Applied Information Technology opens Virtual Platform for the Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt

The Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) is a project that aims to provide digital access to the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt. The HDL runs on an open source library developed in the Hochschule Offenburg and provides a virtual research environment in which researchers can work more effectively. This article presents the development made in the HDL to provide alternative ways of content dissemination through the OAI protocol.Through the implemtantion of the OAI-PMH data provider in the HDL, the library is accessibly in many universities and research centers everywhere around the globe

Geothermie kompakt – online lernen

Die geothermischen Energieressourcen im Oberrheingebiet rücken immer mehr in den Brennpunkt für eine nachhaltige Energieversorgung. Um die Grundlagen und Potenziale dieser Energiequelle darzustellen, wurde ein E-Learning-Seminar „Geothermie kompakt – online lernen“ entwickelt, das erstmalig im Rahmen der Messe GeoTHERM 2008 in Offenburg als „Virtuelles Klassenzimmer“ präsentiert wurde. Die Inhalte des Kurses und das Lernmaterial wurden in kooperativer Zusammenarbeit der Autoren nach wissenschaftlichen Methoden und pädagogischen Erkenntnissen zum E-Learning erarbeitet. Der Moodle- Kurs thematisiert die Grundlagen der Geothermie, wobei speziell auf Fragen nach der Art der geothermischen Ressourcen und deren Nutzungsmöglichkeiten eingegangen wird. Die Kursmodule wurden so konzipiert, dass sie als Lehrmaterial für Lehrende wie Lernende verwendbar sind

Humboldt digital library and interconnectedness

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.The Humboldt digital library (HDL) represents an innovative system to access the works and legacy of Alexander von Humboldt in a digital form on the Internet (www.avhumboldt.net). It contributes to the key question about how to present interconnected data in an appropriate form using information technologies. The HDL has been created as a dynamic digital library with the capability of connecting multilingual and multimedia data from diverse online archives. Humboldt’s volumes have become available, but beyond that any relevant information related to the observations of Humboldt, even outside the works can become immediately accessible. This makes it possible to recognize natural changes and compare Humboldt’s descriptions with recent situations. The technology we have developed addresses the issues of sustainability and makes it possible to detect changes in the environment since the time of Humboldt’s observations

Exploring the Americas in a Humboldt Digital Library: Problems and Solutions

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version is available from http://www.amergeog.org/gr/jul06/baron.html

Virtual Research Environment in the Digital Library of Alexander Humboldt

After approximately 200 years, a comprehensive access to the texts of Humboldt’s extraordinary exploration of the Americans is within sight. To open the legacy to the public for free access the Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) project has been developing a dynamic amount of data related to studies of Alexander von Humboldt. The library includes a range of texts, tables and images, as well as many tools that assist mining the data and navigating the system

Humboldt's Idea of Interconnectedness as an Internet Portal

This article sets the focus on methods of information technology in the Humboldt Portal, which represents an ongoing research project to develop a virtual research environment on the Internet for the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt. Based on the experiences of developing and providing the Humboldt Digital Library (www.avhumboldt.net) for more than a decade, we defined a working plan to create an Internet portal for comprehensive access to Humboldt’s writings, no matter if documents are provided as PDF files, scan images or XML-TEI documents on external archives (Google Books, Internet Archive, Deutsches Textarchiv, Bibliotheque National de France). Going far beyond services of a digital library we will provide an information network with multimedia assets, which are containing objects like terms, paragraphs, data tables, scan images, or illustrations, together with correlated properties like thematic linkage to other objects, relevant keywords with optional synonyms and dynamic hyperlinks to related translations in different languages. So the Humboldt Portal can contribute to the key question, how to present interconnected data in an appropriate form using information technologies on the Web

Alexander von Humboldt's Idea of Interconnectedness and its Relationship to Interdisciplinarity and Communication

Alexander von Humboldt, a German scientist and explorer of the 19th century, viewed the natural world holistically and described the harmony of nature among the diversity of the physical world as a conjoining between all physical disciplines. He noted in his diary: "Everything is interconnectedness." The main feature of Humboldt's pioneering work was later named "Humboldtian science", meaning the accurate study of interconnected real phenomena in order to find a definite law and a dynamic cause. Following Humboldt's idea of nature, an Internet edition of his works must preserve the author's original intention, retain an awareness of all relevant works, and still adhere to the requirements of scholarly edition. At the present time, however, the highly unconventional form of his publications has undermined the awareness and a comprehensive study of Humboldt's works. Digital libraries should supply dynamic links to sources, maps, images, graphs and relevant texts. New forms of interaction and synthesis between humanistic texts and scientific observation need to be created. Information technology is the only way to do justice to the broad range of visions, descriptions and the idea of nature of Humboldt's legacy. It finally leads to virtual research environments as an adequate concept to redesign our digital archives, not only for Humboldt's documents, but for all interconnected data

Supercomputing of Tomorrow - Artificial Intelligence in a Smarter World

Technology and computer applications influence our daily lives and questions arise concerning the role of artificial intelligence and decision-making algorithms. There are warning voices, that computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence-and exceed it. This paper points out that a replacement of humans by computers is unlikely, because human thinking is characterized by cognitive heuristics and emotions, which cannot simply be implemented in machines operating with algorithms, procedural data processing or artificial neural networks. However, we are going to share our responsibilities with superior computer systems, which are tracking and surveying all of our digital activities, whereas we have no idea of the decision-making processes inside the machines. It is shown that we need a new digital humanism defining rules of computer responsibilities to avoid digital totalism and comprehensive monitoring and controlling of individuals within the planet Earth