toma@sun.uucp (Tom Athanasiou) (11/03/88)
I've asked this before, but I got no response. Come on folks, somebody's got to know something about the digital librarian. A summary of its capabilities? Details of its document representations? A pointer to an article about it? -- toma
toma@sun.uucp (Tom Athanasiou) (11/04/88)
I got this from (rit@coyote.stanford.edu) who asked me to post it for him. I attended a demo of mathematica yesterday at Stanford. The goodie was that they made a demo on a next machine. Furthermore, the next people made an "informal" demo after the mathematica presentation. The content was basically the same than the one at the 12 oct. presentation, which I also attended. Only this time I was a little bit more attentive. Apparently, the basic function of the DL is searching for a string. Usually (i.e. in most demo examples) it is a word, some examples involved several words. It looks like it can be any (not "predefined") word (like look at any reference to "mammal" in the webster, as opposed to being able to find entries only). The output is a menu of the different units containing the reference. I don't know how these units are defined. If you look in Shakespeare works, it sends you back "sonnets", in the webster it sends you websters entries. These are editable text. You can also get pictures, I don't know if they come automatically or if you can specify "picture only" or "text only" searches. From a more general point of view, one great thing is the openness of the applications to each other. You can look for the entry (a primitive for the dictionary object) of any word in any document, then search the digital library for references to it, then feed these to your favorite spreadsheet program (I am extrapolating this last one). A kind of super-pipes (since the environment is a bit more structured than bare unix), which really makes the difference with a mac environment. One other great thing is that "high throughput capability". While playing several plucked strings synthesized in real time, the system was searching the webster for mammal references and displaying pictures of animals (about ten to twenty pictures at the rate of one per 2 seconds roughly). Finally, concerning software distributions, the next guy said that they found a great way for distributing software (other than campus network which was also advocated). The announcement will come soon. I suspect a billboard system, like the one S Wolframmhad described a few minutes ago to release updates of mathematica through portal. That's all. It's only impressions. A more rogorous approach would be to buy the next documentation but I am not willing to spend hundreds of bucks for it.
chari@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Chris Whatley) (11/04/88)
>[What is the digital librarian]
Well, its not really anything because it doesn't exist. There is an application
called "Find" which is probably what you are referring to. It is supposed
to keep track of your text, mail and on-line docs like the Digital Library.
There is also a text datbase called "jot" as well as a big, bad Sybase SQL db.
I can't wait 'till 0.9 he says as he wrings his hands.
Chris
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