Digimap mashup lets users see beneath their feet

Geological mapping data of the British Isles has now been made available online through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Collections company.

JISC Collections was set up last year as a means of gaining more clout with the publishing world in its continuing support for education bodies and research councils. With Geology Digimap, the new online resource will gather its information from the British Geological Survey and present users with an insight into the British landscapes physical substance and structure as well as the historical processes that have shaped the geology of the land.

Based on the same platform as Digimap which utilises current and historical map data from the Ordnance Survey, users can view all onshore geological data amassed so far, such as land movement, artificial ground, faults and fossil beds. Information from the BGS Lexicon of Named Rock Units is also tied into the site. Whilst the applications of Geology Digimap are more obvious for civil engineering students, architects and the like, such as when considering a region for a new development and the engineering and material requirements necessary to achieve that. There are however, opportunities for a variety of professionals and students; from those in agricultural studies, archaeology, the bio-sciences, coastal management as well as the field of environmental management. Although access is only available to subscribing researchers and those in Higher or Further Education with appropriate Athens authentication.

Commenting on the launch Dr William Kilbride, a Chair of the JISC Collections said: “For a few years now JISC has funded mapping for Great Britain and has recently added historical maps. With Geology maps we’re now able to see beneath our feet. By making the geology maps available through Digimap, many users will already be familiar with the techniques and tools they need to access the data.”

Gates and British Library put da Vinci in code

Two notebooks that document the thoughts of Leonardo da Vinci's scientific investigations are now available online following a landmark collaboration between the British Library (BL) and Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates.

Codex Leicester, owned by Gates, the world's richest man, and Codex Arundel, a British Library treasure, have been reunited online as part the famed BL Turning the Pages digital books service.

"I am amazed by da Vinci, he personally worked out how light worked," said Bill Gates of his Codex Leicester, "Every one of those notebooks is an amazing document." The Codex Arundel and Codex Leicester were dispersed in the 16^th Century.

The notebooks contain da Vinci's notes, diagrams and sketches of his studies of mechanics, optics and the moon. "Nobody used visual material so brilliantly," said Professor Martin Kemp the world's leading da Vinci authority. "The way da Vinci combined incomparable genius with the human determination to strive for knowledge and practical improvement is an incredible inspiration," Gates said. 

Kemp, talking to an audience at the BL where Gates was launching the Windows Vista operating system, said; "It is incredibly important to have it available digitally as a scholar."

Windows Vista technology is at the centre of the second generation Turning the Pages application. Users can browse high resolution images of the texts and now compare two volumes side by side. "The historian of science will be able to exchange ideas with the historian of art, the Leonardo biographer with the structural engineer, the aeronautics expert with the mathematician," said Lynne Brindley, BL chief executive of the ability to add and share notes and annotations online via

Vista

and Turning the Pages. "Web 2.0 has the potential to unlock the world's treasures and transform how scholars work."

Brindley added that Microsoft's involvement will speed up the addition of research material to Turning the Pages, "Putting a book on used to take weeks, now can be done in a few hours."

As Gates launched

Vista

he noted that in 1995, the last time a new Microsoft operating system and Office application were launched together, the inclusion of an internet browser was low key.

Vista

has undergone beta testing from five million individual testers.

www.bl.uk/ttp2/ttp2.html

Threat to services as cuts loom at British Library

In a briefing paper submitted to the Chancellor Gordon Brown and fellow MP’s, British Library (BL) officials have outlined the serious damage that will be inflicted on the institution if it is forced to make cuts in government enforced plans, writes Daniel Griffin.

Reports from The Guardian newspaper today suggest that the cuts could be up to five to 7% for the publicly funded institution and would entail a threat to key projects and services. To offset any decline in funds, the briefing paper by library officials estimated as a worse case scenario, charges would have to implemented on the use of reading rooms, used by 400,000 people a year, opening hours may have to be cut back, two galleries may close and spending on research journals and books would also face a decline in funds.

Just as significantly, plans for a digital library would suffer a massive blow, “We will be unable to fulfil our statutory obligations for legal deposit of electronic material. UK digital information will be lost for future generations” the BL paper states. Supporters of the library came out in force, with Python, presenter and patron, Michael Palin reported as saying “This is one of the great storehouses of world culture, and what I have seen of their archive material, both photographic and written is quite dazzling.” Lord Bragg added the library “needs to be nourished, not hobbled.” Accusations of “cultural vandalism” and “madness personified” were also flung in the government’s direction.

Responding to the barge of criticism, the newspaper quoted a spokeswoman from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport as saying “We are working with the sector on business planning,” “We want to get the best value for money. There has been 10 years of huge increases in funding for the arts.”

Can IBM satisfy users, the organisation and IT?

No sooner do I file a column (coming soon) on the clash between IT-driven and user-driven computing than IBM decides to make two announcements which, between them, more or less address the issues I raised.

In what looks like a pincer movement, IBM has extended Lotus Notes into the Web 2.0 world. It has also announced an alpha program called QEDwiki, which is providing a Web 2.0  environment for the enterprise.

IWR's editor, Mark Chillingworth, has already blogged about the Notes extensions, so I'll cover QEDwiki. It's partly a tool for creating lightweight applications on the fly out of readily available or home-grown program components (widgets) and information sources. It's also a typical wiki environment in which users can cooperate and share information.

IBM has been participating in the Web 2.0 world from the beginning and understands its potential as well as the need to adhere to corporate security standards. It is well poised to take the existing (and maybe new) Notes users into this world as well as encouraging and facilitating new developments at the edge of the organisation.

However, It's early days for QEDwiki. Many potential information and program code sources have not yet been opened up by organisations using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods, although there are plenty available on the web. And most regular users will steer clear of scripting their own widgets using PHP. But this won't prevent them creating simple mashups from others' work.

IBM has shown that it is possible to create a working environment which may, one day, satisfy the desires of the organisation, IT and the users. That would be quite an achievement.

Here's a slightly cheesy and occasionally techie YouTube demo from IBM.

Nature uncovers PR attack on open access

Scientific journal Nature has discovered that a PR man whose career has been spent putting a positive spin on fraudsters like Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and denying scientific evidence of climate change, has been hired by STM publishers Wiley and Elsevier.

Eric Dezenhall and his company have been hired to attack the open access publishing movement, mainly in the US. The spin doctor has authored a book on his practises titled, Nail 'Em! Confronting High Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses.

Jim Giles, a News and Features reporter at the London office of Nature was handed an email thread by a source revealing discussions Dezenhall has had with employees at Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, American Chemical Society as well as the Association of American Publishers (AAP) regarding a strategy to deal with open access debate.

According to Nature, Dezenhall advised them to "focus on simple messages, such as "public access equals government censorship"" and to paint a negative picture of a world without peer review. With Elsevier often deemed the big bad bully of the scientific world, Dezenhall controversially recommends that they join forces with groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington DC think tank that used oil industry money to poor scorn on claims by many leading scientific groups and Greenpeace of the affects of climate change.

Dezenhall is believed to be charging between $300,000 to 500,000 for the campaign. Susan Spilka, director of corporate communications at Wiley was quoted by Nature as saying in the email thread, "Media messaging is not the same as intellectual debate," and that publishers have reacted too defensively by making precise statements about open access.

Nature has also seen minutes of an AAP meeting from last year showed that particular attention was paid to PubMed Central, which has pioneered open access publishing in the US.

The article is well worth reading, click here, and will certainly add a new dimension to the open access debate and do little for the reputations of the publishers involved.

IBM adds Web 2.0 fruits to Lotus application

Computing and software giant IBM has announced a set of new applications for its Lotus information management applications at the Lotusphere 2007 conference in Orlando; that lean heavily towards the collaborative modes of information management that Web 2.0 pioneers.

Lotus, traditionally known for providing large corporations with email, calendar, and staff directory applications will now offer users social networking, blogging, a presence in the online world of Second Life, as well as video casting and real time chat.

Lotus Connections is a new addition to the range of applications and allows a user to create their own profile or communities using keywords, which can then be searched by other Lotus users within the organisation. Experts at the conference in the US are talking of Lotus Connections as being a Facebook style development.

A further collaboration application announced was Lotus Quickr, which allows conferencing in real time from different locations. The latest version of the instant messaging application Lotus Sametime now supports video chat.

Technical support for Lotus has entered into another dimension with the announcement that a Lotusphere complex has been launched in Second Life to provide the residents of the virtual world with advice and tutorials on collaborating with Lotus.

IBM said at their conference they hope these applications will ensure that new generations of workers that are used to using Web 2.0 technology will find Lotus has the tools they are comfortable with. Major corporations like the security of workers communicating and collaborating through Lotus as it provides information management tools for capturing and backing up information for legal purposes. 

The onward march of Google Book Search

Google has signed another major US library to its Google Book Search (GBS) project. This time, it's the University of Texas at Austin, and what's significant about it is that the library has some world-leading Latin American special collections, widening the range and scope of the project.

Meanwhile in Manhattan last Thursday, the New York Public Library hosted a conference organised by Google called Unbound: Advanced Book Publishing in a Digital World. The speaker's roster included Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media) and Michael Holdsworth, former MD of Cambridge University Press. Also present, taking a keen interest, were sales chiefs from Springer and Taylor & Francis - who probably had a few notes to share on Springer's unsuccessful bid for Informa last November.

Holdsworth talked about CUP's "zombie titles" that no longer sell in hardback in an economic way, but get new lives when they can be accessed digitally. CUP has reportedly started up a "Lazarus program" to get these books online via Google Search - visitors who arrive via book search are more likely to buy something, and spend more than others. Others, such as Springer, said they were also happy to revive their backlists online through such mechanisms as Google Book Search.

The blog if:book, a project of The Institute for the Future of the Book, commented archly about Unbound that "Google's tactic here seems simultaneously to be to reassure the publishers while instilling an undercurrent of fear." Publishers are being told to get with the project or lose out in the long term. Though, as if:book noted, "the 800lb. elephant in the room is of course the lawsuits brought against Google (still in the discovery phase) by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors' Guild for their library digitization program".

But despite these ominous clouds, it's clear that Google has decided to engage with publishers and libraries, probably in an attempt to divide and conquer. One of the UK's leading libraries needs to take up the mantle and open this discussion up here as well. With the British Library working closely with Microsoft on a similar digitisation programme, and the Bodleian Library involved with GBS, a similar conference might be in order for other European publishers who weren't at this event to air their views.

Discover undercurrents with Trampoline Systems

Trampoline Systems watches the flow and exchange of documents in a company network, giving it the ability to spot key influencers and to bring into view the documents accessed and an individual's network of contacts.

The primary value is to staff who need to find sources of expertise or particular kinds of information very quickly, or simply to keep tabs on their own recent activities and connections. Having said that, it is also of value to companies who are looking to reduce their dependence on some people and bring others more into the fold.

Many companies feel more comfortable with this kind of system behind the firewall, so it is available as an appliance as well as a hosted service. Customers so far include the UK Foreign Office, Grant Thornton and Channel 4 Television. Yesterday, it announced a substantial pilot programme inside the Raytheon Company, a US defence and aerospace business. The aim is to improve the sales process through finding and exploiting existing relationships and sources of expertise.

Last year, it chose to illustrate its system using 200,000 of Enron's internal emails from 1999-2002 which had been released by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The default in any company is to capture all emails, but the user can elect to exempt private messages. The system recognises existing permission levels.

Connections can be mapped around any individual and both their contacts and their communication  themes can be navigated through tag clouds as well. Emails are listed according to their relevance and each can be viewed in its own window.

Here's a (slightly reduced in size) map of some of the connections centred around one person:

The width of the connecting lines reveals the traffic flow between individuals. You can double click any person's name to bring them to the centre and show their own connections. The related document list and tag clouds appear in the same browser window, providing instant access to all that is important.

Science gets a common land for open access

ScientificCommons has launched online, the website aims to be a single port of call for accessing freely available scientific information that is published using open access models.

The new site identifies authors and provides clear data on the relationships between authors from its database by clicking through on a link. ScientificCommons claim the site does this across disciplines and institutions. 

So far the service has indexed 10 million publications and extracted the details of four million authors. The Open Access Protocol for MetaData Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was used to gather the information. The service will index a range of file formats, including PDF, PowerPoint, Rich Text File, Word and Postscript. All documents will be stored on the ScientificCommons database, but regular refreshes will be made.

European Commission petitioned to open access to research

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), a publicly funded body which negotiates and secures access to electronic information for the UK's academia, has joined forces with Knowledge Exchange and SPARC Europe to lobby for new policy on access to scientific information.

A petition from the three organisations, which work closely with publishers and librarians in academia, is calling for open access to research that has EC related funding to be made available online soon after publication.

The petition is also calling on the European Commission to set out European wide policy on the development on digital repositories for scientific information. A central part of the petition is calling for the recommendations of the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publications Markets of Europe to be implemented. The report came out a year ago in January 2006. 

"Over the past three years there has been significant progress in improving access to publicly funded research," said Rachel Bruce, JISC Director of Information Environment. "This progress will be strengthened by the implementation of the recommendations of the Commission's study." 

Information professionals, researchers and members of the information industry are being called upon to sign the petition, which can be done so from this link. 

Is this the future of information access?

Will Digital Readers, change the information world? IWR plans to find out by ditching its paper based books for a week and living with digital paper. iLiad, the digital paper device from iRex Technologies is on "road test" for a week.

Back in the dot com days people said the book was dead in the face of the internet, instead Jeff Bezos proved the opposite to be true and books have never been stronger, thanks to Amazon re-igniting people's interests. But Amazon is a story of increased access to printed books, not a radical change in the relationship and experience users have with a book. Digital paper promises to be that major change that technology has been promising for some time.

IWR isn't a hardware led title, but if digital paper takes off, it could change the information landscape you our readers work in. Digital paper claims to be easy to read indoors and out, and allows a user to scribble notes on top of your texts without permanent damage. It not only stores a library full of books on its hard drive, but you can download and add newspapers and if you are so inclined (or busy) work documents.

We will let you know in the next issue what we think, but in the mean time, we would love to hear your opinions on digital paper and digital books

What the papers say: Big brother’s big database?

News emerged over the weekend that the Government is implementing plans to free up the flow and access of information between Whitehall departments and government agencies in a bid to make public services run more efficiently. The FT reported that this means that the public will only have to inform the government once if they change address, when normally would have to contact multiple departments such as the DVLA, local council and tax office.

Quality newspaper the Independent reported that civil liberties groups were in uproar as the plans were the thin edge of the information wedge, and are concerned the government can and will extend the range of shareable information as it sees fit.

Plans for debating the issue through 100 member strong citizen panels were also mooted as a means of “deliberative democracy” in an attempt to allay fears. The Guardian was also quick to point out that rumors for a “single massive database” were not accurate and that the announcement was just a means of “seeking public support to allow existing systems to exchange data.”

The FT also reported that the Government will keep in place current safeguards on sharing medical, tax and criminal records, whilst the Mirror, Guardian and Independent reported concerns from opposition parties that it was a chance for “bureaucrats to snoop” whilst Shami Chakrabarti, Liberty Group Director, the human rights group argued “This half-baked proposal would allow an information free-for-all within government – ripe for disastrous errors, and ripe for corruption and fraud.” The Daily Mail cited shadow Home Secretary David Davis criticism of the government’s record of database management such as failures in the Sex Offenders register and more recently the tracking of criminal records from overseas.

The Independent meanwhile devoted its entire front page to the issue and was slightly less hysterical than the tabloids with its sinister Big Brother themed coverage.

The broadsheet in a tabloid's clothes pointed out that Britain has “the world's most ambitious identity scheme, as well as a rapid expansion of the DNA database. Details of all children will be held in a single register to be launched next year, medical records are being transferred to a central NHS database and plans are being examined to track motorists' movements by satellite,” the Indie grimly reminded us.

In a sober effort for balance, their commentator Johann Hari questions in his accompanying article “When the Government acts, why do we always assume there is something to fear?” asking for a little bit of calm and consideration to the matter.

How much are businesses wasting on useless "research"?

Perhaps the most compelling facts that emerged from Convera's recently released results of a survey of "more than 1000 professionals", is that businesses are increasingly paying employees to hunt for information that can't be found on the web, and are making decisions or writing reports with just a sketchy grasp of all the facts.

Well, that's our "GYM" buddies for you! The reality of the three big "horizontal" engines - Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search - is that they're great consumer search engines; advertisers will happily hand over cash to get their ads displayed on the basis of certain search terms. So, the consumer is likely to be exposed to the most relevant ads and site results from the engine's indexes. Win-win situation.

It doesn't work when it comes to sharing information for academic research or business research. What's the motivation for any organisation to make their intellectual collateral freely available to all, including competitors, online – none! And if it's all locked behind closed doors, then no search engine, no matter how "vertical" (the latest buzz phrase in search circles) will be able to get at it.

Convera's figures are disturbing: barely 10% find exactly what they're looking for (yes, for a staggering 90% the search is fruitless); 70% admit to getting side-tracked; and 60% do not ask for help. Less than 25% are confident that the big search engines give them results that have "looked everywhere".

Someone should do an analysis of precisely how much money is being lost each week as employees waste time doing incomplete and useless "research". And there is clearly a deficit of trust building up with regards to many search engines – people are more widely realising that many search results have far less value than first assumed.

The government: transforming or centralising?

So, the government is closing 551 websites and it's examining a further 374 to see if they're for the chop. Details are in the Transformational Government annual report.

If the sites are that pointless, one has to wonder how they came to exist in the first place. Were they the result of a fevered "let's jump on the web bandwagon before it whooshes past"? Assuming the civil servants behind the initiatives were professionals, this seems unlikely.

The truth is that each site was probably set up with the best of intentions by the people creating them in order to address a perceived need. What's shocking is that their existence was either an exercise in futility or that what was once seen as essential is now deemed irrelevant. Take your pick.

The idea that the good stuff can be centralised seems a bit of a sick joke. Just when the world, well a lot of it anyway, is devolving responsibility to people who know really know their stuff, our government appears to be gathering everything at the centre, remote from the experts at the coalface.

And think of all those links that are now going to be broken. Or will the government do the smart thing and retain ownership of all the URLs and create intelligent redirects into the most appropriate part of the newly-centralised system?

Hmmm. Don't hold your breath.

If you're interested,  Directgov and BusinessLink are the new ways to connect.

PDF attacks not as likely as first feared

Initial fears of a major security flaw affecting every website containing a PDF are not as bas as first feared.  Last Thursday IWR revealed that security experts at iDefense, part of VeriSign had warned the information industry of the flaw.

Now Ken Dunham, director of the Rapid Response Team at iDefence has revealed that they over-egged the risk and now realise it only affects old browser versions and a hacker is therefore unlikely looking to exploit the flaw.  Dunham now describes the risk as "somewhat limited"; he said to IWR sister title The Inquirer.

Dunham does recommend that information professionals avoid future problems by downloading version 8 of Adobe Acrobat.

Government set to close 550 websites

Government information will be centralised on to two major sites and major destination sites like NHS Direct as the government closes 550 web sites. Its transformational strategy will see over half of the government's websites close, down to 26 sites from 951.

According to today's Financial Times 90 sites have already closed with 461 sites already in the firing line for closure. A further review of the 374 sites will be carried out by June.

The government instead will focus its online information strategy on its two key sites direct.gov.uk and businesslink.co.uk. By closing the sites it expects to save £9 million a year. Pat McFadden, the minister in charge of transformation believes the policy is justified as direct.gov and businesslink provide users with powerful search gateways to government information.

UK PubMed Central is green for go

The British version of PubMed Central has gone live and is now freely available. UK PubMed Central is a mirror and sister site to PubMed Central founded and run by the US National Institutes of Health.

Users of UK PubMed Central can access full-text peer reviewed content on the site.

UK PubMed Central has been in the making for a year and a half, the service is funded by Arthritis Research Campaign, The Biotechnology and biological Sciences Research Council, The British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, The Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, the Department of Health, JISC, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.

Technical support for the service is delivered by the British Library, University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute.

UK PubMed Central hosts 620,000 full text articles.

Vikings raise their shields against Blackwell price rises

Blogger and open access publishing advocate Peter Suber has revealed how four major university libraries in Norway have issued a joint statement revealing that price negotiations with Blackwell publishing have come to an end and access to Blackwell content will cease.

Back in the autumn the libraries tried to reach an agreement on electronic access prices with Blackwell, with negotiations breaking down researchers, students and academics at the universities from January 1 no longer had access to 778 electronic journals from Blackwell. In a statement the librarians state that they feel the stipulations from Blackwell are "unacceptable" as are the price increases.

"Blackwell has journals covering all universities disciplines, so this will affect all our users, Helge Salvesen of Tromso University Library said in an online statement. Library directors at all of the universities are unanimous in their agreement that the situation is no longer acceptable. The statement has been signed by the library directors of the University of Trondheim, University of Tromso, University of Oslo and the University of Bergen.

Has Wolters Kluwer given up on its Education, too?

Dutch information services and publishing group Wolters Kluwer has put its Education division up for sale, according to a report in today's Dutch newspaper, De Telegraaf.

The story claims that WK has sent out sales information to potential buyers, has appointed Lehman Brothers to oversee the sale, and that it expects to fetch up to Euro 700 million (about £470m). No sources are cited.

The Education division is one of five resulting from the company restructuring instigated by US-born CEO and chairman Nancy McKinstry, since she was appointed in 2003. The division is managed by Fred Grainger, a former Thomson Corporation employee.

Potential buyers for the WK division are cited as Pearson, Lagardere, SanomaWSOY – and Reed Elsevier (with whom WK is said to have been in merger negotiations with recently). The division is the largest educational publisher in Europe, with businesses in the UK, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Sweden.

If the reports are confirmed, this would be the second major For Sale notice put up on an education division in the last three months – last October, Thomson Corporation said it would auction its Education division in Q1 2007.

Stem cell research shows they can be harvested from Amniotic fluid

Latest research, published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology, indicates that stem cells can be harvested from amniotic fluid, which would diffuse the arguments surrounding the science.

Amniotic fluid is the substance surrounding babies in the womb during gestation and has been known to contain important cells.  The report out today by the Institute for Regenerative Medicine found that stem cells can be harvested from the fluid, which means that embryos, the current way of harvesting stem cells, would not have to be destroyed. It is this destruction of embryos that has caused so much controversy, as rights campaigners claim it it unethical.

Anthony Atala, director of the institute led the research. Stem cell research is considered important because the cells can be grown into any type of body tissues, which can then be used to combat disorders like Alzheimer's, diabetes and Parkinson's disease.

Reed Elsevier stocks jump on talk of takeover

Reed Elsevier bucked the overall downward trend of the FTSE last Friday, showing renewed market interest in it on rumours of a takeover. Though, strangely, the rumours that swept the floor, according to Reuters, were that it would be taken over by Dutch information services and publishing giant Wolters Kluwer.

Not surprisingly, some analysts were keen to pour cold water on the speculation, pointing to EU regulations, which had scuppered a previous planned merger in 1998.

The two companies have divisions spanning all the major information markets - education, legal, tax and financial, health - and you could imagine that such a merger would be extremely appealing to them in terms of consolidating costs bases. It wouldn't necessarily benefit the buyers.

However, both companies may be a bit worried by the war chest that Thomson Corporation is planning to create by selling off its second largest division this year, and leaving it with enough money for a big acquisition - possibly even Germany's Springer.

The Anglo-Dutch publisher is still a major powerhouse in the market – last November it said it was still on course to post revenues of $5.44bn in 2006, with 5% growth in its business before acquisitions and currency fluctuations were taken into account.

But 2007 looks like being a year of significant consolidation. And investors in stock markets don't get bullish for no reason at all. Maybe the view is that because the takeover seems to be slightly inverted (the much smaller Wolters Kluwer taking over the larger Reed Elsevier by way of equity investment backing) that there might be a way to be found around the regulators.

Jimmy Wales: "me and my big mouth"

Jimmy Wales, the one-time options trader who created Wikipedia, is rumoured to be teaming with Amazon to launch a new open-source search engine in Q107. Allegedly called Wikiasari, it is destined (according to Forbes) to out-Google Google.

Much of that information is wrong.

Wales told Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan that the news broke, because of "me and my big mouth." Apparently, James Doran, the Times reporter who broke the story asked Wales "if he ever thought about search." And, because it had been on Wales' mind for some time, he shared his thoughts. This, of course, set hares running all over the Christmas period.

Here's what's actually going on: Wales, through his wiki communities company Wikia, Inc., has embarked on a people-powered search project which will rely on existing projects Nutch and Lucene for its background infrastructure. Apart from some second-round financing in the company, Amazon is not involved in this project.

Wales believes that a trusting community will gather around the search software, refining its capabilities and dealing with ambiguities, just as happened with Wikipedia. The difference this time around is that Wikia is a commercial organisation and he's going to have to address the "why should we?" question that potential participants will be asking themselves.

Wales is driven by the idea of transparency: that algorithms and methods be clearly explained, rather than being secret processes which could lead to suspicions of deliberate bias.

You can keep yourself informed of progress by signing up to the Search Wikia wiki. Wales thinks that a launch, if it happens, is a year or two away.

Thought provoking story from FT.com on China

Here's an article to send around to the management team that just may get them to invest in your department and in research and development.  Today's Financial Times profiles how Chinese scientists are making massive leaps in terms of invention and the all important knowledge economy.

The dragon's lab - how China is rising through the innovation ranks details how in 2006 China overtook Japan in research spending rankings and is now in second place and closing in on a weakening USA. China also overtook engineering experts the Germans last year in terms of the number of patents filed and is now in the top five.

Not only is R&D getting lots of Chinese funding, so is education to produce the researchers with the number of university students quadrupling to 16m, 352,000 of which are engineers, compared to just 137,000 in the USA.

Multi-national companies are keen to exploit this interest as well because Chinese scientists earn just 20% of what a western scientist takes home.

There are problems though, corruption such as the recent case of a dean at Jiatong University claiming to have developed a microchip that can process 200m instructions per second had in-fact scraped the name off a Motorola processor and the report highlight a number of studies and experts that show China is not an innovative country.

Denis Thatcher joins updated Dictionary of National Biography

Denis Thatcher, husband to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is amongst those to join the heralded pages of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), a print and online directory of everyone and anyone who has contributed something to the rich history and culture of Great Britain.

The latest round of updates includes 202 new biographies to the online edition, alongside Denis are comedian Bob Monkhouse, singer Maurice Gibb, Thora Hird and photographer David Hemmings. "Perhaps no British Prime Minister has depended more heavily on a spouse," the DNB states.

Franco/German partnership dissolves over intended rival to Google

The German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) has announced that they would be withdrawing from Project Quaero, the plan to launch a Euro search engine challenger to Google and Yahoo writes Daniel Griffin.

According to the French Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII) who spearheaded the consortium, the split has been put down to differences over technology between them and the BMWi who also announced they will be setting up their own research project, dubbed Theseus. Theseus is intended to be an “information and technology service” rather than just a search engine. The French meanwhile wanted to focus more on the multimedia search side with the indexing of text, images and video.

Since its initial launch in January 2006, the project has been dogged with a perceived lack of commitment from the German side of the partnership. With no major German backer five months after the projects initial launch in January last year it is perhaps an unsurprising development.

A ministry spokeswoman from the BMWi told The Guardian; “The French wanted a search engine. We wanted something else.” Championed exuberantly by French President Jacques Chirac in his continuing crusade against “Anglo-Saxon” cultural imperialism, Project Quaero – Latin for “I search” was quickly dubbed “Ask Chirac” according to the newspaper and is expected the French will continue to develop the initiative without partnership from the Germans.

Has ProQuest sold the wrong division?

Kate Worlock, director of information market analysts EPS, has questioned the strategy of ProQuest in selling its Information and Learning division, when all around it are selling off their education businesses.

In the report ProQuest: Focus now solely on schools, Worlock writes: "At a time when other businesses are disposing of their education divisions, ProQuest's sale of its more reliable and profitable assets has clearly shaken investors".

In the report she highlights how the sale of Information and Learning, as well as the sale of its automotive parts information service ProQuest Business Solutions will enable the company to significantly pay off its debts.