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How we'll live when information surrounds us

Recorded at the ALA MidWinter 2009 OCLC Symposium

The Web, and how we use it, has changed dramatically over the past few years. We've seen explosive growth in social networking, more types and volumes of content becoming available, a wider availability and sophistication of creative tools and the growing use of mobile devices to access the Internet. Taken individually, each of these changes represents a major shift in how we learn and communicate. Together, these trends signal a shift to a future where the Web is at the center of our information lives.

What does that mean for us as learners, educators, citizens and creators? How will our lives be changed when we don't connect to information on a case-by-case basis, but live in an environment saturated with data, media and communications?

OCLC invited David and Nova to share a preconference conversation with us. Their dialogue (PDF download) touches on several key concepts related to the future of the Web and how we'll share information and ideas.

nfogami is a cleaner, simpler wiki. But unlike other wikis, it has the flexibility to handle different classes of data. Most wikis only let you store unstructured pages -- big blocks of text. Infogami lets you store semistructured data, just like ThingDB does, as well as use ThingDB's query powers to sort through it.

Each infogami page (i.e. something with a URL) has an associated type. Each type contains a schema that states what fields can be used with it and what format those fields are in. Those are used to generate view and edit templates which can then be further customized as a particular type requires.

While there are numerous mechanisms and enabling frameworks for retrieving
data asynchronously into an HTML document, the basic task of injecting
a significant amount of data into a document remains a typically laborious process.

To circumvent this laborious process, many developers instead opt to
asynchronously retrieve "markup fragments", which are made of data that has already been
fully-injected into the necessary HTML that can simply be inserted "as-is" into the main document.

While this approach works well enough, there are many use cases where it still
makes more sense to only retrieve pure data from the server.

IBDOM was designed to alleviate this tedium, while fully-embracing standard-compliant
documents, by providing an unobtrusive mechanism to "map data values" to JavaScript Objects.

This vocabulary is an expression in RDF of the concepts and relations described in the
IFLA report on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).

This vocabulary is a work in progress, it includes RDF classes for the group 1, 2 and 3 entities
described by the FRBR report and properties corresponding to the core relationships between
those entities. It does not yet describe attributes of the entities. Where possible, appropriate
relationships with other vocabularies are included in order to place this vocabulary in the
context of existing RDF work.

Because this library is standards-based it means that you don’t have to learn a new API.
It uses standard DOM properties and methods throughout which also means that I don’t have to write any documentation.
It is part of a suite of little libraries that I’m developing called base2. This is the first library under that umbrella
and is called base2.DOM. Not a great name I know.

The library is structured so that it can be used in a variety of ways. In this post I’m only going to show you one way to use
the library. The easy way. I’ll show you alternative ways to use base2.DOM in subsequent posts.

What is WPopac? It’s an OPAC — a library catalog, for my readers outside libraries — inside the framework of WordPress, the hugely popular blog management application.

Why misuse WordPress that way? WordPress has a a few things we care about built-in: permalinks, comments, and trackbacks (and a good comment spam filter), just to start. But it also offers something we’ve never seen in a library application before: access to a community of knowledge, programmers, and designers outside libraries. Because the core of WPopac is WordPress, and because it preserves WordPress’s rich plugin API and themes structure, it already has more users, designers, developers, and administrators than all the ILS vendors combined.

ActiveRDF is a library for accessing RDF data from Ruby programs. It can be used as data layer in Ruby-on-Rails, similar to ActiveRecord (which provides an O/R mapping to relational databases). ActiveRDF in RoR allows you to create semantic web applications very rapidly. ActiveRDF gives you a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for your RDF model: you can address RDF resources, classes, properties, etc. programmatically, without queries.


• ActiveRDF can be used with various RDF stores, adapters to other stores can be written very easily.
• ActiveRDF uses convention over configuration, which means it works very nicely in 90% of the cases.
• ActiveRDF is open source, released under the LGPL license.
• ActiveRDF is in active development.