Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online (TGN)

The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is a ” a hierarchical vocabulary of around 1.1 million names, and coordinates and other information for around 892,000 geographic places.” (From Getty Vocabularies Download Center)
In other words it is an controlled vocabulary of place names that can be searched online or, with permission, downloaded in XML form (or relational database or MARC.) I wonder if this could be used to create text engines that search by place and use the TGN records (which contain hierarchical information) to provide context? To put it another way, is TGN an ontology?
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CAIDA: Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis

CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) has a wealth of information, papers, analysis, and tools on their web site, including mass information visualization tools that have been developed and links to information about the visualization techniques. You can also get cool posters of the Internet. In their “about” page they write that CAIDA is,

a collaborative undertaking among organizations in the commercial, government, and research sectors aimed at promoting greater cooperation in the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. CAIDA provides a neutral framework to support cooperative technical endeavors.

Sabine Scholl: Book Interface

Sabine Scholl has a simple and interesting interface to her personal site which looks like a very tall book that you can scroll up and down. I don’t know if it is intentional, but there is a visual joke on flipping pages and scrolling up and down to the site. All the links are just to anchors further down the “page”. This is courtesy of Ross Scaife.

Jason Lewis: ActiveText

At the Textologies workshop organized here at McMaster by Travis Kroeker and Andrew Mactavish, I saw a neat project, ActiveText that was demonstrated by Jason E. Lewis at Concordia. ActiveText is a C++ library that can be used to make active text. Jason has gotten it right – the objects he handles go from glyphs up to passages. They can have behaviors so that segments of text are activated. See the animation.
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Mind Mapping

At the Burlington Art Centre I attended a day-long workshop on “The Art of Change” where the “mind mapping” software Mindjet: Mind Manager was demonstrated. Mind mapping apparently was invented by Tony Buzan as a way of unleashing the potential of the mind. See, Buzan Centres – Mind Mapping – Mind Map Definition. The presenter oversold mind mapping and it is not clear that visual thinking software running on a small screen is preferable to a good big peice of software or whiteboard, but at its heart mind mapping seems to be hypertext for thinking – drawing graphs of ideas. What is is strange is how this business technique has spawned software similar to what has come from the hypertext community, software like Storyspace, which bills itself as serious hypertext for writers.
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Next Generation foundation and the Map of Creativity

The Next Generation Foundation has a Flash based site that is interesting both for its design and content. This organization was set up by the CEO of Lego and, for an organization focused on “creativity” has a stiffling “Terms of use” (see the link off the main page.) The foundation focuses on children’s play and creativity. To get a sense of their mission (to sell more toys?) read the bizarre “Manifesto and Call to Action” by Seymour Papert. Here is a quote,

There exists today an unprecedented opportunity for synergy between the goals of parenting and the goals of industrial entrepreneurship, between spiritual concerns about the meaning of life and political concerns about the policies of nations, between the cultivation of the arts and the preparation of young people for the workplace.

One neat feature they have is an interactive Map of Creativity which has a circular interface for navigating projects that recommended as innovative and helping children play.
This came StÈfan’s blog

China and cyber dissidents

The Globe and Mail has a story about how Cyber dissidents rattle China’s thought police. The story features the “Stainless Steel Mouse”, a 24-year-old woman Liu Di who was jailed for a year for her online activities. What is scary is how many people China purportedly has monitoring the net. It is also scary how technology companies have worked with the government to develop online surveillance tools. China may prove the Internet is as easy to patrol as the streets. The story is by Rod Mickleburgh, Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, Page A16.

Data Privacy and the Patriot Act

The Globe and Mail has a story U.S. Patriot Act could affect data on Canadians, B.C. privacy head says by Rod Mickleburgh (Saturday, October 30, 2004 – Page A13 ) about a report by the BC privacy commissioner that concludes that if BC outsourced their health data management or storage then the FBI could get access to that data due to provisions in the Patriot Act. Basically the Patriot act gives US agents the right to ask US companies for access to data they store even if protected by another countries’ privacy regulations. This is likely to affect US companies bidding on services abroad. I suspect we are going to see a slow move among countries to avoid dealing with US telecommunications and data management companies.
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