Aduna Autofocus can do this. It lets you create multiple indices which can be (networked) directories, web sites, IMAP servers or even a remote index server. You can query each index independently or all together by simply (de)selecting them.
Another nice thing about this tool is that it also lets you search on a lot more facets than just keywords (you can search specifically for title, age, owner, source, document type and a number of other facets) - and it has a very useful graphic visualisation (screenshot) of the search results.
Not open source, but free for private use.
Seriously, are they offering anything better than standard keyword and author search?
Yes, though it may be hard to see this at first. The system makes it possible to query for specific properties of citation entries, which is more precise than simple keyword search. Also, in the current release of the software the interface is limited to a few 'fixed' properties, but there is no underlying technical reason for this, it could be easily extended to allow the user to search for arbitrary properties of any citation. Since the storage format is RDF, extension with properties as needed is trivial.
You are misrepresenting that exchange. Linus definitely did *not* stay cool. In fact, he started being rather abusive at first, and later on in the thread even apologized for that.
I had not heard about the book-signing incident, and find it somewhat hard to believe to be honest (not saying you're lying, just that I'm surprised). I only know Tanenbaum in passing, but he always struck me as a nice, if somewhat odd, person.
I think this is a misunderstanding of what is happening here. The whole point of developing these new languages is that they work _on top_ of existing languages. So nothing in the existing approach will be broken if RDF and related languages are introduced.
Look at it this way: HTML and all that is used to communicate information to humans. RDF and related languages are used to communicate information to machines. So we add an additional communication channel to the existing one that will allow machines to better understand the information that its user wants to see, thus enabling that machine to better support its user in a.o. information retrieval and navigation tasks.
It's interesting that you mention this, because actually the whole concept of trust is one of the major research issues within the Semantic Web community.
Have a look at this article by James Hendler which talks about
the use of the semantic web in an agent context. Trust is right at there at the top of the layering cake that make up the semantic web.
As for usefulness, time only can tell of course, but there is certainly a lot of research and development being invested in making this happen.
I was sort of hoping that they'd have a 12" figure of the Black Knight, complete with detachable arms and legs.
Re:you've fallen for MS strategy
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 1
IE has pulled so far ahead because Microsoft has been pushing for a complex mess of standards, as part of the W3C and outside, while implementing these features in parallel in IE. They have been cheered along in this effort by academics and startups who want their overly complex and mostly useless features added to the web standards.
I wonder what overly complex mess of standars you are referring to. From the top of my head, I cannot think of any W3C Recommendation that IE fully supports and others don't. XSL support in IE is still marginal and largely based on an old spec. XML Schema is not yet supported, nor is XHTML. RDF is not supported in IE at all. Exactly what W3C standard did you have in mind?
In Switzerland, they still assume that people are more decent, thus you have to pay afterwards. In Holland they would assume one
would dump the old TV's and Computers in a lake etc. to avoid the recycling costs
If you have ever seen the canals in Amsterdam you would know that this is not such a far-fetched assumption:)
There are non x86 platforms out there other than "the MIPS processor released in 1985 that I just couldn't part with" dude... Ever heard of Sun Ultra?:)
Seriously though, I find it rather annoying that they didn't include a nice Solaris build. Compiling at the site I am on now is just plain agony (because of crappy library installations and a rather slow network). Still, it's only a prerelease, we'll see what they do for the final version.
And yes, I realize that they can't include a build for every friggin' OS/platform on the planet, but I would imagine SPARC still being large enough to consider...
While the DOJ is of course correct in proposing a breakup (as a direct result of finding Microsoft guilty of monopolysing the market), I wonder whether this will help control MS' influence in any way.
While having seperate divisions for OS and application software will (hopefully) hamper their attempts to integrate the lot, 90% of the world's PC will still run on Windows. 99% of the world's managers will still choose to use Windows software and Microsoft applications because it is still the de facto standard. Breaking up the company doesn't help here at all.
Besides, look at what happened with the AT&T breakup. The seperate companies each went ahead to become market leaders in their own segment. It was hardly of any benefit to AT&T's direct competitors.
In short: I'm not getting up my hopes that this will seriously threaten MS's dominant position on the global market.
Wow. Hotmail just shot up 10 points on my esteem-o-meter.
Basically, the last paragraph sums it all up:
"Functionally, the RBL is a way of saying you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Isn't that a good reason for you to fix what's wrong with your system?"
This whole issue has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it's a technical matter: if you haven't configured your server in a way that prevents abuse, you should expect to be shunned by other providers. Hotmail adopting this viewpoint may well give the anti-spam movement a push in the right direction.
ObSneer: Something good from Hotmail. What next, pigs with wings?
Wow. Hotmail just shot up 10 points on my esteem-o-meter. Basically, the last paragraph sums it all up: "Functionally, the RBL is a way of saying you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Isn't that a good reason for you to fix what's wrong with your system?" This whole issue has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it's a technical matter: if you haven't configured your server in a way that prevents abuse, you should expect to be shunned by other providers. Hotmail adopting this viewpoint may well give the anti-spam movement a push in the right direction.
The problems with the Turing test are that it is too hard and that it can produce false negatives. After all a machine could be truly intelligent and not human at all.
The Turing test does not produce false negative. It states that IF a computer passes it THEN it is conscious. The implication is not reversible.
Despite many researchers devoting their time to actually building machines to pass a constrained version of the test, I would say that the main merit of it is exactly that it is very hard. Constrained Turing tests, such as computers that can talk about a certain subject, only produce clever programming gimmicks that do not scale. However, the complexity that is inevitably needed to actually produce intelligent speech is the key feature here: from complex interactions of simple components intelligence emerges. Both Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofstadter have written some insightful stuff about this. In "Consciousness Explained" Dennet describes a conversation between a Turing-test-proof computer and an interrogator: the computer tells the interrogator a joke and explains it. It also comments that it doesn't really like the joke because it is about racial prejudice. Reading this conversation makes you realize how immensely difficult this task is.
In short, I don't agree that passing the Turing Test is no longer a goal of AI. Any system that would pass the real-deal test should be considered intelligent. However most programs written today are just gimmicks, that can only pass very short or very constrained tests. We are very, very far away from passing the real test.
Slashdot Mirror
Blimey. They changed it when I wasn't looking.
I swear, it used to stand for Simple. Thanks for the heads-up.
Actually it is not recursive. The S stands for Simple.
Which, I guess, is kinda hard to believe if you're not into this stuff.
"Unox, the worst operating system"
(only funny if you speak Dutch I guess)
Another nice thing about this tool is that it also lets you search on a lot more facets than just keywords (you can search specifically for title, age, owner, source, document type and a number of other facets) - and it has a very useful graphic visualisation (screenshot) of the search results. Not open source, but free for private use.
Slashdot ran an article on Bibster some time ago, which uses Semantic Web technology under the hood.
Then there are the entries for the Semantic Web Challenge, organized by the ISWC, which have some interesting and useful applications.
These are just a few pointers to semantic web software. There's more, I'm sure.
Seriously, are they offering anything better than standard keyword and author search?
Yes, though it may be hard to see this at first. The system makes it possible to query for specific properties of citation entries, which is more precise than simple keyword search. Also, in the current release of the software the interface is limited to a few 'fixed' properties, but there is no underlying technical reason for this, it could be easily extended to allow the user to search for arbitrary properties of any citation. Since the storage format is RDF, extension with properties as needed is trivial.
FYI, Bibster uses Semantic Web technology and standards, actually. Data is stored in RDF, and peers retrieve data using the SeRQL
RDF query language.
You are misrepresenting that exchange. Linus definitely did *not* stay cool. In fact, he started being rather abusive at first, and later on in the thread even apologized for that.
I had not heard about the book-signing incident, and find it somewhat hard to believe to be honest (not saying you're lying, just that I'm surprised). I only know Tanenbaum in passing, but he always struck me as a nice, if somewhat odd, person.
I think this is a misunderstanding of what is happening here. The whole point of developing these new languages is that they work _on top_ of existing languages. So nothing in the existing approach will be broken if RDF and related languages are introduced.
Look at it this way: HTML and all that is used to communicate information to humans. RDF and related languages are used to communicate information to machines. So we add an additional communication channel to the existing one that will allow machines to better understand the information that its user wants to see, thus enabling that machine to better support its user in a.o. information retrieval and navigation tasks.
Have a look at this article by James Hendler which talks about the use of the semantic web in an agent context. Trust is right at there at the top of the layering cake that make up the semantic web.
As for usefulness, time only can tell of course, but there is certainly a lot of research and development being invested in making this happen.
I was sort of hoping that they'd have a 12" figure of the Black Knight, complete with detachable arms and legs.
I'm a far cry from a dinosaur expert, but I remember seeing a Discovery program about this about a year ago...
If you have ever seen the canals in Amsterdam you would know that this is not such a far-fetched assumption :)
J1
Seriously though, I find it rather annoying that they didn't include a nice Solaris build. Compiling at the site I am on now is just plain agony (because of crappy library installations and a rather slow network). Still, it's only a prerelease, we'll see what they do for the final version.
And yes, I realize that they can't include a build for every friggin' OS/platform on the planet, but I would imagine SPARC still being large enough to consider...
While the DOJ is of course correct in proposing a breakup (as a direct result of finding Microsoft guilty of monopolysing the market), I wonder whether this will help control MS' influence in any way.
While having seperate divisions for OS and application software will (hopefully) hamper their attempts to integrate the lot, 90% of the world's PC will still run on Windows. 99% of the world's managers will still choose to use Windows software and Microsoft applications because it is still the de facto standard. Breaking up the company doesn't help here at all.
Besides, look at what happened with the AT&T breakup. The seperate companies each went ahead to become market leaders in their own segment. It was hardly of any benefit to AT&T's direct competitors.
In short: I'm not getting up my hopes that this will seriously threaten MS's dominant position on the global market.
Wow. Hotmail just shot up 10 points on my esteem-o-meter.
Basically, the last paragraph sums it all up:
"Functionally, the RBL is a way of saying you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Isn't that a good reason for you to fix what's wrong with your system?"
This whole issue has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it's a technical matter: if you haven't configured your server in a way that prevents abuse, you should expect to be shunned by other providers. Hotmail adopting this viewpoint may well give the anti-spam movement a push in the right direction.
ObSneer: Something good from Hotmail. What next, pigs with wings?
Wow. Hotmail just shot up 10 points on my esteem-o-meter. Basically, the last paragraph sums it all up: "Functionally, the RBL is a way of saying you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Isn't that a good reason for you to fix what's wrong with your system?" This whole issue has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it's a technical matter: if you haven't configured your server in a way that prevents abuse, you should expect to be shunned by other providers. Hotmail adopting this viewpoint may well give the anti-spam movement a push in the right direction.
The Turing test does not produce false negative. It states that IF a computer passes it THEN it is conscious. The implication is not reversible.
Despite many researchers devoting their time to actually building machines to pass a constrained version of the test, I would say that the main merit of it is exactly that it is very hard. Constrained Turing tests, such as computers that can talk about a certain subject, only produce clever programming gimmicks that do not scale.
However, the complexity that is inevitably needed to actually produce intelligent speech is the key feature here: from complex interactions of simple components intelligence emerges. Both Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofstadter have written some insightful stuff about this. In "Consciousness Explained" Dennet describes a conversation between a Turing-test-proof computer and an interrogator: the computer tells the interrogator a joke and explains it. It also comments that it doesn't really like the joke because it is about racial prejudice. Reading this conversation makes you realize how immensely difficult this task is.
In short, I don't agree that passing the Turing Test is no longer a goal of AI. Any system that would pass the real-deal test should be considered intelligent. However most programs written today are just gimmicks, that can only pass very short or very constrained tests. We are very, very far away from passing the real test.