INFO 320

Readings, Class Assignments, Term Assignment and Grading

All work should be conveniently located (i.e., easy for me to find) on your personal website.

Assignments, Deliverables and Grade Contribution


• One     Contribution to course grade: 10%    Due: Tuesday October 30

  The typical Dialog stopwords are: 'an', 'and', 'by', 'for', 'from', 'of', 'the', 'to', 'with' and the boolean operators 'and', 'or', and 'not'. Find meaningful uses of each of these words by checking dictionaries, foreign language dictionaries, lists of corporate names, personal names, abbreviations and scientific terms, etc., etc. Hints: Is 'The' a common Vietnamese surname? When a Frenchman goes to London, what does he drink at 4 pm in the afternoon? What is the postal abbreviation for Oregon?

  For each one of these words, find at least one semantically rich use and note the origin of the use (i.e., "I found it in xyz chemical dictionary...it means this and that"). If you can't find a semantically rich use, then list the places where you looked.

• Two    10%     Due: Tuesday November 13

  Construct a MARC record with these fields: 100, 245, 260, 500, 600, 650, and 700. Search OCLC WorldCat to get the established form of my name for the 700 field. Search for your name, and if you find it, use it.

• Three    10%     Due: Tuesday November 20

  Write a paragraph describing what this course is about. Suggest all the appropriate terms and phrases from the INSPEC and ERIC thesauri that you think best describe this course. Justify your choices. If there are aspects to this course, not covered by these thesauri, list them as well.

• Four    10%     Due: Tuesday November 27

  Convert the MARC record your created in Assignment Two into an XML document.

• Five    10%

  Create examples to illustrate how these axes work: ancestor, child, descendant, and parent

• Six    10%

  Create examples to illustrate how the keys and string functions work.

Go out into the real world. Find someone or a group of people or an organization. Model some of their data as an XML source.      more

One     How important is orthography?

Reading: Orthography as a Fundamental Impediment to Online Information Retrieval


• Is the Internet changing language? Argue yes or no and supply examples.
  Assigned to everyone whose last name begins A - M



• Is orthography important for searching the Web? Survey some common Web tools like Google, Lycos, Northern Light, etc., and determine if apostrophes matter, if hyphens matter, if spaces matter and so on.
  Assigned to everyone whose last name begins N - Z


Two     Indexing the World Wide Web?


• How to index the Web...
  Reading: Using Dublin Core

Assigned to everyone whose last name begins A - F and T - Z


• Maybe we can't index the Web...

Reading: Where is Meaning When Form is Gone?
Assigned to everyone whose last name begins G - S


Three     The Semantic Web?


• How to express meaning on the Web...
  Reading: The semantic Web

Assigned to everyone whose last name begins N - Z


• Or maybe it's harder to do than you think...

Reading: The Semantic Web, Universalist Ambition and Some Lessons from Librarianship
Assigned to everyone whose last name begins A - M

If you keep track of the grades you receive for each assignment, you can figure out exactly what grade you'll receive: