Week VIII – continued…
Tending to be a laid-back technozoid (I rub Valium® on my face to wake up in the morning), and having seen many bursts of unhealthy enthusiasm for now-deprecated applications & hardware, I’ll still say that there’s room for cautious optimism that the technics/techniques we’ve examined over the past several weeks will be of practical use.
The mashup (MU) of GIS with TerraKitty would provide improvement to OPACs for our instant-gratification clientèle in physically finding (& mapping) the location of what they want. Of course they want it yesterday with a side of fries, but now they can send the pickup info to their courier company. The ILL models are also ripe for these kinds of incorporations.
BTW: I don’t think that those duets-with-the-dead (A/V or audio-only) should be called a MU, no more than the à la Matrix BulletTime video technique.
It would be very nice to see a more flexible MU of Google tools; say a med student is looking for a nearby, gross anatomy class happening soon. That front end would be med class-related, have search parameters for class+gross anatomy, know starting or target location, then GIS for azimuth & elevation.
Tagging plus MeSH was touted in N.Y. Times the other day, an article about the “Diseasome”. (They picked up on this only a year late, c.f. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 May 22;104(21):8685-90. Epub 2007 May 14). Hmmm, various sized/colored circles, linkages, font size differences… sort of a Clusty look… holey DNA, Batman, it’s social diseases tagging!
Never forget TANSTAAFL: somebody, somewhere, somehow pays for it. But the identifying & allocating of responsibility & funding can also be aided by the same tools being used for providing service; all in all a sustainable business model after all. But there’s going to have to be some resetting of expectations…