Overview of content related to 'png'

What Is a URI and Why Does It Matter?

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Henry S. Thompson describes how recent developments in Web technology have affected the relationship between URI and resource representation and the related consequences.

URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier, the official name for those things you see all the time on the Web that begin 'http:' or 'mailto:', for example http://www.w3.org/, which is the URI for the home page of the World Wide Web Consortium [1]. (These things were called URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in the early days of the Web, and the change from URL to URI is either hugely significant or completely irrelevant, depending on who is talking—I have nothing to say about this issue in this article. If you have never heard of URIs (or IRIs, the even more recent fully internationalised version), but are familiar with URLs, just think 'URL' whenever you see 'URI' below.)

Historically, URIs were mostly seen as simply the way you accessed Web pages. These pages were hand-authored, relatively stable and simply shipped out on demand. More and more often that is no longer the case; in at least three different ways:

Web pages for reading have been complemented by pictures for viewing, videos for watching and music for listening;
The Web is now more than a conduit for information, it is a means to a variety of ends; we use it to do things: purchase goods and services, contribute to forums, play games;
The things we access on the Web are often not hand-authored or stable, but are automatically synthesised from 'deeper' data sources on demand. Furthermore, that synthesis is increasingly influenced by aspects of the way we initiate the access.

It is against this background that I think it is worth exploring with some care what URIs were meant to be, and how they are being used in practice. In particular, I want to look at what is to be gained from a better understanding of how other kinds of identifiers work.

The Official Version

Insofar as there are definitive documents about all this, they all agree that URIs are, as the third initial says, identifiers, that is, names. They identify resources, and often (although not always) allow you to access representations of those resources. (Words in bold are used as technical terms—their ordinary language meaning is in many cases likely to be more confusing than helpful.)

'Resource' names a role in a story, not an intrinsically distinguishable subset of things, just as 'referent' does in ordinary language. Things are resources because someone created a URI to identify them, not because they have some particular properties in and of themselves.

'Representation' names a pair: a character sequence and a media type. The media type specifies how the character string should be interpreted. For example JPG or HTML or MP3 would be likely media types for representations of an image of an apple, a news report about an orchard or a recording of a Beatles song, respectively.

Book Review: Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Brian Whalley looks at a student survival aid in the information age that should also be valuable for tutors.

'Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies' is an example of an ever-increasing range of 'self-help' books for students on a variety of topics relating skills, tips and education. Such books range from 'Critical thinking skills' [1] to the quite specific, for example, 'Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and more' [2]. This offering from Gower/Ashgate comes somewhere in between. It introduces students to the main current technologies and some of the pedagogic devices they might find in modern education.

eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Emma Tonkin investigates ebooks and takes a look at recent technological and business developments in this area.

Due in large part to the appearance since mid-2006 of increasingly affordable devices making use of e-Ink technology (a monochrome display supporting a high-resolution image despite low battery use, since the screen consumes power only during page refreshes, which in the case of ebooks generally represent page turns), the ebook has gone from a somewhat limited market into a real, although presently still niche, contender. Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008 [1]; Sony sold 300,000 of its Reader Digital Book model between October 2006 and October 2009. In September 2009, ebooks represented between 1% and 3% of the total US publishing market [2].

Following the JISC National eBooks Observatory Study [3] in the UK, one participant, David Nicolas, was quoted as stating that ebooks have 'reached the tipping point' [4]. Keeping in mind Bohr's statement that, 'prediction is very difficult, especially about the future', it's nonetheless safe to say that publicity about these devices is currently at a high point. But for ebook readers, as Figure 1 shows, this is not their first time in the spotlight.

"A good book has no ending. ~R.D. Cumming"

This article marks the third time that Ariadne has discussed the subject of ebooks, namely "Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where are we now?" [5] and "e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?" [6]. There is something very beguiling about the idea of a book that has 'the marvelous chameleon-like quality that it can very quickly be made to substitute for a different printed work by simply loading different content' [7] - a book that can play the role of a library.

As Striphas [8] points out, the concept of the electronic book, and the exploration of the interaction between the size of a container and the quantity of knowledge held, has an extraordinarily long history. He traces the idea back to the creation of miniature manuscript books, composed of 'tiny handwriting, or micrographia', in the late 15th century, which were functional objects and could be read by means of a magnifying glass.

Striphas notes the development of microphotography techniques in the 19th century. This was initially pioneered by John Benjamin Dancer, an optical instrument-maker who combined microscope and camera in order to create the earliest example of microphotography on record [9]. Luther reports that 'the 21 May 1853 issue of Notes and Queries carried a letter from a Dublin scholar asking "May not photography be usefully applied to the making of catalogues of large libraries?' Microphotography led to the report in the British Photographic Journal of, 'A page of printing, from Quekett's "Treatise on the Microscope", reduced to such size that the whole of the volume of 560 pages could be contained in a space one inch long and half-an-inch broad ' [8].

Learning to YODL: Building York's Digital Library

editor — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Peri Stracchino and Yankui Feng describe a year's progress in building the digital library infrastructure outlined by Julie Allinson and Elizabeth Harbord in their article last issue.

E-Archiving: An Overview of Some Repository Management Software Tools

editor — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000

Marion Prudlo discusses LOCKSS, EPrints, and DSpace in terms of who uses them, their cost, underlying technology, the required know-how, and functionalities.

In recent years initiatives to create software packages for electronic repository management have mushroomed all over the world. Some institutions engage in these activities in order to preserve content that might otherwise be lost, others in order to provide greater access to material that might otherwise be too obscure to be widely used such as grey literature. The open access movement has also been an important factor in this development. Digital initiatives such as pre-print, post-print, and document servers are being created to come up with new ways of publishing.

Web Focus: Guidelines for URI Naming Policies

editor — Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000

Brian Kelly with some guidelines For URI naming policies in his regular column.

"Cool URIs"

What are "cool URIs"? This term comes from advice provided by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). The paper "Cool URIs don't change" [1] begins by saying:

Book Review: The Invisible Web

editor — Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Marieke Napier reviews the book: The Invisible Web.

Chris Sherman and Gary Price

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t see

Cyber Age Books, 2001. ISBN 0-910965-51-X

Price: $29.95

I first became interested in the Invisible Web after seeing Chris Sherman and Gary Price talking at the Internet Librarian International Conference in March this year.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): Vector Graphics for the Web

editor — Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000

David Duce discusses the World Wide Web Consortium's Scalable Vector Graphics markup language for 2 dimensional graphics.

To view the Scalable Vector Graphics in this article you will need a viewer. The Adobe® SVG Viewer is a plug-in that will allow your Web browser to render SVG and is available free from the Adobe Web site.

Web Focus: Hot News From WWW10

editor — Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000

Brian Kelly reports on the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, held in Hong Kong on 1-5 May 2001.

Previous Web Focus articles have provided trip reports on the International World Wide Web conferences [1] [2] [3] and [4]. These reports have commented on the birth of new developments such as XML, RDF and WAP and the mobile Web. So what was hot from WWW10?

Well the weather certainly was hot - and very humid. The 1,200+ delegates were very appreciative of the air-conditioning in the Hong Kong Conference Centre, located on Hong Kong island, next to the harbour (see Figure 1).

Web Focus: Ways of Exploiting New Technologies

editor — Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:00:00 +0000

Brian Kelly discusses Intermediaries: Ways Of Exploiting New Technologies.

Since February 1998 HTML 4.0 [1], CSS 2.0[2], the Mathematical Markup Language MathML [3] and the Extensible Markup Language XML [4] have all become W3C Recommendations. These web protocols, all of which are concerned with the way in which information can be represented and displayed, were initially Working Drafts which were developed by the appropriate W3C Working Group.

Formats for the Electronic Library

editor — Wed, 19 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Judith Wusteman describes the document formats used in electronic serials.

Every day, subscribers to the the NewJour mailing list [1] receive notification of new Internet-available electronic serials. The NewJour definition of a serial covers everything from journals to magazines and newsletters; from the British Accounting Review to Ariadne, to The (virtual) Baguette and I Love My Nanny. Some days, a dozen or more publications are announced. As of 13th February 1997, the NewJour archive contained 3,240 items.

MIDRIB

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Julian Cook describes a major database of medical images.

The task of MIDRIB ('Medical Images Digitised Reference Information Bank') is to create a system for the creation, storage and networked delivery of image-related information. This involves a complex chain of events that takes an image from its raw form (such as a slide on a clinician's shelf) to the point where the user can retrieve it individually from a digital networked resource of potentially hundreds of thousands of items. In between it has to be captured in digital form and described so that it can be retrieved. This sequence demands a range of processes and software tools.

Netlinks Symposium

editor — Thu, 18 Jul 1996 23:00:00 +0000

Sarah Ashton reports from the Netlinks Symposium, organised by the Netlinks eLib project and the Department of Information Studies in the University of Sheffield.

Wire: Dave Beckett, Interviewed

editor — Sat, 18 May 1996 23:00:00 +0000

Dave Beckett is subjected to an interview via email.

What do you do in the world of networking/libraries/WWW

Wire: Email Interview with Chris Lilley

editor — Tue, 19 Mar 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Lilley submits to an interview by email.

I represent JISC at the Advisory Council meetings of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Most of the delegates are representing commercial companies, wheras I am effectively representing the UK Higher Education sector! W3C member companies are given advance information in confidence, and I am currently working with W3C to see how I can involve UK HE in the work of W3C without violating that confidence.