As wikipedia says, a blog , that originates to the year 1994, is a new online way of publishing articles of interest or texts from differents authors (we can be the authors as anyone can have a blog nowadays) with the whole liberty to publish what each of those authors think is interesting or worthy to publish.

Another way to call them in spanish is bitácora which makes reference to the old bitacora’s notebooks. In english we can also call them weblogs.

It can be said that this is also a way of sharing information and commenting what has been published. Readers can write their opinions and writers can answer to those comments.

The most known blog services are:

• Blogger
• WordPress

References:

• Blog. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 4-1-2010. From: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

As Wikipedia says CiteULike is a free online service in which you can organize different publications. It has been on the Web since 2004. Here you can:

• Store references found online
• Discover new articles and sources
• Share references
• Find out who is reading what you are reading

CiteULike allows users to tag, organize and bookmark different kind of information and metadata through a Web browser. This service is based on the principle of social bookmarking and its aim is to promote and develope the sharing scientific references amongst researchers.

CiteULike is very well-known nowadays as it as more tha 3 million articles bookmarked.

What is GoogleBooks?

Google provides a service called GoogleBooks which, as wikipedia says, searches the full text of books that Google scans. This books are stored in digital databases.

Thanks to this service, the user can “open” a book and view pages from the book chosen as well as content-related advertisements and links to the writer webpage or also booksellers.

The aim of GoogleBooks is to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge and also to promote the democratization of knowledge. However, it is worth to say that this service has been critized for copyright violations.

References:

• CiteULike. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 4-1-2010. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteULike
• CiteULike. Retrieved: 4-1-2010. From: http://www.citeulike.org/
• GoogleBooks. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 4-1-2010. From:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

TEXT ANNOTATING SYSTEMS:

As Wikipedia says an annotation is a summary made to information in a book, document, online record, video… Annotations provide data about a software program that is not part of that program itself. The annotations have got a number of uses:

• Information for the compiler.
• Compiler-time and deployment-time processing.
• Runtime processing.
• It can also find waht’s wrong or right with something.

MARKUP LANGUAGES:

As Wikipedia says this is a system for annotating a text in a different syntactical way. A markup language include:

• Revision instructios by editors
• Typesetting instructions
• Structural markers

Markup is always omitted from the version of the text which is showed for end-user consumption.

A great example of markup language os the famous Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that is one of the document formats of the World Wide Web.

SEMANTICS PRESENTATION:

As Wikipedia says this kind of semantics, specially in computer semantics, specify how a particular piece of a formal language os represented in a distinguished manner accesible for example to human vision. A clear example of presentation semantics is:

<bold>….</bold>

Between this two sintactic signs there must be constructed a bold typeface.

Some markup languages contain presentation semantics like HTML,CSS… But others don’t have this kind of semantics, like XML,XPath…

STYLE SHEETS (CSS):

As Wikipedia says these kind of sheets are used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language. The most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML.

This sheets enable the separation of document content from document presentation including some of these elements: layout, colors and fonts. CSS also allow a markup page to be presented in different styles such as on-screen, in print, by voice and also on Braille-based.

Authors usually add a determinate style sheet with a document while readers can use their own one, the one their computer include, for example.

References:

• CSS. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 21 October 2009. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Css
• Markup Languages. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 21 October 2009. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Markup_language&oldid=320609469
• Annotation. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 21 October 2009. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annotation
• Presentation Semantics. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 21 October 2009. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_semantics

 Se trata de un proyecto de creación híper textual, colectiva y multilingüe con licencia Creative Commons que ha sido desarrollado dentro de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Deusto entre el 24 de abril y el 24 de julio de 2006.

Se emplea la forma Wiki que permite una colaboración directa e inmediata entre los autores.

 El público puede colaborar de la siguiente manera:

•  Modificando el texto.
• Continuando cualquiera de los inicios propuestos. 
•  Proponiendo ramificaciones del argumento a través de la creación de enlaces.

El objetivo central de este proyecto radica en la interacción de distintos componentes lingüísticos-literarios. Destaca:

• La híper textualidad y los hipervínculos.
• El multilingüísmo (euskera, ingles, castellano)
• Múltiples autores.
•  Múltiples personajes. 
•  Múltiples tramas.

Este proyecto se sitúa en el contexto de los movimientos informáticos y artísticos que proponen la abolición de la autoría individual y la colaboración como herramienta en el proceso de producción artístico.

La difusión de la Wiki novela se llevó a cabo de dos modos:

•  A través de los medios de comunicación tradicionales como El Correo, El Correo Digital o Punto Radio.
• A través de las nuevas formas de difusión de noticias en Internet como comentarios en foros y blogs, listas de distribución…

Como conclusión se podría decir que han sido visibles las dificultades y complejidades que lleva un proyecto multilingüe como este. La difusión, por su parte, ha tenido un éxito destacable. Este software, además, ha facilitado el desarrollo de la tarea colaborativa en la creación literaria, a la vez que ha ofrecido un espacio de debate para cada una de las páginas creadas y un rincón propio de cada novelista. El resultado final de la Wiki novela es un texto de alta calidad literaria que se sitúa en la línea de los experimentos narrativos postmodernos. Por todo ello, el proyecto Wiki novela supone un punto de partida muy interesante (técnica y narrativamente) para posibles versiones o proyectos posteriores a pesar de que todavía haya que mejorar ciertos aspectos como el diseño de la interfaz, en las herramientas del sistema, en la colaboración entre lenguas o en el mantenimiento del nivel de interés por parte de los usuarios.

References:

• La Wikinovela: un proyecto de creación hypertextual, colectiva y multiligüe en Internet. Retrieved: 13 October 2009, 16:07. From: http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2006/gts/comunicacio.php?id=658

Some examples of digital libraries:

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC): It was established by a committee of librarians, scholars and archivists at a meeting held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on July 17 2004. They had the aim of building a cooperative digital library among partners within the Caribbean providing at the same time open online access to Caribbean cultural, historical and scientific materials to scholars, students and citizens. This digital library is associated with the Florida International University, the University of the Virgin Islands and the University of Florida.

 Most of the contents of this digital library are primarily made up of items digitalized on-side by partner istitutions. It has also collaborated with partners to acquire funding both for state-of-the art digitization equiptmen and on-site training from expert staff. It also accepts collaboration from institutions.

 The library (dLOC) has been funded thanks to a generous grant from the United States of Education’s Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Acces Program.

The Digital Library of India

References:

• The Digital Library of India. Retrieved: 9 October 2009, 13:45. From: http://dli.iiit.ac.in/
• The Digital Library of The Caribbean (dLOC). Retrieved: 9 October 2009. 13:51. From: http://www.dloc.com/
• Digital Library, Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 9 October 2009, 13:40. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_library

It’s important to say that ebooks can change the way of consuming and buying traditional paper books.

The characteristics that distinguish the ebooks from the traditional ones are the followings:

• An ebook is a book on the screen of a computer with the basic keys to move around it.
• It offers the electronic paper technology.
• Some of these ebooks allos us write different comments and notes on the pages.
• Other kind of ebooks only allow a special kind of document to avoid the piracy.

Thanks to these characteristics we can read a book in a more suitable and comfortable way, as if we were reading a normal paper written book but with the new technologies included.

Why should we buy ebooks rather than traditional books?

• Is an advantage for students and bussinesmen or bussineswonen.
• They’re more useful.
• They’re cheaper.
• We can save lots of them in the memory of our computer..
• You can get it easier than a traditional book without going to the library or waiting for the book to come to the shop.

References:

• E-books y libros tradicionales vs usos legítimos, Felipe Sanchez Iregui. Retrieved: 9 October 2009, 21:16. From: http://www.enewnesslaw.com/documents/E-BOOKS.pdf
• Oswaldo. Blog personal( 2007). Retrieved: 9 October 2009, 21:20. From: http://oswaldolilly.blogcindario.com/2007/11/01998-el-e-book-y-los-libros-de-papel.html
• Suit101. Colaboracion y contenidos de calidad. Javier Yohn Planells( 2009). Retrieved: 9 October 2009, 21:30. From: http://gadgets.suite101.net/article.cfm/un_futuro_sin_papel

 It consists on the study of computational implementations of linguistics structures. It is also an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical modelling of natural language from a computational perspective. Traditionally this kind of linguistic was performed by computer scientists specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. People working on computational linguistics often work as members of interdisciplinary teams.

Talking about its origins we can say that computational linguistics originated in the United States of America in the 1950s to with the aim of using computers to automatically translate texts from foreign languages. 

 This kind of linguistics can be divided into major areas depending on the medium of the language being processed, also if it spoken or textual and also depends on the task being performed.

• Some researching areas of computational linguistics are:Design of parsers for natural language.
• Machine translation as one of the earliest and least successful applications of this kind of linguistics draws on many subfields.
• Computer-aided corpus linguistics…

References:

• Linguistics, Wikipedia The Free Encyclopaedia. Retrieved: 30 September 2009, 19:00. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linguistics&oldid=314131655
• Computational Linguistics, Wikipedia The Free Encyclopaedia. Retrieved: 30 September 2009, 19:12. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics

d`Alembert presenta la Enciclopedia como un sistema de todos los conocimientos humanos y busca una manera de representarlos en síntesis y por ello divide la actuación de las facultades intelectuales y fabriles del hombre en facultades de memoria, razón e imaginación.

A partir del año 1759 Diderot continua en solitario el trabajo con la publicación de 10 volúmenes y la colaboración de Rosseau, Voltaire, Turgot…

Podríamos decir que la Enciclopedia fue creada en un movimiento general que exaltaba y dignificaba las artes mecánicas que los puros pensadores ignoraban o desdeñaban y a los que sólo la especulación pura les precía digna.

References:

• La Enciclopedia. Retrieved: 30 September 2009, 14:30. From: http://thales.cica.es/rd/Recursos/rd99/ed99-0257-01/enciclo.html

As I have already said, with the help of his group, Berners-Lee not only created the HTML language but he also created the HTTP protocol and the finder or locator of different objects on the Web called URL.

He is member of diverse groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium of which he is the director. This consortium is an organization that develops interoperable technologies like softwares, tools, guidelines…

He has been given very important awards like the Japan prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation prize…

Nowadays, Berners-Lee works colaborating with Government of the UK to help make the data more accesible on the web, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced in June 2009.

References:

• Wikipedia, La enciclopedia libre, Tim Berners-Lee. Retrieved: 24 September 2009 19:50. From:http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
• Tim Berners-Lee. Retrieved: 24 September 2009 19:57. From: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/#Bio
• Las artes @ Digital. El autor y la autoría en el mundo digital. María Jesus Lamarca. Retrieved: 24 September 2009 20:01. From:  http://artesadigital.blogspot.com/2009/02/el-autor-y-la-autoria-en-el-mundo.html

 Why is important to learn linguistics?

Linguistics is a science that is related to everything that has to do with the language and it also analyzes the origin and the rules of it. The language is also studied as a system and it uses different levels like the phonetic level, the morphological level, the syntactical level, the lexical level and the semantic level.

Taking into account this definition, we can say that the study of this science is really important in our lives because with it we can know better a language, the origins of the words, the spelling, the sounds of the letters… And not only our own language, but the different ones we are studying too.

In my opinion, is essential to understand the linguistics so this way people can know how to use a language in a proper way. For that we must have some basic knowledge on it. I think that this is the reason why in schools the syntactical, semantical and the lexical levels are teached.

As a conclusion I can say that this science is really important not only in an academical way but only in our every day lives, because language is used by everybody everyday so it is important to know how to use it.

REFERENCES:

• Definición.de, Definición de lingüística. Retrieved: 24 Septiembre 2009 19:07. From:http://definicion.de/linguistica/