Day four, Thursday March 10th

This day started as always early, quick breakfast and bus to Sristhi.

First on our schedue was a lecture by Ajai Narendran about mutual subjects connected with internet, databases, web and digital imprints and counterparts.

In the introduction we focused on semantic web which is particulary  a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand. We discussed about the differences and possibilities in this relation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database.The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There is a dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web consortium working to improve, extend and standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on have already been developed. However, Semantic Web technologies are still very much in their infancies, and although the future of the project in general appears to be bright, there seems to be little consensus about the likely direction and characteristics of the early Semantic Web.

Later on we focused on data containers and Christiane Paul thoughts. What data base is ?

store information, in a set of columns. 

While a database is now commonly understood as a computerized record keeping system, 

it is essentially a structured collection of data that stands in the tradition of ‘data containers’ such 

as a book, a library, an archive.

Databases can be distinguished according to different ‘data models’–that is, data containers and the ways in which data are 

stored in and retrieved from them. Among the most common data models (some of them subsets 

of others and sometimes used in combination) are: 

• Hierarchical Databases that arrange the data in hierarchies similar to a tree structure with 

parent/child relationships. 

• Network Databases that are still close to the hierarchical model but use ‘sets’ to establish 

a hierarchy that allows children to have more than one parent and thus establishes many- 

to-many relationships. 

• Relational Databases, the most common form, are based on the research of Dr. E. F. 

Codd at IBM in the late 1960s and relies on the concept of tables (so-called ‘relations’) 

that store all data. Contrary to hierarchical or network databases, relational ones do not 

require a close understanding of how exactly information within the database is 

structured since each table can be identified by a unique name that can be called and 

found by the database. 

•  Client/Server Databases, which come in various forms and allow multiple ‘clients’ to 

remotely and simultaneously access and retrieve information from a database server 

around the clock. 

• Object-Oriented Databases that are designed to work well with object-oriented 

programming languages (such Java and C++) and make entries (objects) in the database 

appear as programming language objects in one or more languages.  

all Christiane text is available here in PDF version :

http://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Spring06/259M/readings/paul_christiane-final.pdf

From databases we went to web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0

Trying to see the relation beetween them, and also the progress that has been made.

Web 1.0 – That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 – This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 – This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

In the last part of lecture the question “How google works” has been asked and so we went into all this process on pictures, to make it easier to understand.

In a short drawn illustration it looked like this :

            After this breathtaking lecture we went on the rooftop to eat lunch and have another brainstorm. The teams were supposed to be chosen and annouced soon, and we were discussing our ideas and possible projects.

After lunch the lecture went into Natural Language Processing NLP. 

(Google trademark secrets)

There’s a nice video from google/sic!/ about this issue up here :

Then on we were searching for a nice online open source project alterantives like 

http://www.ohloh.net/ and VISIMO.

And in the end we went on the John Brickman Edge Foundation that is focused on promoting inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.

http://www.edge.org/

We also spoke about the antropologist Gregory Bateson 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson

Bateson also viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems.This supreme cybernetic system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as the Mind.While the Mind is a cybernetic system, it can only be distinguished as a whole and not parts. Bateson felt the Mind was immanent in the messages and pathways of the supreme cybernetic system. He saw the root of system collapses as a result of Occidental or Western epistemology. According to Bateson consciousness is the bridge between the cybernetic networks of individual, society and ecology and that the mismatch between the systems due to improper understanding will be result in the degradation of the entire supreme cybernetic system or Mind. Bateson saw consciousness as developed through Occidental epistemology was at direct odds with the Mind.[

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