Author Archives: iain_emsley

I am a developer in the Janet web team as well as occasionally working on some Open Source projects. The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and are not to be taken as a position or comment by Janet.

Open Service Definition

The Open Knowledge Foundation are bringing the Open Service Definition to version 1.0 which is a helpful step. I wholeheartedly agree with it. As services and APIs develop, we need to create a legal framework within which data, knowledge and dissemination services can be used to allow greater access to open knowledge now rather than […]

Getting vertigo retrieving information

Last week I went along to the ISKO UK seminar/event on Information Retrieval (IR) held at University College London. Brian Vickery gave a talk about the first fifty years or so of IR. Like any good event, I came away with loads to ponder. I’m still pondering some of my notes (I wish my handwriting […]

The Future of Knowledge?

I went to the Future of the Internet talk at the Oxford Internet Institute (webcast here) where Larry Sanger (Citizendium and Wikipedia) and Andrew Keen debated the where the Internet might go and how knowledge would develop. Neither,  I think, really got into the argument but rather skirted the issues. Sanger’s argument for a more […]

Building data stores

Mats Dahlstrom’s talk at the Dilemmas of Digitization conference mentioned the Deep Sharing: A Case for the Federated Digital library paper by Daivd Seaman. It would be great if there was a system for rapidly building small data stores from scratch to include texts and then have these with editing software components, text encoding output […]

Spelunking text data

One of the ARTFUL developers presented the PhiloLogic and its PhiloMine extension. Both are free text searching databases and tools. Both sets of code are designed for large sets of data which does raise the question whether it might be useful to develop a set of tools for smaller data holdings or individuals.

Communities of repositories

I was recently at the Dilemmas of Digitization conference held at the Maison Francaise in Oxford and organised by the Cost 32 group, a project looking at creating open scholarly communities online across Europe. One of the points that interested me is the idea that repositories need to develop services of their own to the […]