.

Natural Language Interfaces

The communication betwen people that use a computer using natural language is a good idea. Despite, it’s very difficult t program a computer to chat across different domains, it’s much easier to program one to can understand comands in a restrictive environmnet. Before all this were known, it was marketed a spreadsheet  program that allowed people to communicate with the program using a natural language interface.

 Altought the intuitive appeal of a natural language interface,  some researches had said that some languages have a lot of ambiguities for be used to communicating with computers, but there is an experimental data suporting the efficacy of  a natural language interface, and some studies that have compared  natural language interfaces with other styles of interface.

This study compare the facility of learning a tradicional command/menu interface to a spreadsheet whit the simplicity  of  learning the natural language interface of Lotus HAL.

References:

•  Natural language interfaces. (March, 3, 2008)In Rice Virtual Lab. Retrieved: (June, 21, 2009).From http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lane/case_studies/interface/index.html
• Natural language. (2009, June 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:54, June 9, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_language&oldid=295457792

Question Answering

Question answering is assignment of automatically answering a question sit in natural language. To find the answer to a question, a question answer program have to use a collection of  natural language documents or a pre-structured database. This program deal with a large range of question types  including: fact, list, definition, cross- lingual questions, etc.

 The first question answering systems were developed in the 1960s; they were natural language interfaces to expertsystems thar were made to specific domains. However, present question answering systems use text documents as their secondly knowledge source  and combine various natural language processing techniques to search for the answers.

 Question answering methods allow people to do their work without any problem a cause of their large list of explanations: the information are likely to be phrased in many different ways, contexts, and documents,  giving people a lot of benefits.

REFERENCES:

-Question answering. (2009, May 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:46, May 27, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Question_answering&oldid=288495130

- Question answering. ( April//20//2006). In Lycos. Retrieved . May, 27, 2009. From: http://usuarios.lycos.es/questionanswering/

Machine Translation!!

Machine translation, is a sub-field of linguistics  that translate by computer methods texts or speeches from one language to another.

 One of the most important associations of machine translation is EAMT,( European Association of machine translation), this association set up meetings that  are intended to provide a forum of researches, commercial developers and users to exchange ideas concerning all aspects of  Machine Translation. The goal is to shown the techniques of translation, which are going to be used in  industry and uses of translation technologies.

In EU, there are more than 80 recognized languages or dialects , and  government  and industry who wants to provide good services to people in their native language,  for that reason both have to use digital resources  such as machines translation methods.

 

References:

• Machine translation. (2009, May 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 09:28, May 26, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_translation&oldid=292228964
• Machine translation. ( December 13, 2008, at 08:33 PM) ,  in AAAI TOPICS.Retrieved: May, 26, 2009, at 11:44 Pm) http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/MachineTranslation

El procesamiento del lenguaje natural

El procesamiento del lenguaje naturalo PLN, es una rama ingenieril de la lingüística internacional. el PLn se ocupa de la formulación e investigación de mecanismos eficaces, que se utilizan para  que haya uan comunicación entre personas o entre personas y máquinas por medio de lenguajes naturales.Una asociación que se ha ocupado profundamente de este tema es la  asociación SEPLN ( Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del lenguaje natural), que está formada por socios numerarios e instituciones .Esta asociación se creo en el año 1984, con el objetivo de difundir todo tipo de actividades referentes a la enseñanza, investigación y desarrollo en el ámbito del procesamiento del lenguaje natural, tanto nacional como internacionalmente.

El objetivo de SEPLN, es establecer medios para intercambiar información, materiales científicos, para organizar seminarios y conferencias y para promocionar publicidad y colaboración con otras instituciones relacionadas con actividades del mismo campo.

 Una de las actividades más importantes promovidas por SEPLN, es la celebración de un congreso anual, que sirve de encuentro para los distintos grupos que trabajan en el area del procesamiento natural, aunque tambiém tienen revistas y páguinas web en las que pueden discutir sus ideas.

 

REFERENCES:

• Procesamiento del lenguaje natural. ( 1984). En Sociedad Española para el procesamiento del lenguaje natural. Fecha de consulta: Mayo, 26, 2009. En: http://www.sepln.org/

Procesamiento de lenguajes naturales. (2009, de abril. Wikipedia, La enciclopedia libre. Fecha de consulta: 09:50, mayo 26, 2009 from http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Procesamiento_de_lenguajes_naturales&oldid=25434058.

•  Pocesamiento del lenguaje natural. (2009/02/27 11:50). En Grupo de investigacion del procesamiento del lenguaje natural. Fecha de consulta: 26 de mayo del 2009,

CLARIN

Clarin is one of the 35 projects funded by the “ITC - Research Infraestructures” that have been selected by ESFRI(  European Strategui Forum on Research  Infraestructures) and this projects can be seen in the ” Hoja de Ruta” , that is a paper were are written the infraestructures which are going to be built, due to their relevance for  investigation.

It wants to offer the scholars the tools to allow  computer-aided language processing , addressing one o more of the multiples roles language plays in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

 To obtain these objectives, Clarin will be built on a nunber of keys technologies coming from the major initiatives advancing the Science. Some of them are:

• incorporate advanced multi-lingual language processing technology that supports cultural and linguistic integration.
• include Data Grid technology to connect the repositories as being implemented in the DAM LR pilot  project  and web services the various centres participating in the project provide.

    But there are  more  initiatives that I have not menmentioned.

   Clarin offers us an interesting context to validarte many resources from different repositories.

References:

• Clarin. From Distributed collaboratories Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology for Science.( November, 19, 2008, 15:37) . Retrieved: May, 11, 2009, 13:35. From http://www.d4science.eu/clarin
• Common L anguages Resources and Technology Infrastructure. From Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada.( Jun,16, 2008). Retrieved: May, 11, 2009, 13:40. From http://www.sepln.org/revistaSEPLN/revista/41/proy1.pdf
• Clarin. From Universitat Pompeu Fabra.( March, 28, 2009). Retrieved: May, 11, 2009, 13:50. From http://clarin-es.iula.upf.edu/system/CLARIN_presentaci%C3%B3n_AESLA.pdf