Expansion Of Internet Archive
The archive has expanded its software museum and databases.
Posts tagged ‘Metadata’
Although Java has applied a patch to fix Java 7 from a massive security vulnerability, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has reiterated its warning that Java still poses risks.
Whats Happening In the World Of AI
Artificial Intelligence researchers have been making steady—and quite visible—progress in computer vision, language translation, artificial speech, exoskeletons, and more for the past 15 years.
Data Visualization Tools
- Sunburst, which displays data as a series of rings to demonstrate hierarchies.
- Zoom, a tool for analyzing different ranges across data sets.
- Trellis, an aggregation of scatter plots designed to help visualize patterns within Big Data.
- Treemap, which is similar to Sunburst but displays hierarchies as rectangles instead of rings.
National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding
The White House has released a new strategy for federal information sharing lists among its top priorities adoption of metadata standards and the further extension of the Federal Identity Credential and Access Management framework. The new document does define policy objectives, which includes metadata.
U.S. Refuse To Sign ITU Treaty
An Alliance of Western democracies including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada has rejected a proposed treaty over concerns it hands repressive governments too much authority over the Internet.
Ambassador Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. delegation to the Dubai summit “This conference was never meant to focus on Internet issues and the Internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years — all without U.N. regulation.”
Delegates from the Netherlands, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, the Philippines, Poland, and the Czech Republic also said they could not sign the proposed International Telecommunication Union treaty, which is scheduled to be finished by today. Kenya’s delegate appeared to take the same position, saying “we reserve our rights” to “go back home and do more consultations” before signing, and India has signaled it agrees with the U.S. position. Japan’s delegation said needed to consult with Tokyo before proceeding.
Deep divisions became apparent over the mere mention of “human rights obligations” in the treaty — a proposal that China and Iran opposed — and whether the U.N. was the proper organization to oversee key decisions about how the Internet should be managed. Currently groups including the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, fulfill that role.
Canada said it was forced to reject the proposed treaty because of its commitment to an Internet “in which people are free to participate, communicate, organize and exchange information.
At least a dozen nations, especially the United States, has likely doomed the entire summit, which was convened to draft a new treaty, unless a competing alliance including China and Algeria are willing to offer a dramatic last-minute compromise. ITU secretary general Hamadoun Touré said in September that “no proposal is going to be passed if it does not have very wide support from all involved.”
Data Citation Index
October 2012, Thomson Reuters to release the Data Citation Index on the Web of Knowledge platform to provide a single point of access to quality research data from repositories across disciplines and around the world.
ICPSR Project To Improve Metadata
Researchers will be able to retrieve improved metadata and have access to new tools for searching through and analyzing the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies under a new joint initiative launched by ICPSR, the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, and several partners. The project is supported by a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation, ICPSR. The American National Election Studies program in the Center for Political Studies at UM’s Institute for Social Research and NORC, will carry out the two-year “Metadata Portal for the Social Sciences” project. Technical support will be provided by Metadata Technology North America and Integrated Data Management Services.
The first phase of the project will involve bringing the metadata for the existing GSS and ANES datasets up to the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard using XML. In the sample of the surveys, the project will also capture enhanced metadata on questionnaire flow and variable transformations.
The second part of the project will create a metadata portal on the Web to demonstrate some of the prototype tools that can be built with the new structured metadata — for example, survey catalogs and documentation libraries, question and classification banks, dynamic code books customized to user specifications, and tools for harmonization and comparison. These innovations will be broadly applicable to all survey data.
Thirdly, the project will develop new metadata-driven workflows and best practices to capture metadata early in the data production process so that it can be reused across the research lifecycle.
Texas A & M and Early Modern OCR Project
Texas A&M University has received a two-year development grant for $734,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the university’s Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP), to improve the digitization, transcription and preservation of early modern texts
Digital Data News and Information 
Written
on February 10, 2013