iNODE

During yesterday’s commute—while listening to a podcast with Ben Goodger (lead engineer for Firefox)—I heard about his favorite “secret tip” for Firefox users. It was one I’d never noticed or used: smart keywords. I’ve now tried it out and believe it will save a few hundred mouse clicks per week, thus the mention here.

What problem does it solve? I hate having to go through a couple of clicks to do a search of our OPAC. I’d like to be able to go to the Firefox location bar and type in: opac unix and have a search run against our OPAC for all items with “unix” as a keyword.

How? First, get to page where you typically enter a search term. Instead of filling in the search box, right click within it. You’ll see an “Add a keyword for this search…” option. Click that option and give the search type a name (so you can find it later in your bookmark list) and a keyword…in this case I used “opac.”

Now, to run a search on that page you need only type “opac unix” in the Firefox location area…a search executes. But there’s a problem in this particular case (our OPAC) when you try it a second time–Firefox saved all the URL information needed to run the search (including the session and process ID’s that appear in our OPAC’s URL). To fix that particular problem with a Voyager OPAC, just go to the Bookmarks, then Manage Your Bookmarks, then select the name you gave this particular “smart keyword” bookmark, right click the bookmark, select Properties, and then delete the &PID=234234234&SEQ=234234234 section of the Location: value. In other words, convert this:

http://infosparc.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=%s &SL=None&Search_Code=CMD&PID=2604& SEQ=20060426093856&CNT=15&HIST=1

to this:

http://infosparc.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=%s &SL=None&Search_Code=CMD&CNT=15&HIST=1

Now it works correctly. Think I might change the “trigger” from “opac” to just “o” in the next revision…

More info on “smart keywords” can be found around the net. John Bokma offers a nice explanation on his blog.

Nature magazine is suggesting a new “standard” for use by publishers (and others) to expose content to open text mining applications—and the March 23rd issue is available for testing. From Nascent, Nature’s blog on web technology and science, Tim Hannay presents an interesting look and a bit of documentation for their proposed OTMI (Open Text Mining Interface) standard. The illustration for this post is a snippet of a screen grab from the XML file of an article using the OTMI syntax:

Every now and then a scientist contacts Nature asking for a machine-readable copy if our content (i.e., the XML) to use in text-mining research. We’re usually happy to oblige, but there has to be a better way for everyone concerned, not least the poor researcher, who might have to contact any number of publishers and deal with many different content formats to conduct their work. Much better, surely, to have a common format in which all publishers can issue their content for text-mining and indexing purposes.

The Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI) is a suggestion from Nature about how we might achieve that. As described in my earlier post, I presented a brief summary of the idea at the Bio IT World conference in Boston. We’ve since been sharing the idea with some other publishers. This post is intended to provide a few written details and an update.

Our initial demo uses the 23 March issue of Nature (by happy coincidence, a wonderful special issue on the future of scientific computing). Embedded in the HTML of the abstract and full-text file for each article is a tag like this:

<link rel=“OTMI” type=“application/atom+xml” xhref=“../otmi/otmi-nature04614.xml” />

which points to an OTMI file — a machine-readable representation of the text.

Yes, this is pretty cool but also a bit chilling. The basic idea here (as I understand it) is a mechanism to enable machines to “read” and “understand” (that is, “mine and/or index”) content but at the same time, make sure that humans can’t simply grab the content and derive understanding (e.g., read it). Looked at another way, isn’t this a form of DRM?

If you read the comments following the Nascent post, one reader makes an interesting connection to this work:

http://www.starshiptitanic.com/novel/

Don’t do software reviews as a rule but I’ve been finding so many uses for Yojimbo (the software package, not the Kurosawa film) that I thought I’d mention it here.

Conceptually, Yojimbo is a free-form “filing cabinet” for storing the digital flotsam of your electronic life (documents, emails, PDFs, web pages, etc.). Thus far, I’ve tended to think of it as the place I put things “I know I’ll need someday” and with full Spotlight integration, locating them is simple. Yojimbo doesn’t store a link, it ingests the item (which means you can put something in Yojimbo and then delete all other traces–useful for ephemeral things like receipts from online orders, reservation confirmations, and the like.

It handles most file formats and features a number of easy data entry options. For example, if you’re printing a document and want to include it in your Yojimbo database (called the Library) select PDF as output and click “Save PDF to Yojimbo”. Have something on your clipboard? Press F8 and a dialog that enables adding to Yojimbo appears. Finally, there’s the option of having a small Tab appear on the edge of your screen…drag an item to it and it ends up in your Yojimbo library.

Yojimbo offers the option to encrypt any item in your database which makes it an ideal place to store passwords, account numbers and the like. According to Bare Bones the encryption is done with a 256bit AES key. A nice bonus: If you have a .mac account (and more than one computer), Yojimbo supports database syncing.

Prior to springing for the registration, I tried both DEVONthink (a more powerful information manager but one that presents a much steeper learning curve) and StickyBrain (great program but one that’s showing signs of feature-creep) but I wasn’t looking for a program to really change my life (or one I had to change my life to use), so Yojimbo won out–simple to use and immediately useful. It’s a niche product, to be sure, but one that I think you’ll find meets a host of small but recurring needs.

So what’s not to like? Well, you can’t just drag a Microsoft Word document into Yojimbo and have it look precisely right. Yojimbo gets the text and does a pretty decent .doc -> rtf approximation of what’s on the original page but it’s not 100%. If you want to include Word documents, either accept the limitations or use the Print->PDF->Yojimba ingest routine. While Yojimbo accepts images, it doesn’t deal with video (but then why would you want to include video in this sort of application?).

Where could it improve? It offers “smart folders” to group items but you’re unable to create your own rules. I’d also like to see basic WebDav support so the syncing wouldn’t be tied to .mac accounts. With Apple including a boatload of code in OS X to support .mac syncing, I can understand why BareBones started with .mac support but I’m hoping the future brings a more flexible (and robust) approach.

Because it uses several Tiger-specific technologies (primarily Core Data), you must be running OS X 10.4.3 or later. The program sells for $39 for a single user license ($29 for Educational users). A fully-functional 30 day demo is available.

http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo

I haven’t posted anything here for a couple of weeks. I think it’s because I took a week off for Spring Break (to help my daughter do the college tour thing) and whenever I have more than seven days away from the office it seems it takes another seven to get back fully in the groove.

By that logic I’m about two days away from having something useful to talk about here but why let that stop me? Here are a couple of fragments that will have to do until then…

MEEBO – A cool web-based chat client–which means you can use it from just about anywhere. Supports AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo, MSN and Google Talk. This might have potential for libraries trying to ramp up IM services (to replace the online reference bloatware that dominated this space a year or so ago).

Other World Computing – I’ve ordered a couple of things from OWC over the past couple of years but not enough that I’d register on their radar…but I want to take a minute to rave about their customer service. About 6 months ago I bought a 12″ aluminum PowerBook battery from OWC. When it arrived, the plastic battery had come unattached from the aluminum plate. I decided I’d just superglue the thing back down (so I wouldn’t have to get into the hassle of shipping it back and waiting, etc.). I thought it went well enough but I apparently didn’t line everything up precisely and after a few months use, the battery started falling out at odd times as I carried the laptop around. Not realizing I’d already “fixed it till it broke,” I pulled the battery apart from the aluminum backing plate and thought I’d reglue it. Dumb move—the little aluminum plate bent. I felt like it was completely my fault now, but dropped a note to OWC on their “contact us” form, asking if they’d sell me just an aluminum plate. I got this response back the next day:

How about we just arrange a cross ship and get you back to base with a new battery?

Best Regards,
Lawrence R. O’Connor

Digging around, I discovered that Lawrence (”Larry”) O’Connor is the CEO of Other World Computing. Not bad, huh? I boxed up the mess I’d made and mailed it. Two days ago my new 12″ battery arrived. Needless to say I’m now a really loyal OWC customer (http://www.macsales.com).

And finally…

…the Google hegemon advances

Attended the CNI Spring Meeting yesterday (briefly) and today (more completely). To be honest, I didn’t find the overall program as interesting as some I’ve attended in the past but that’s not meant as a criticism of CNI or the work they do pulling this event together twice a year. In some ways I think it is the result of how much more efficient communication is becoming thanks to the web (websites, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.). Five years ago, I sometimes heard about a particular project for the first time at the CNI project briefings (e.g., in 1999 at the Phoenix winter meeting I heard a presentation on DSpace). Today, I find that I’ve often heard about a particular project that I find on the program so while it’s no longer all about raising my awareness of what’s happening, it’s still the best place I know for posing a question or two to those actually doing the work on projects of importance.

One project I was quite interested in was the “Building an Interdisciplinary Research Program in an Academic Library” briefing given by James Mullins and Scott Brandt of Purdue. My interest in the issues surrounding the role of the library in digital data collections was piqued by the NSF’s recent “Long Lived Digital Data Collections” report. The presentation showed that Purdue is doing very interesting work in this growth area–although I was surprised to learn during a Q&A exchange that “the data” actually lives on the TeraGrid. This struck me as a bit odd since I had heard the point made during the presentation that faculty were reluctant to give stewardship of their data to the IT group but trusted the library more. I guess I was hoping to hear that the library was doing the IT piece of this as well.

Roy Rosenzweig gave a really entertaining and informative talk to close the event–a look at how the internet and web-based technologies are democratizing history and historiography. A really wide-ranging and thoughtful presentation, he even found a way to work this State of the Union remix into his session (you’ll need QuickTime).

My interest in basketball ended abruptly Saturday evening, right about the time that Mason’s run at the NCAA championship appeared to stall…but the whole experience was great for Mason and I ended up with a new green tee shirt (”Mason Nation”) to boot. I’m pretty sure only an alien spaceship landing on the quad could have catapulted Mason to national attention any faster than our basketball team managed it. This morning, I went into a newstand in Alexandria and noticed that of the 20+ daily papers I looked at, all but two had some story about Mason on the front page.

Hoping there’s a bit of magic left in that “Mason Nation” shirt, I’ll wear it to the National’s home opener next week (April 11th). I’ve got a couple of tickets about 10 rows higher and further right than anything Frank Howard ever managed to hit but there aren’t any really bad seats at RFK.

Opening Day is tomorrow (I’m ignoring the made-for-ESPN opener this evening in Chicago) as is the CNI Spring Meeting. I’ll be at CNI (checking in with the Nats progress via GameDay Audio from mlb.com). The CNI meeting will close on Tuesday with an address from my friend Roy Rosenzweig.