Friends/ A Most Remarkable Development! /Gerry Not As Crazy As Some Say [:-) [snip] What the ViewPlus technology does is to create image files that can be rendered in tactile form (via a tactile touchpad or printed out with an embossing printer) and also in audio (via text-to-speech technology). At the core of this technology is an image format known as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Unlike bitmapped image formats like TIFF and JPEG, SVG is an XML-based format that provides the images as vector graphics (the core of PostScript and PDF) with text and metadata in XML. [snip] The benefits to the print-disabled user are obvious. Dr. Gardner demonstrated how a graph that was otherwise inaccessible to a print-disabled user was made meaningful: He could feel the slopes of the various lines on the graph, and as he did so, the software read labels describing the lines, including the values of datapoints, as he touched them. [snip] What the ViewPlus software had done with that image was nothing less than adding the semantics that takes it from being "dumb" to dynamic data. Imagine a whole collection of such images in which a researcher could use a computer to search for certain patterns, values, and features and do comparisons or calculations on them. This is Tim Berners-Lee*s vision of the Semantic Web: information that a computer can understand. Not just store, find, and deliver, but understand. Your Thoughts? Please Comment On The Blog Post on Scholarship 2.0 At [ http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2008/06/viewplus-feeling-is-more-than-seei... ] OR [ http://tinyurl.com/65bvhe ] /Gerry Gerry McKiernan Associate Professor Science and Technology Librarian Iowa State University Library Ames IA 50011 gerrymck@iastate.edu There is Nothing More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come Victor Hugo [ http://www.blogger.com/profile/09093368136660604490 ] Iowa: Where the Tall Corn Flows and the (North)West Wind Blows [ http://alternativeenergyblogs.blogspot.com/ ]