Primal search or primal scream, you be the judge

I read about the Primal semantic search engine a while back. It's supposed to help you brainstorm and/or find content related to your search terms. When the site fails you may be tempted to let out a primal yell of frustration and when it works a primal shout of glee. You can create an account for free to keep track of your searches.

July/August 02010 issue of D-Lib Magazine available

Quoting from the announcement on various mailing lists (02010 07 15):

The July/August issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now available.

This issue contains four articles, an opinion piece, and a conference report. Also in this issue you can find the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'. This month, D-Lib features The Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery of Scripps College collection of Japanese woodblock prints.

The articles include:

nature.com OpenSearch: A Case Study in OpenSearch and SRU Integration by Tony Hammond, Nature Publishing Group

Document Management in the Open University of Catalunya (UOC) Classrooms by Albert Cervera, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

The Benefits of Integrating an Information Literacy Skills Game into Academic Coursework: A Preliminary Evaluation by Karen Markey, Fritz Swanson, Chris Leeder, Brian J. Jennings, Beth St. Jean, Victor Rosenberg, Soo Young Rieh, Robert L. Frost, Loyd Mbabu, and Andrew Calvetti, University of Michigan; Gregory R. Peters, Jr., Cyber Data Solutions LLC, and Geoffrey V. Carter and Averill Packard, Saginaw Valley State University

Semantically Enhancing Collections of Library and Non-Library Content by James E. Powell, Linn Marks Collins and Mark L. B. Martinez, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard according to this Information Today Newsbreaks from March 1, 02010. Version 1 of this standard, developed "with help from its first Smartwords partners, including The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, O'Reilly, Vook, Scribd, ibis reader, and the Internet Archive," is supposed to be released in the summer of 02010. More information is available on the Wordnik Blog about its Smartwords initiative under a post dated February 23, 02010.

Wordnik itself is I think the first online dictionary that fully engages the Web 2.0 environment. Tweets from Twitter that utilize a word you look up are displayed, along with all sorts of other contextual information, including individual comments and tags from registered users of Wordnik. Except for the fact that Wiktionary allows any registered user to directly add content about a word, I think Wordnik has one-upped Wiktionary. Wordnik claims in its FAQ that it will work with individuals to incorporate new words into its "giant databank of English!"

Semantic Web in Action

According to the Librarians' Internet Index, the "Semantic Web in Action ... article (originally published in December 2007 and re-featured in January 2009) reviews progress towards the idea of a "Semantic Web: a highly interconnected network of data that could be easily accessed and understood by any desktop or handheld machine." Accompanied by a glossary and related articles and links. From Scientific American.
URL: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=semantic-web-in-actio
LII Item: http://lii.org/cs/lii/view/item/27844"