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Thursday, October 14, 2010
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Search and Business Intelligence: The Humble Inverted Index Wins Again
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by Avi Rappoport
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In this modern age, big institutions have giant piles of data about their operations: The question is what to do with all those bits. Extracting the right information can help to avoid waste, delays, systems failures, and even terrorist threats. For example, look at Toyota's customer support and repair data: If management had been looking, it would have noticed that something was going terribly wrong. Business intelligence (BI) means mining through all that digital data (in legacy systems, databases, and even spreadsheets) and reporting what's going on. This generally requires creating aggregations that need server farms with sizable hard disks and lots of memory. But text search engine technology, using sophisticated versions of inverted indexing, can create files that are effectively shadow databases in much less space, optimized for fast retrieval. These search/BI hybrids also provide sophisticated access to the contents of text fields, making customers very happy indeed.
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Routledge’s Library and Information Science Journals Now on Facebook
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The Routledge Library and Information Science Facebook page now carries news and special offers from a comprehensive list of journals. The page provides an outlet for interacting with Routledge's 35 unique library journals, as well as current information about new articles, conferences, editor announcements, access to free articles, special promotions, and other news items of interest to the library community.
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Wiley-Blackwell Launches Pilot Program for Biotechnology Journals With DeepDyve
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A portfolio of biotechnology journals with more than 75,000 articles will be available through DeepDyve, the largest online rental service for scientific and scholarly research articles, under a new Wiley-Blackwell pilot program. DeepDyve uses a "Research, Rent, Read" model that lets researchers discover and skim read-only articles from these journals on the DeepDyve site at affordable prices. The pilot will feature 26 journals and content dating from 1912, including the Journal of Pharmaceutical Science, American Journal of Medical Genetics, Biotechnology and Bioengineering, and Cell Proliferation.
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Nursing Reference Titles Joining Ovid
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Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, announced a new partnership with the American Nurses Association (ANA), the U.S.'s largest nursing professional organization, to offer a collection of its professional reference titles through OvidSP and Nursing@Ovid. Key ANA books scheduled to be available include Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice, Nursing's Social Policy Statement: The Essence of the Profession, Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements, Guide to the Code of Ethics for Nurses: Interpretation and Application, Magnet Hospitals Revisited: Attraction and Retention of Professional Nurses, Nursing Administration: Scope and Standards of Practice, and Public Health Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice.
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Getting the Complete Picture With Attivio’s Active Dashboards
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by Paula J. Hane
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There are a few technologies for which I'm particularly grateful as an online information professional: embedded links, faceted search, and dashboards. All of them are designed to make a researcher's life easier, getting to the right information faster and easier. None of these are new tools, but I want to reflect on the growing importance of dashboards as a user interface in the information management field today. A dashboard pulls information from diverse sources and presents it in an interface designed to be easy to read, similar to an automobile's dashboard. The key difference is that users can interact with the information. The interactive nature of a dashboard lets a user move quickly from a summary view to drill down to various levels of detail and usually in easy-to-comprehend visuals and graphics. And that is just what Attivio offers with its Active Dashboard but with another key difference. The system is indeed "active." You don't have to search for information—the system pushes it to you. And, as you click on a piece of information in a window, other windows on the dashboard are automatically updated.
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If you regularly read blogs, add these to your reader:
ITI Books Blog – booksblog.infotoday.com – news, observations, and commentary from the authors, editors, and publishers of Information Today, Inc.'s many book offerings.
ITI Conference Blog – libconf.com – covering ITI's library conferences worldwide.
Library Stuff – librarystuff.net – the library blog dedicated to resources for keeping current and professional development, written by Steven M. Cohen.
InfoToday Europe Blog – infotodayeurope.com – The latest news, analysis and opinion on the information industry in Europe and the UK.
Business of Video blog – blog.streamingmedia.com – Daily posts about the online video industry, business trends and analysis, market data, and research as well as the online video business models in the media and entertainment, broadcast, publishing, advertising and enterprise industries.
destinationCRM Blog – destinationcrmblog.com – a blog from the editors of CRM magazine, dedicated to providing Customer Relationship Management information in a timely manner to connect decision makers and providers.
SpeechTech Blog – speechtechblog.com – updates on speech technology and its applications in daily life. Covers everything from ASR to VUI, with lots of links, threads, and even a few pictures thrown in for good measure.
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Paula Hane's New Chapter
Effective June 1, Paula J. Hane is giving up her assignment as News Bureau Chief at Information Today, Inc. (ITI), where she was engaged to provide editorial direction to the ITI NewsBreaks service hosted on infotoday.com. She also wrote for Information Today and the Cyberskeptic’s Guide to Internet Research. She has been associated with the company for 16½ years and was previously the Editor of Database magazine for Online, Inc. She will continue to accept freelance editorial and writing assignments.
The responsibility for producing news commentaries and in-depth analyses for the infotoday.com website will be integrated into the workflow of the Information Today newspaper, with Barbara Brynko as Editor-in-Chief/Editorial Director. Assisting Barbara will be Brandi Scardilli as Managing Editor.
Vendors should continue to send information industry and product news items to Information Today: Barbara Brynko (Editor-in-Chief/Editorial Director) at bbrynko@infotoday.com. Library technology news should continue to be sent to Computers in Libraries magazine at cilnews@infotoday.com. As always, freelance writers are encouraged to submit story ideas directly to the editors.
We wish Paula success in her new ventures and thank her for her many years of great work as News Bureau Chief at ITI. Paula can be reached at paulajeanhane@gmail.com.
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