Books by David Stuart

A nostalgic look at Scottish football and mementoes from 1946 to 1986 when the game was at its (almost) egalitarian and entertaining best. It was a period with a wide spread of trophy winners: eight different teams were crowned champions and Scottish clubs regularly impressed in all three European competitions.

The world's foremost expert on Maya culture looks at 2012 hysteria and explains the truth about what the Maya meant and what we want to believe.Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilizations End. The World Cataclysm in 2012. 2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl. According to many of these alarmingly titled books, the ancient Maya not only had a keen insight into the mystical workings of our planet and the cosmos, but they were also able to predict that the world will end in the year 2012.David Stuart, the foremost scholar of the Maya and recipient of numerous awards for his work, takes a hard look at the frenzy over 2012 and offers a fascination (and accurate) trip through Mayan culture and belief. Stuart shows how the idea that the "end of the Mayan calendar," which supposedly heralds the end of our own existence, says far more about our culture than about the ancient Maya. The Order of Days explores how the real intellectual achievement of ancient Maya timekeeping and worldview is far more impressive and remarkable than any of the popular, and often outrageous, claims about this advanced civilization.As someone who has studied the Maya for nearly all of his life and who specializes in reading their ancient texts, Stuart sees the 2012 hubbub as the most recent in a long chain of related ideas about Mesoamericans, the Maya in particular, that depicts them as somehow oddball, not "of this world," or as having some strong mystical link to other realms.Because the year 2012 has no prominent role in anything the ancient Maya ever actually wrote, Stuart takes a wider look at the Maya concepts of time and their underlying philosophy as we can best understand them. The ancient Maya, Stuart contends, were worthy of study and admiration not because they were strange but because they were altogether human, and they developed a compelling vision of time unlike any other civilization before or since.

Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction and exploration of ontologies and demonstrates their value to information professionals.More data and information is being created than ever before. Ontologies, formal representations of knowledge with rich semantic relationships, have become increasingly important in the context of today's information overload and data deluge. The publishing and sharing of explicit explanations for a wide variety of conceptualizations, in a machine readable format, has the power to both improve information retrieval and discover new knowledge. Information professionals are key contributors to the development of new, and increasingly useful, ontologies.Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction to the following:defining the concept of ontologies and why they are increasingly important to information professionalsontologies and the semantic webexisting ontologies, such as RDF, RDFS, SKOS, and OWL2adopting and building ontologies, showing how to avoid repetition of work and how to build a simple ontologyinterrogating ontologies for reusethe future of ontologies and the role of the information professional in their development and use.This book will be useful reading for information professionals in libraries and other cultural heritage institutions who work with digitalization projects, cataloguing and classification and information retrieval. It will also be useful to LIS students who are new to the field.

This book is a clear guide for library and information professionals as to what web metrics are available and how to assess and use them to inform decisions and prove value

The web is changing from a web of documents to a web of data; from a web that can be read by humans, to one that can be read by machines. These are fascinating advances for anyone interested in the changing nature of the web and the way we access information. The technologies being forged in this new landscape will provide a host of opportunities for library and information professionals to shape the information landscape of the future. This book is a wide-ranging introduction to the emerging web of data and the semantic web, exploring technologies including APIs, microformats and linked data. Its topical commentary and practical examples drawn from the international LIS community explore how information professionals can harness the power of this new phenomenon to inform strategy and become facilitators of access to data. Key topics covered include: open data: a semantic web - one that's meaningful to computers data silos; the semantic web- the RDF vision embedded semantics; and, the library and the web of data the future of the librarian and the web of data. This is essential reading for library and information professionals and for LIS students and researchers. It will also be of value to information architects, web developers and all those interested in making sure that people have access to the information they need.