[WEB4LIB] Re: next big thing?

[Kevin W. Bishop]

I agree -- XML should have an enormous impact on our work.  In my humble 
experience, what gopher and WWW offered were access to information; now our 
needs seem to be more at the organization of information.

I really have no clue what the next big thing will be, but I thought this 
was interesting ... I'd like to see it in action.
-kb


PAGELESS WEB BROWSING
Researchers at the University of West Florida's Institute for Human and
Machine Cognition have come up with a new learning tool called concept
mapping that bypasses the usual page-by-page process of Web browsing. It
will not replace Web browsers, says the Institute's Alberto Canas, but will
augment the process of finding out about a particular subject by organizing
related information into so-called Cmaps -- a graphic representation of a
subject that shows how it is linked to related topics and subtopics. "If
you can do something about helping humans better exploit the sort of
information ghetto on the Web, you've got lots of customers," says
Institute director Ken Ford. "They all know that their browser's no good
because when you ask them which button they click most, they all say the
back arrow." The software was developed as part of a broader $6-million
federally funded project that includes the creation of Cmaps for NASA and
the U.S. Navy, and the Institute's version can be downloaded for free by
government agencies, schools, students and other nonprofit users.
(AP/Wired.com 20 Feb 2001)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41906,00.html




At 04:18 PM 2/20/01 -0800, Robert Tiess wrote:
>"Drew, Bill" wrote:
> > What will be the next "big thing" in information delivery that librarians
> > should watch out for?  I am thinking in terms of things of such import as
> > the World Wide Web and gopher.  Both changed how we deliver information.
>
>XML would be a candidate, since it changes how
>information can be stored, retrieved, converted,
>transferred, and "understood" by computers.
>XML is great not only for its markup potential
>but also for its related technologies, such as
>XLink ("create and describe links between
>resources" <http://www.w3.org/XML/Linking>)
>and XPointer <http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr>,
>which facilitates deep parsing of and linkage
>to specific XML data structures (imagine
>anchor-type linkage/data extraction).  Or put
>it this way:  What MARC did for libraries, XML
>can do for the web plus more.  Tim Berners-Lee
>takes the XML revolution several steps further
>in his grand vision of the "Semantic Web":
>
>Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
>Related article: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/xml2000/timbl.html
>
>Robert
>
>rjtiess at warwick.net
>http://rtiess.tripod.com
>http://rtiess.tripod.com/xmlsites.htm

_________________________________________
Kevin W. Bishop, Campus-Wide Info. Sys. Coord.
Libraries and Information Services
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
<bishopk at rpi.edu> | <http://www.rpi.edu/rpinfo/>