Access 2007

“In search of intelligent search discovery.”

Richard’s vision goes something like this:
What is relevance in an OPAC? The computer doesn’t know what someone is after, but what if the system knew you were a botany student? Searching lady bug could come up with much more relevant results…Knowing the user context helps the system perform. We are making steps toward this with systems like Endeca and Primo which show the user in his/her context within the data thereby facilitating further exploration.

So what is the Talis Platform? It is a generic platform for storing, managing data.  It is a service on the web. The API allows for searching through a form that then spits back XML - completely customizable.  You can put it anywhere since it’s an API - for instance you could build a widget in Facebook with your data.  You can choose any licence you want, but they encourage open licences under the creative commons.   The platform allows you to start relating different resources together - such as the catalogue, wikipedia, courses…etc.

“Bringing the ocean floor to your desktop”

The Venus project will provide real time access to the ocean floor so that we can monitor it and extend the internet under water.  It will cost Canadian tax payers a mere $10 million. The Neptune project is being built by UVic.

One  fascinating discovery: where the Earth plates are coming apart and hot water is spewing along with chemicals, life in the form of bacteria has also been found.  The observatory is collecting data at a phenomenal rate and it’s problematic because of the different data formats.  They are developing a Data Management and Archiving System (DMAS). This will serve as the software link between the underwater infrastructure and the users.  Their mandate is to make data available to researchers in real time.  They will store data for long term time-series studies.  The killer app for this project will the the automatic event detection - ie) studying earthquakes as they happen - and getting the word out about potential fallout such as tsunamis.  The “Ocean Commons” is going to be the facebook for scientists - the brain behind the repository.  They still need a way to automate identifying the interesting stuff from video footage (which is enormous).

“…trying to figure out where are users are going and where they are at is challenging…”

Jessamyn’s advice:  when teaching new users technology it’s important to choose tools that work - tools that are comfortable and easy to use.

Jessamyn talked about a site called Ask Metafilter - still in beta - where people can pose questions to businesses and companies and get answers directly from them on the site.

When teaching web 2.0 technologies, we aren’t just teaching tools, we are teaching our users how to rethink about things.