I respectfully disagree with this comment: Indeed; as long as we try to compete with the big guys, we will *always* be playing catchup; there is no way ever we will have the resources, smarts and money to do what they're doing.
This is true: This is why we need to focus on all of those things in our portfolio which we can assume they're not interested in spending efforts on, things they can't capitalise on.
The answer to to both these comments is to get some technological marketing specialists working in libraries. Lets bring the best of the business world into library management and operations. Who are are REAL leaders, and (with respect) not just ALA's "Librarian of the Year."
"As to *what* they're doing, I'd put money on latent semantic parsing, cluster analysis and profiled results." To this I'd add the semantic web and RDF, and especially Cyc and Cycorp. Think of Cyc as Wintermute's great, great, great, great grandparent. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
http://www.cyc.com/
http://www.opencyc.org/
You heard it hear first: the "agents" in the early AI literature of the mid-80's will be based on Cyc. Who in the ILS business is paying attention to this? NOBODY. Cyc would make a heck of a foundation for a robot or spider to traverse one's traditional catalog, maybe a portal like LibData or MyLibrary, and citation databases, as well as the web-at-large. I wouldn't be surprised if Cyc or something like it were lurking in the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.
M. Andrews
Received on Tue Jun 27 2006 - 23:09:39 EDT