Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Copyright sets boundaries on history: "Dr Humphrey Southall, the director of the University of Portsmouth's project, points out a further irony: if the project's website, which is funded by the universities' Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), were visible only within further and higher education institutions, it would be covered by Edina, a wide-ranging access agreement between data suppliers including OS and Jisc. 'It only arises because it's open access,' says Southall. 'Taxpayers would be amazed what is available within higher education, which is paid for by the general public but isn't available to the general public.'"
Monday, February 19, 2007
I have used the badger service, which sits on top of pipes, to create a simple news service from NLH - see panel on right hand side of the blog.
Update - Badger works fine, but my complicated template is complicating things just now. Oddly enough, it all woirks fine in preview mode.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Kim Cameron: HelloWorld Information Cards :
"There have been some who have rejected the open “meta” model in favor of just settling on tokens in the “concept de jour”. They urge us to forget about all these subtleties and just adopt SAML, or PKI, or whatever else meets someone’s use cases. But the sudden rise of OpenID shows exactly why we need a token-agnostic system. OpenID has great use cases that we should all recognize as important. And because of the new metasystem architecture, OpenID payloads can be selected and conveyed safely through the Information Card mechanisms just as well as anything else. To me it is amazing that the identity metasystem idea isn’t more than a couple of years old and yet we already have an impressive new identity technology arising. It provides an important example of why an elastic system like CardSpace is architecturally right.
It’s sometimes hard to explain how all this works under the hood. So I’ve decided to give a tutorial about “HelloWorld” cards. They don’t follow any format previously known to man - or even woman. They’re just someting made up to show elasticity. But I’m hoping that when you understand how the HelloWorld cards work, it will help you see the tremendous possibilities in the metasystem model.
The best way to follow this tutorial is to actually try things out. If you want to participate, install CardSpace on XP or use Vista, download a HelloWorld Card and kick the tires. (I’m checking now to see if other selector implementations will support this. If not, I know that compatibility is certainly the intention on everyones’ part).
The HelloWord card is just metadata for getting to a “helloworld” identity server. In upcoming posts I’ll explain how all this works in a way that I hope will make the technology very clear. I’ll also make the source code available. An interesting note here: the identity server is just a few hundred lines of code. "
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Ecology Articles in Google Scholar: "A few observations remain. Should libraries support access through GS? Libraries paying large sums for Biological Abstracts, Web of Science, and CSA databases may rightly believe their patrons should be pointed to these. Just as many biochemists have developed a habit of using PubMed despite a library's provision of expensive licensed databases, so might ecologists develop a habit of using Google Scholar. It exists within an environment they use daily, is easy to search, and often succeeds in providing a good-enough answer. The in-depth indexing may retrieve data not easily accessible through standard abstracting services. Since it will be used, the decisions libraries have to make are only in what ways and at what level we should support Google Scholar."
Sunday, February 11, 2007
QEDWiki and Pipes may give a new level of unctionality to the Web. I'd say convergence with the semantic web is now on the horizon.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
MySpace for Healthcare? Much Closer Than You Think....
Does the social networking trend matter in healthcare? Several new companies are betting the answer is "yes."
Tim O'Reilly: Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet.
It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
CardSpace OpenID collaboration:
anRain, Microsoft, Sxip, and VeriSign will collaborate on interoperability between OpenID and Windows CardSpace™ to make the Internet safer and easier to use. Specifically:
* As part of OpenID’s security architecture, OpenID will be extended to allow relying parties to explicitly request and be informed of the use of phishing-resistant credentials.
* Microsoft recognizes the growth of the OpenID community and believes OpenID plays a significant role in the Internet identity infrastructure. Kim Cameron, Chief Architect of Identity at Microsoft, will work with the OpenID community on authentication and anti-phishing.
* JanRain, Sxip, and VeriSign recognize that Information Cards provide significant anti-phishing, privacy, and convenience benefits to users. Information Cards, based on the open WS-Trust standard, are available though Windows CardSpace™.
* JanRain and Sxip, leading providers of open source code libraries for blogging and web sites, are announcing they will add support for the Information Cards to their OpenID code bases.
* JanRain, Sxip and VeriSign plan to add Information Card support to future identity solutions.
* Microsoft plans to support OpenID in future Identity server products
* The four companies have agreed to work together on a “Using Information Cards with OpenID” profile that will make it possible for other developers and service providers to take advantage of these technology advancements.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Adam Bosworth on why AJAX failed...and then succeeded. We had the same problem as Bosworth, pitching a DHTML based application called MyWorkPlace to Microsoft in 2001.
Monday, February 05, 2007
The business of health: video of a Web based business intelligence dashboard for a US family physician
Friday, February 02, 2007
Thursday, February 01, 2007
A few weeks ago the Cooksey report suggested that 'knowledge brokers' might be a good thing in the NHS. Jonathan Lomas makes a similar suggestion in this week's BMJ. It was odd that David Cooksey made no reference to the extensive (and expensive) network of libraries in the NHS. Not having access to the BMJ I don't know if Lomas mentions NHS libraries.
The latest Pew Internet survey finds that tagging is suprisingly popular:
Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content
