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From
the Editor’s Desktop
Included in
this issue of the Bulletin are three articles that reflect a
central concern with the disruptive impact of the digital age on
areas that have always been controversial – copyright, fair use
and protected speech. In
the first of a two-part article Tom Lipinski discusses the recent Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., Supreme Court decision,
beginning with a look at the legal background of the case. He then
moves on to discuss the specifics of the decision that holds
peer-to-peer software providers Grokster and StreamCast
contributorily liable for “massive” copyright infringement.
From
another perspective, Jim Campbell looks at the expansion of
copyright protections in the
United States
created by recent legislation and the moves to counteract
perceptions of an erosion of the traditional balance between the
rights of copyright holders and fair use. Finally, in his
International Column, Julian Warner, international liaison to the
ASIS&T Board of Directors, considers the roles of democracy,
responsibility and free speech in a Web environment.
Elsewhere
in this issue, we look at the recent history of information
retrieval research, specifically the Text REtrieval Conferences (TREC)
sponsored since 1990 by the National Institute of Science and
Technology. TREC’s current director, Ellen Voorhees, summarizes
the history and results of the use of the TREC testbeds.
And
last, turning from the challenge of developing the retrieval
algorithms that have been so essential to the success of the Web
to-date, we look at the “Semantic Web” of the future. Jay ven
Eman discusses how to export to or “wrap” a thesaurus for use by
software agents on the Semantic Web using the Web Ontology tool
(OWL). He also discusses what additional steps are needed if agents
are to take advantage of the potential of the Semantic Web in
processing documents that have been indexed using terms from an OWL
thesaurus. Anyone seeking to understand the Semantic Web and its
relationship to traditional information retrieval or those
contemplating a Semantic Web project will find much of value here,
including a sober assessment of the difficulties.
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