In the eye-blink that has elapsed since the turn of the millennium, the lives of those of us who work with information have been utterly transformed. Pretty well all we need to know is on the web; if not today, then tomorrow. It's where we learn and play, shop and do business, keep up with old friends and meet new ones. What makes it possible for us to find the stuff we need to know? Search engines.
Search engines - "web dragons" - are the portals through which we access society's treasure trove of information. How do they stack up against librarians, the gatekeepers over centuries past? What role will libraries play in a world whose information is ruled by the web? How is the web organized? Who controls its contents, and how do they do it? How do search engines work? How can web visibility be exploited by those who want to sell us their wares? What's coming tomorrow, and can we influence it? We are witnessing the dawn of a new era, starting right now - and this book shows you what it will look like and how it will change your world.
Do you use search engines every day? Are you a developer or a librarian, helping others with their information needs? A researcher or journalist for whom the web has changed the very way you work? An online marketer or site designer, whose career exists because of the web? Whoever you are: if you care about information, this book will open your eyes - and make you blink.
About the authors:
Ian H. Witten is professor of computer science at the University of Waikato, where he directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography. A fellow of the ACM, he has written several books, including How to Build a Digital Library (2002) and Data Mining (2005), both from Morgan Kaufmann.
Marco Gori is professor of computer science at the University of Siena, where he leads the artificial intelligence research group. He is the Chairman of the Italian Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, a fellow of the IEEE and of the ECCAI, and former President of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Teresa Numerico teaches network theory and communication studies at the University of Rome 3, and is a researcher in Philosophy of Science at the University of Salerno. Previously she was employed as a business development and marketing manager for various media companies, including the Italian branch of Turner Broadcasting System (CNN and Cartoon Network).
* Presents a critical view of the idea of funneling information access through a small handful of gateways and the notion of a centralized index--and the problems that may cause.
* Provides promising approaches for addressing the problems, such as the personalization of web services.
* Presented by authorities in the field of digital libraries, web history, machine learning, and web and data mining.
* Find more information at the author's site: webdragons.net.

For people with various forms of physical disability, extreme slowness of communication is commonplace. In the first part of this 1992 book a functional architecture for communication aids is discussed and the idea of automatically supplying the intrinsic redundancy contained in natural communication is explained. The distinctions between adaptive and non-adaptive models of communication are shown and details are given of working predictive text generation systems. One such system is the Reactive Keyboard, and in the second part of the book this is described. It greatly speeds communication by predicting the user's next response, although it does not always predict correctly. The guesses are made on the basis of previous answers and thus can conform to whatever kind of text is entered. This will be of great value to all involved in helping disabled users interact with computers.

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Fourth Edition, offers a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts, along with practical advice on applying these tools and techniques in real-world data mining situations. This highly anticipated fourth edition of the most acclaimed work on data mining and machine learning teaches readers everything they need to know to get going, from preparing inputs, interpreting outputs, evaluating results, to the algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining approaches. Extensive updates reflect the technical changes and modernizations that have taken place in the field since the last edition, including substantial new chapters on probabilistic methods and on deep learning. Accompanying the book is a new version of the popular WEKA machine learning software from the University of Waikato. Authors Witten, Frank, Hall, and Pal include today's techniques coupled with the methods at the leading edge of contemporary research. Please visit the book companion website at https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html. It contains Powerpoint slides for Chapters 1-12. This is a very comprehensive teaching resource, with many PPT slides covering each chapter of the book Online Appendix on the Weka workbench; again a very comprehensive learning aid for the open source software that goes with the book Table of contents, highlighting the many new sections in the 4th edition, along with reviews of the 1st edition, errata, etc.

"How to Build a Digital Library" is the only book that offers all the knowledge and tools needed to construct and maintain a digital library, regardless of the size or purpose. It is the perfectly self-contained resource for individuals, agencies, and institutions wishing to put this powerful tool to work in their burgeoning information treasuries. The Second Edition reflects new developments in the field as well as in the Greenstone Digital Library open source software. In Part I, the authors have added an entire new chapter on user groups, user support, collaborative browsing, user contributions, and so on. There is also new material on content-based queries, map-based queries, cross-media queries. There is an increased emphasis placed on multimedia by adding a "digitizing" section to each major media type. A new chapter has also been added on "internationalization," which will address Unicode standards, multi-language interfaces and collections, and issues with non-European languages (Chinese, Hindi, etc.). Part II, the software tools section, has been completely rewritten to reflect the new developments in Greenstone Digital Library Software, an internationally popular open source software tool with a comprehensive graphical facility for creating and maintaining digital libraries. As with the First Edition, a web site, implemented as a digital library, will accompany the book and provide access to color versions of all figures, two online appendices, a full-text sentence-level index, and an automatically generated glossary of acronyms and their definitions. In addition, demonstration digital library collections will be included to demonstrate particular points in the book. to access the online content please visit, http: //www.greenstone.org/howto

*Outlines the history of libraries-- both traditional and digital-- and their impact on present practices and future directions. *Written for both technical and non-technical audiences and covers the entire spectrum of media, including text, images, audio, video, and related XML standards. *Web-enhanced with software documentation, color illustrations, full-text index, source code, and more."

In this fully updated second edition of the highly acclaimed Managing Gigabytes, authors Witten, Moffat, and Bell continue to provide unparalleled coverage of state-of-the-art techniques for compressing and indexing data. Whatever your field, if you work with large quantities of information, this book is essential reading--an authoritative theoretical resource and a practical guide to meeting the toughest storage and access challenges. It covers the latest developments in compression and indexing and their application on the Web and in digital libraries. It also details dozens of powerful techniques supported by mg, the authors' own system for compressing, storing, and retrieving text, images, and textual images. mg's source code is freely available on the Web.
* Up-to-date coverage of new text compression algorithms such as block sorting, approximate arithmetic coding, and fat Huffman coding
* New sections on content-based index compression and distributed querying, with 2 new data structures for fast indexing
* New coverage of image coding, including descriptions of de facto standards in use on the Web (GIF and PNG), information on CALIC, the new proposed JPEG Lossless standard, and JBIG2
* New information on the Internet and WWW, digital libraries, web search engines, and agent-based retrieval
* Accompanied by a public domain system called MG which is a fully worked-out operational example of the advanced techniques developed and explained in the book
* New appendix on an existing digital library system that uses the MG software

For people with various forms of physical disability, extreme slowness of communication is commonplace. In the first part of this 1992 book a functional architecture for communication aids is discussed and the idea of automatically supplying the intrinsic redundancy contained in natural communication is explained. The distinctions between adaptive and non-adaptive models of communication are shown and details are given of working predictive text generation systems. One such system is the Reactive Keyboard, and in the second part of the book this is described. It greatly speeds communication by predicting the user's next response, although it does not always predict correctly. The guesses are made on the basis of previous answers and thus can conform to whatever kind of text is entered. This will be of great value to all involved in helping disabled users interact with computers.