The Huffington Post recently shared an inside look at the origins of Siri. The article states, “The world got its first inkling of the quick wit that would make Apple’s Siri an icon during a packed press conference held before an auditorium of tech elite. ‘Who are you?’ an Apple executive asked the assistant. ‘I am a humble personal assistant,’ Siri answered to appreciative laughter. More like humbled personal assistant. That press conference was actually Siri’s second coming-out party. When the virtual assistant first launched in early 2010, it was a standalone iPhone app called Siri created by a 24-person startup with the same name, a company Apple would later acquire.” Read more

Uri Friedman has put together a brief history of Big Data on ForeignPolicy.org. Here are a few highlights from the timeline: In 1997, “NASA researchers Michael Cox and David Ellsworth use the term ‘big data’ for the first time to describe a familiar challenge in the 1990s: supercomputers generating massive amounts of information — in Cox and Ellsworth’s case, simulations of airflow around aircraft — that cannot be processed and visualized. ‘[D]ata sets are generally quite large, taxing the capacities of main memory, local disk, and even remote disk,’ they write. ‘We call this the problem of big data’.” Read more

Hal Hodson recently covered the “semantic evolution” of Talis culminating in Kasabi. He writes, “In 1969, a group of libraries in Birmingham decided they needed to become more efficient. Calling themselves the Birmingham Libraries Cooperative Mechanisation Project (BLCMP), the group built a centralised database of ‘machine-readable’ bibliographic records, first using microfilm to store book data then, from 1982, using IBM mainframes with terminals at each library. BLCMP went on to become Talis, named after its integrated library system, and for many years it was leader in the automated library management software market. But that is a mature market, and last year Talis divested its library division to focus on the company’s other passion: semantic technology.” Read more

Christine Connors has written a short history of classification, noting how today’s taxonomies play into the grand scheme of things. Connors begins, “The earliest known means of classifying an object and keeping it in order are girginakku. These are ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets that were attached to scrolls and tablets and used to identify the contents. Examples of approximately 5300 years in age can be found in the British Museum. Girginakku at Glencairn. These clay tablets were used for many purposes, including cataloging. The famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt housed one of the earliest forms of library catalog in the third century BCE. The library reportedly housed more than 120,000 scrolls which were stored in bins categorized by subject.” Read more

A new article takes a look at how linked data is bringing Civil War history into the present: “April 2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the first hostilities of U.S. Civil War, and museums, municipalities, historic sites, and schools are making their preparations for the events and exhibits to commemorate it. While, no doubt, times are tough for funding cultural heritage projects, there’s a lot of excitement around the sesquicentennial, making it a great opportunity for those exploring how technology can make history more interactive. It’s also a great opportunity to pursue linked data efforts across these museums and historic sites, in turn making this historical information more discoverable and interoperable. That’s what the Civil War Data 150 project is undertaking.” Read more