One of the intriguing aspects of the (chemical) Internet is its interaction
with the computer (operating systems) used to access it. I
have long considered this coupling to be far weaker than it should be.
So it was with interest that I noted some announcements by Apple
Computer and their forthcoming next version OS (which also presages
the Windows "Longhorn"). The two aspects that caught my eye
are at
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/searchtechnology.html
which is a) adding rich metadata to the basic file system to make
finding files easier and b) coupling RSS into its browser (and hence
possibly the underlying OS itself).
The thought struck me that this has the potential for solving one
problem which seems to have struck like a pernicious virus these
last few years, and which I have noted on this forum previously,
namely a profusion of "shrink wrapped" scientific content in the
form of PDF (Acrobat) files increasingly littering our computers,
about which the only thing we know for certain is the often inscrutable
file name (we dont even really know if any given file contains "chemistry").
The theory is that e.g. RSS would deliver the metadata, including bibliographic
information (using eg PRISM-RSS), chemical information (CMLRSS),
Math information (MathML-RSS) etc, and that any "shrink wrapped"
PDF file would be associated with this information by the OS.
Thereafter, a "search" on one's computer would immediately reveal
this associated information, and one could then find eg "all Acrobat files
authored by A on chemical topic B written in 2004 and containing
a chemcal substructure C. Well, that is a bit off, but it would mean
that one's computer could finally become a proper scientific instrument,
rather than a depository of confusion as it often is nowadays.
A pipe dream perhaps! If anyone else has any other ideas on how
to couple science with the instrument almost invariably now used to
retrieve it, do let this forum know.
--
Henry Rzepa. Imperial College, Chemistry Dept.
+44 0778 626 8220 +44 020 7594 5804 (Fax)
Although there is little overt chemistry here, the (free) issue of JODI
has some interesting (and occasionally impenetrable) visions of how Hypertext
will/should evolve
========================
Future Visions of Common-Use Hypertext
>From the special issue editorial:
"This special issue arises out of a panel held during the ACM Hypertext '03 conference. Panellists were invited to sell their vision as 'the next big thing' in hypertext, either to supplement, augment or supplant 'modern day' systems, which, let's face it, is the Web, and to consider new ways to embed their research in contexts and situations that are accessible to the majority".
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/editorial
The issue includes the following papers:
P. Brown, H. Brown (February 2004)
Integrating Reading and Writing of Documents
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Brown/
J. Catanio, N. Nnadi, L. Zhang, M. Bieber, R. Galnares (April 2004)
Ubiquitous Metainformation and the WYWWYWI Principle
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Catanio/
P. De Bra, L. Aroyo, V. Chepegin (May 2004)
The Next Big Thing: Adaptive Web-Based Systems
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/DeBra/
A. Di Iorio, F. Vitali (May 2004)
Writing the Web
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/DiIorio/
K. Edmonds, J. Blustein, D. Turnbull (May 2004)
A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Edmonds/
S. Harper, C. Goble, S. Pettitt (April 2004)
proXimity: Walking the Link
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Harper/
R. Mayans (May 2004)
The Future of Mathematical Text: A Proposal for a New Internet Hypertext for Mathematics
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Mayans/
A. Moore, T. Brailsford (May 2004)
Unified Hyperstructures for Bioinformatics: Escaping the Application Prison
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Moore/
P. Murray-Rust, H. Rzepa (March 2004)
The Next Big Thing: From Hypermedia to Datuments
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Murray-Rust/
T. Nelson (July 2004)
A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
H. Obendorf (April 2004)
The Indirect Authoring Paradigm - Bringing Hypertext into the Web
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Obendorf/
m. schraefel, L. Carr, D. De Roure, W. Hall (July 2004)
You've Got Hypertext
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/schraefel/
--
The Journal of Digital Information is an electronic journal published only via the Web. JoDI is currently free to users thanks to support from the British Computer Society and Oxford University Press
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
--
Henry Rzepa.
+44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax)
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
(Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email.
If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).
Hi,
July's Molecule of the Month is atenolol, which is a beta-blocker used for
treating high blood pressure and angina.
It has been written by Ravi Bhandari who is an undergrad student at
Imperial College London.
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/motm.htm#july2004
[You might like to know that the URL for the main Molecule of the Month
Page has now changed to:
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/motm.htm
although the old links will still work, and going to the old page
will simply redirect the browser automaticaly to the new URL.]
Regards,
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Dr Paul May, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, UK
tel: +44 (0)117 928-9927 fax: +44 (0)117 925-1295
<mailto:paul.may@bris.ac.uk> Mobile: 07811371539
Home URL: <http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/staff/pwm.htm>
Molecule of the Month: <http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/motm.htm>
"Ah, a chemist, eh? Do we get to blow something up, then?"
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
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