Incessant Expressions

The semantic web has brought us many things, some useful, most not. The best thing about the emerging semantic web is the widespread proliferation of information. While I personally think most of it’s junk, the one thing I find extremely beneficial is the fact that so much literary and educational material is now available for free or very low cost. The ever present front-runners of open source information, the O’Reilly Radar has an excellent post about the use of Google Books for finding books that you most likely will not normally find in a library or even a specialized one at that.

Let’s talk about online books from some major outlets first: Google Books and Amazon’s reader. I remember when Google Books came out of alpha and was ho-hum on the content. The reader was shoddy (pre-AJAX days, imagine that!) but there was very little real content to search through. Fast forward nearly 4 years and the reader is fully functional and simple to use, modeled after simplistic PDF readers and is relatively lightweight. The content’s also gone from nearly nil to overflowing with books. Take the example of Albert Pike’s seminal book Morals and Dogma. I own two copies of this book, a first edition and a 1999 edition, but if I didn’t I could just read the entire thing online since Google Books has a number of copies cataloged for full text. This is a boon for research-a-holics and those who just love to read books digitally. Instead of plunking down a nice bit of money like I did for my editions, I can read the whole thing online for free from the comfort of my own couch! And it doesn’t stop there, libraries around the world are getting in on the action too. With Google’s library partnership booming, more and more libraries and librarians are contributing to the Google Books project and helping to spread rare and common books alike with the rest of the world. In the three years since I began using Google Books, I never thought the project would actually take off like it has, especially in the way of rare or hard-to-find books. And Google’s educational reach doesn’t stop there. They also have Google Scholar that allows you to search scholar journals without worry and this trend is only going to continue.

But let’s not leave Amazon out of this! They have their own online book application too and it’s far more polished than Google’s version. Using my example from Pike, I can easily read excerpts from Amazon or I can even search the full text of the book. Not only does this somewhat mirror Google’s output but it’s an awesome way to save money if you only need to read a particular part of a book and don’t want to buy it. This has helped my girlfriend out a number of times in her studies where she did not see the need to purchase a $200 music history book only to need to reference a single chapter subset for a paper. What’d she do? She hit up Amazon, found the book, searched the full text and got what she needed. If you take the cost of the book, around $200, and how much we were charged from our ISP for that time, in essence the book cost a total of about $1. Quite an immense savings, I’d say. Their selection of searchable and viewable books is growing day-by-day as they, and more importantly publishers, recognize the growing want of being able to read sections or entire books online.

Then you have sites such as lecturefox.com, Open Educational Resources Commons, and varsitynotes.com with all offering free lecture notes online from an enormous number of schools and professors. Lecturefox in particular is growing exceedingly fast with lectures being submitted from world renowned schools such as UCLA, Stanford, and MIT. Granted, none of these sites were really the first ones to do this but they’re some of the best aggregators around for it. A few years ago, MIT started putting all of its computer science lectures online and its since grown to just about everything at the school through the incredibly successful Open CourseWare site. Since MIT’s breakthrough work in free coursework, you’re hard pressed to find an Ivy League or otherwise credible school not doing something similar.

The semantic web has brought many good things and many bad in the last few years, I can remember when semantic web was just a dream and buzzword on the tips of tongues for many big names in the Internet scene but now it’s a reality. With this new found availability of information, it’s only inevitable that education resources would being cropping up and populating the web and they’ve done so with a force and are reaching people far beyond what any had hoped. Everyday I find a more useful resource than the day before and it’s only getting better. The other day I jokingly remarked that I no longer need to go back to school for my Master’s degree since so much scholarly information is free (as in speech, not as in beer) and frankly, this may come to be true.

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