A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, and oftentimes public, digital ledger consisting of records called blocks that is used to record transactions across many computers so that any involved block cannot be altered retroactively, without the alteration of all subsequent blocks.[1][18] This allows the participants to verify and audit transactions independently and relatively inexpensively.[19] A blockchain database is managed autonomously using a peer-to-peer network and a distributed timestamping server. They are authenticated by mass collaboration powered by collective self-interests.[20] Such a design facilitates robust workflow where participants’ uncertainty regarding data security is marginal. The use of a blockchain removes the characteristic of infinite reproducibility from a digital asset. It confirms that each unit of value was transferred only once, solving the long-standing problem of double spending. A blockchain has been described as a value-exchange protocol.[21] A blockchain can maintain title rights because, when properly set up to detail the exchange agreement, it provides a record that compels offer and acceptance.
Category: Computing & data (Page 79 of 91)
Computing and data is a broad category. Our coverage of computing is largely limited to software, and we are mostly focused on unstructured data, semi-structured data, or mixed data that includes structured data.
Topics include computing platforms, analytics, data science, data modeling, database technologies, machine learning / AI, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, augmented reality, bots, programming languages, natural language processing applications such as machine translation, and knowledge graphs.
Related categories: Semantic technologies, Web technologies & information standards, and Internet and platforms.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt.com, a tech start-up which uses, promotes and helps develop the open source Solid platform. Solid aims to give people control and agency over their data, questioning many assumptions about how the web has to work. Solid technically is is new level of standard at the web layer, which adds things never put into the original spec, such as global single sign-on, universal access control, and a universal data API so that any app can store data in any storage place. Socially Solid is a movement away from much of the issues with the current WWW, and toward a world in which users are in control, and empowered by large amounts of data, private, shared, and public.
Sir Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
The ‘open web’ refers to the non-proprietary portion of the world wide web (WWW). That is, the portion that is free and freely accessible, as it was when it was launched. The opposite of the open web is a proprietary “walled-garden”, such as Facebook.
‘Document computing’ was a term used to cover a collection of technologies that emerged as computer, or electronic publishing became a growing industry late 1980s and early 1990s. The idea was to differentiate the creation, management and delivery of unstructured data from the traditional and still prevalent structured data orientation of computing applications. It was one of the keynote topics at the first Documation conference in 1994 . Also see the more current, largely overlapping ‘content technology’.
Also see:
Gilbane Report Vol 6, Num 1 — Document Computing – Is This Our Business?
In the early days of information technology (1950s – 1970s), computers were mostly mainframes and the information mostly structured data managed by information systems based on hierarchical and then relational databases.
With the emergence of descriptive markup languages such as SGML, XML, and JSON that add structure other forms of unstructured data or content such as text and streaming data, as well as NoSQL and graph database, linked data, and knowledge graph technologies, the distinction between structured and unstructured data or content is less relevant. Modern data lakes store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
“Content technology” is a form of information technology that uses computing technology to create, retrieve, process, manage, store, share, and distribute unstructured data, such as narrative text and audio visual media, and typically incorporates or integrates with systems that manage structured data . The term emerged as early web content management systems proliferated, but includes any technology that processes some form of unstructured data, such as authoring, publishing, natural language processing, search and retrieval.
The Gilbane Report on Open Information & Document Systems (ISSN 1067-8719) was periodical launched in March, 1993 by Publishing Technology Management Inc. which was founded by Frank Gilbane, its president, in June, 1987.
The Gilbane Report was sold to CAP Ventures Inc in December 1994, who published it until May, 1999, when it was bought by Bluebill Advisors, Inc. a consulting and advisory firm founded by Frank Gilbane. Bluebill Advisors continued to publish the Gilbane Report until March, 2005. The Gilbane Report issues from 1993 – 2005 remain available in either HTML or PDF (or both), on the Gilbane Advisor website, which is owned by Bluebill Advisors Inc.
Below is a link to the first issue of the Gilbane Report. There is also a PDF version.
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation) is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.
In the 80s and 90s MT software was rule-based, but in the 2000s statistical analysis and the re-emergence of neural networking and more advanced machine learning techniques have proved to be far more successful.
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