CHeriCoS

Okay, I'm truly late with this. The 50th Birthday of the Hard Drive was 3 Years ago. As Wikipedia says, the Hard Drive was invented by an IBM Team in 1956. Recently i stumbled upon a nice Video on YouTube made by Hitachi to cherish this event. It's called "Life Without The Hard Drive" and features besides some nice music interesting and funny visualisations of how retrieval would be without hard drives.

Instead of the World Wide Web, there would be a World Wide Warehouse, where all the information of the world is stored. You'd have to type your search with an old-fashioned typewriter, and the browser would be a guy on a bicycle trying to retrieve an answer.

Well, see what happens ...

Maybe I will use this in one of my next talks. This video is one of a series of videos made by hitachi to promote hard drives and the underlying technology. Be sure not to miss "The Dawn Of The Tera Era", "Licence To Read" and the fantastic "Get Perpendicular".

As announced at the Google Lat Long Blog and several news sites and blogs (at least in germany, e.g. FAZ and Golem or Archivalia and Cibera) Google and the Prado Museum has joined in a real impressive project. But let me ask you a question first: Where in the world is Carmen ... oops ... this man with a pole in his hands? If you are not at least a art historian with a favour for renaissance art you will hardly know. This guy "lives" in spain (formerly germany), is about one third of an inch tall and can be found on the famous self-portrait - well, not as famous as this one - of Albrecht Dürer. Due to the fantastic work done at the Prado with the help of Google now you can check yourself just by sitting in your chair and browsing the web. 14 Masterpieces have been digitized in high resolution and combined with Google Earth's zooming technology. And the resolution really IS high! To quote Clara Rivera Rodriguez from the Google Spain division:

The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento ) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias)

See the Prado website for more information. You don't have Google Earth? Well, take a look at the Prado in (less) high resolution at Google Maps. And there is still more to come. They claim that after a initial phase every day a new image will appear. If you are interested in this kind of image technology, you should check out Microsoft's SeaDragon/Photosynth too. In some way it represents a much more exciting and innovative approach to image visualisation. A good starting point is a short speech at Ted by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

As I read in Ivan Hermann's Blog, Thomson Reuters will release the fourth iteration of Open Calais in January 2009. Open Calais is a free web-service that takes unstructured text, extracts persons, places, events etc. from it and returns those entities in RDF-style. Such services can play a key part in the task to charge the semantic web with non-structured content. Meanwhile many interesting applications and tools popped up that use the Calais API in the background. An interesting thing is the semantic proxy that generates RDF from normal websites on the fly. A Firefox and Internet Explorer Add-on called Gnosis provides the same functionality as a browser plugin. Of course there is also a drupal module to auto-tag content on a website (the open calais site itself is powered by Drupal too). This module uses the well-known ARC2-engine as backend, which is a triplestore for PHP/mySQL developed by SemSol aka Benjamin Nowack.