In the field of information and library science (LIS), one of the major challenges of the last twenty or so years of the twentieth century was converting the data about items held in a library from index cards--on which librarians had simply typed the metadata (author, title, publisher etc...)--to computers. A few different solutions have been developed for this problem have been developed, including the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC).
The main way that MARC works is that it assigns all fields, such as author, title etc... as an element, assigns tags and indicators as attributes, and it treats subfields as subelements. For example, an item might be assigned a datafield with a number, while each piece of metadata about the item has been assigned an element, such as a, b, c, etc... When representing an item, for example The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the system would assign the book an arbitrary number and have a preassigned definition of title, author, date, publisher, and ISBN as the elements. The record might look like this:
< datafield tag="670" ind1=" " ind2=" ">
< subfield code="a" > The Grapes of Wrath, c1939: < / subfield >
< subfield code="b" > (John Steinbeck) < / subfield >
MARC is especially beneficial because as an XML file it can share data with other DTDs, such as the DCMI. MARC's official website explains in further detail of the various ways to utilize the DTD, as well as examples of how it marks up various references.
Introduction to Graphics
Because the exercize asked that I save files as. jpg and .gif, I did not practice with .png as much. The lecture notes state that while Portable Network Graphics (pgn) are "a very useful alternative" to the Graphic Interchange Format (gif) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (jpg) formats, PNG has not yet become very popular on the WWW (City University 2009). In my experience looking at the image sources on web pages, this assertion certainly seemed to be the case. I first wanted to attach an image that my friend Emily had displayed on the web, but she had displayed the image on Livejournal as part of a slide show, and I could not separate one of the images from the others. When I tried to find the link to the image by viewing the website as an HTML document, rather than an application on Flash, I noticed that she had uploaded the images from her computer using gif. I gave up trying to use her images, and instead used an image from Flickr that was posted by the USA Today. The image that I ended up using has been saved under jpg format.
When you look at the two images on my website, one is a lot grainier than the other. The difference is not due to the formats they have been saved in; they are both .jpg files. The difference is because the first one—the grainy one—is a snapshot that I took, and the second one is a professional photograph put out by USA Today. Here's a link to my website
The Internet and the WWW
This week we focused on writing our own websites using HTML. I got some practice first using a website--www.w3schools.com--that allowed me to type into a box the HTML code, and then to view what I had written.
I am not nearly as familiar with Unix as I am with Windows or Mac OS, but the whole process of changing the directory and putting the files that I had created into the public domain made a lot more sense than changing the directory did the first time.
After I moved my html files to the public folder, I made some changes to the files. I thought because I had moved my files to a new folder, the changes that I made would take effect in those folders, as well. However, I cannot see those changes when I view the webpage on my personal computer. I think that this might be true because I saved them to the U drive on the university computers. In order to make changes to the public, you need to save them to the public drive, instead of just to the home drive.
I'm sure it's possible to save these files to the public folder without using Unix, and I'm sure that we're using Unix for this type of transfer so that we can learn how to use the program. I wonder how one would create a website on just windows or just OS.
Click here to view the webpage that I created.
I am not nearly as familiar with Unix as I am with Windows or Mac OS, but the whole process of changing the directory and putting the files that I had created into the public domain made a lot more sense than changing the directory did the first time.
After I moved my html files to the public folder, I made some changes to the files. I thought because I had moved my files to a new folder, the changes that I made would take effect in those folders, as well. However, I cannot see those changes when I view the webpage on my personal computer. I think that this might be true because I saved them to the U drive on the university computers. In order to make changes to the public, you need to save them to the public drive, instead of just to the home drive.
I'm sure it's possible to save these files to the public folder without using Unix, and I'm sure that we're using Unix for this type of transfer so that we can learn how to use the program. I wonder how one would create a website on just windows or just OS.
Click here to view the webpage that I created.
Bits, Bytes, and Binary
Today, after the lecture discussing the way that binary translates into a code that is more accessible to humans—text in the form of ASCII, to be more specific—we explored the ways that ASCII works, the ways that it is different from other codes used in word processors which are more complex, and the ways that it translates to them.
While ASCII works well among different formats, other data formats represent different styles and fonts more efficiently than ASCII can. Also ASCII does not represent non-Roman characters, making it necessary for other data formats to exist in order to make computing in other languages possible. However, it makes sense that as developers of Unicode and other formats, they made this decision to keep one kind of simple code that many other applications could read.
ASCII is extremely useful for translating basic text, the way we did today and Notepad, MS Word, and a browser in HTML because it can be manipulated with tags to perform certain tasks but still keep the basic information of a document. Unicode is capable of creating something like 107,000 characters versus ASCII’s puny 128 and has an unlimited number of bytes, has become the standard code. MS Word does not use ASCII because it is capable of creating many more characters than 128, but Word is able to read text files.
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