The Invisible Web Weblog

I have written a brief note in the recent issue of Atf magazine entitled “Internet Hidden and Obvious Paradoxes”. In this note I explained 16 paradoxes in the online environment. For example, we have to deal with the increasing information overload and information scarcity at the same time, the scarceness which has happened as a result of too much information. Because we have to spend plenty of time to find useful information in a huge pool of useless and irrelevant data. To read the full text of this note, please follow this link .

The first "International Conference on Integrated Information Technology" ( INTECH 2011 ) will take place at the Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil. The proceedings will be published by Springer. The topics to be discussed are the following: Integrated Computational Science and Engineering, Distributed Computing, Integrated Communication Technology, Computer Graphics and Multimedia, Integrated System Administration, Networking, and Visualization, Integrated Software Models and Developments, Computing Technology in Education, Government, Business, Industry and other areas, Simulation and Modelling, Integrated Data Mining, Federated Networking, Federated Databases, Image Processing in High Tech Environments, Unified Programming Languages, Information Technology Applications in Different Domains and also Fusion of Information Technology.

The 14th International Conference on Business Information Systems ( BIS 2011 ) will take place in Poznan, Poland, June 15-17, 2011. Topics include: * Business Process Management - Semantic business process management - Adaptive and dynamic processes - Supply chain processes - ERP implementations - Integration of data and processes - Collaborative BPM * Ontologies - Creation, learning, population, evolution and evaluation - Ontologies for enterprise content management - Natural language processing and cognitive science - Semantic integration of heterogeneous semi-structured sources - Interoperability of heterogeneous information systems - Business models for Web information integration and aggregation * Contexts - Location-aware and geography-centric information systems - Wireless and mobile applications - Multi-agent distributed systems - Semantic web personalization - Ambient computing * Content Retrieval and Filtering - Hidden Web search and crawli...

The news of my book is available on both IBNA (Iranian Book News Agency) and LISNA (Library and Information Science News Agency) websites.

Today afternoon I delivered a presentation at the third meeting of LIS journals’ chief editors in Tehran. The topic of my presentation was about the process of Peer Review and the possible challenges and difficulties that a journal’s editorial board in general, and reviewers in particular, might encounter during refereeing process. I also suggested a number of research topics on this issue that might be useful for those who are working on this field. I will upload the PowerPoint file of this presentation on my homepage for everyone who might be interested to find out more details about it.

Today morning I had a workshop in Tehran entitled "Essential Skills for Teachers and Students to Evaluate the Quality, Usability and Authenticity of Electronic Resources". I'll upload the PowerPoint file on my homepage for everyone who might be interested to find out more details about this event.

My new book entitled "Basics of Academic Writing" was published. The book, which is in Persian, includes 75000 words in 263 pages and 9 chapters as follows: 1. An Introduction to Paper Writing (Basic Concepts and Definitions) 2. Principles of Academic Approach in Writing (e.g. Authenticity) 3. General Structure of Scientific Papers 4. Main Features of a Good Paper (100 Features in 20 Categories) 5. Research Originality (Avoiding Plagiarism) 6. Practice in Writing (e.g. Free Writing and etc.) 7. Evaluation Criteria to Select a Journal 8. Paper Submission and Addressing Referees’ Comments 9. Dissertation and Thesis Writing (Including 100 Hints)

Information Retrieval Journal is going to publish a special Issue on "Crowdsourcing for Information Retrieval". In their Call for papers, it is mentioned that: "the advent of crowdsourcing is revolutionizing information technology by enabling a wide host of new methodology for data collection, annotation, and processing, as well as system design and evaluation. Given the massive datasets that are both ubiquitous and rapidly growing in today’s digital age, the field of information retrieval (IR) stands to particularly benefit from such advances as academic researchers and industrial practitioners alike leverage the wisdom of crowds to more effective cope with and exploit massive datasets. The novelty of crowdsourcing makes this is an especially exciting time to focus the IR community’s attention toward it and provide an opportunity for discussion and education on this key emerging area. Traditionally manual-labor intensive processes have been particularly impacted by dra...

The Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal is going to publish a special issue on "Multimedia Data Annotation and Retrieval using Web 2.0". The main aim of this issue is to assess the current approaches and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives, related to the use of Web 2.0 in providing automatic annotation and easing retrieval and access control of multimedia data. It aims to provide an overview of the state of the art and future directions in this field, by including a wide range of interdisciplinary contributions from various research groups. Topics of interest include the following: Semantic Web and Web 2.0, Social Networks, Multimedia Semantics, Contextual Multimedia Metadata, Annotation Enriching, Query Rewriting, Metadata Modeling and Contextual Ontologies for Multimedia Applications, Management of Multimedia Metadata (Relational and XML Databases, Semantic Stores, etc.), Multimedia Authoring, Multimedia-based Access Contr...

The International Academic Forum in conjunction with its global partners is going to hold the Inaugural Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship ( LibAsia ) from May 27-30 2011, at the Ramada Osaka, Japan. The main conference themes are: "Ancient and Modern" & "Journeys of Discovery". Regarding the conference’s announcement, LibrAsia 2011 is not only an academic conference, but also offer a number of talks, workshops, and readings of original works of interdisciplinary and intercultural discussion.”

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up. Mark Twain If you want to be happy, be. Leo Tolstoy Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination. Immanuel Kant If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years. Bertrand Russell My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy. William Shakespeare You cannot always have happiness, but you can always give happiness. Author Unknown Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is. Maxim Gorky Some pursue happiness, others create it. Author Unknown The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash. Author Unknown Being happy is something you have to learn. I often surprise myself by saying "Wow, this is it. I guess I'm happy. I got ...

The World Science Day for Peace and Development (WSDPD) is celebrated on 10 November each year. Today, for this occasion, in an interview with IBNA I talked about the key roles of public libraries in the process of popularization of science in the society. The transcription of this interview is available here .

I have written a brief column in LISNA about the basics of Evidence Based Librarianship. This is the link to this note .

"The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. . . It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation , persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree." Alexander Graham Bell "Try not to become a man of success, but rather to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives." Albert Einstein "The first requisite of success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem without growing weary." Thomas Edison "I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to s...

The workshop entitled “Assessing the Usage and Value of Scholarly and Scientific Output: An Overview of Traditional and Emerging Metrics” will take place on November 10, 2010 in Philadelphia. Experts in the fields of scientometrics will attend this event to discuss the new methods that are becoming increasingly important for measuring the usage and value of scholarly and scientific content, including large scientific data sets, and how those measures complement the more traditional, well-known approaches. The titles of some of the sessions and talks in this workshop are: The Usage Approach to Measuring Value; Evaluating the Use and Impacts of Scientific Data; The Eigenfactor; A New Perspective in Journal Metrics; The Citation Approach to Measuring Value: Citation Indexes, Journal Metrics, and the Impact Factors; Usage Statistics from the Librarian and Publisher Perspectives. The details of this event is available here .