Minutes from SIMILE PI phone conference, 11-Dec-03 1100 EDT/1600 BST

--> You are now talking on #simile
--> SteveGarland (garland@18.52.1.28) has joined #simile
<marbut> attendees: eric, steve, mark
<marbut> mark: any progress on getty?
<marbut> ericm: no, no progress
<marbut> mark: Mick was keen for us to obtain a copy
<marbut> ericm: I'll put that on my to do list
<marbut> SteveGarland: as I mentioned last week, 2 students working on
things
<marbut> Vineet's faceted browser can show artstor data in Haystack
<marbut> he's going to be available for a bit of time on Wednesday this
morning, but he's supervising an exam, so not available for all 2 days
<marbut> David H thought it would take a short time, to link Haystack to
Joseki, but only with help from Denis,
<marbut> but after some email exchange, it looks like it easier than he
thought
<marbut> also I've made some progress on a web browser front end for the
artstor data
<marbut> a couple of technical issues still need to be resolved
<marbut> what to get with ungettable URIs, how to display them
--> ksmathers (chatzilla@206.170.148.113) has joined #simile
<marbut> also some issue about dublin core versions, theres a slight change
to from version 1 to version 1.1
<marbut> I'm not familiar with the details, the title changes in DC in the
ontology, I think Haystack is using 1.0, so its
<marbut> not finding things coded in the database with 1.1
<marbut> ericm: Haystack should be using 1.1
<marbut> The 1.0 / 1.1 problem is fairly common. 1.1 came into being three
years ago. You can introduce subProperty / owlEquiv to jumpstart things.
<marbut> Mark: Once we have the Joseki link, we can do that at the Joseki
end
<marbut> SteveGarland: Once David H gets his bit done, that's not a problem
<marbut> ericm: Can we add ungetable URIs to the agenda
--> RRSAgent (rrs-loggee@18.29.0.30) has joined #simile
* RRSAgent is logging
<ksmathers> mark: minor changes to artstor; uri's for instances all point to
locations on simile web site.  put up some minimal pages
<ksmathers> mark: indicating that the namespace is reserved.
<ksmathers> eric: any other plans for namespace.
<ksmathers> mark: uri's are used for anything that is likely to be
crossmapped.  contributors, subjects, keywords
<ksmathers> mark: identified commonality in the data, then an owl equiv can
mapbetween the common instances in the data.
<ksmathers> mark: also worked on the demo script.  kevin wrote a longer
script scenario and events.  mark has done two more in the same style.
<ksmathers> mark: also working the team meeting in boston
<marbut> kevin: I've been working on the 20th century art course
<marbut> this has a much stronger overlap with artstor than the other
courses we have
<marbut> it more than doubles the number of resources, and might be ten
times as many overlaps
<marbut> unfortunately it didn't have any resources defined only class nodes
<marbut> because OCW couldn't obtain rights to these resources
<marbut> so I took the lecture notes, took the information out, and did a
hand mapping to see what the overlap would look like
<marbut> I put this in an excel spreadsheet, then I've converted it to OCW
LOM XML, for each of the items in the spreadsheet
<marbut> so it now has 500 new resources
<marbut> this is not checked into the repository
<marbut> they should map well over to Artstor, there are much stronger
overlap with the others
<marbut> there are some limitations on the mapping, that I've described in
my email, the descriptions are weak, but if we get a strong mapping to
artstor
<marbut> we can copy them from artstor. I don't think its worth doing it for
all 500 images
<marbut> the second limitation is because OCW didn't have any location
information, I did websearches for the technical information
<marbut> I tried to locate instances of these images on the web. So a lot of
the URLs are on the public web, we might want to copy them down, 
<marbut> in case they go away. 
<marbut> Mark: What are the copyright on the images?
<marbut> mark: let's talk about ungetable URIS
<marbut> mark: eric, we'd be interested to hear your position on this?
<marbut> ericm: so does haystack need objects of a particular kind, or do
they just need to avoid 404's?
<marbut> SteveGarland: not sure, I think they just need retrievable objects
<marbut> ericm: but if they got more RDF, could they deal with it?
<marbut> SteveGarland: yes, it can deal with it
<marbut> ericm: the current plan is we are sticking a HTML page?
<marbut> kevin: these are RDF objects, that have URLs associated with them,
they can point to the objects themselves, we could
<marbut> just use Joseki to give you back the objects themselves
<marbut> ericm: is this debatable?
<marbut> kevin: I'm not sure if Andy likes it
<marbut> He says its not a publishing system, its a query system
<marbut> He doesn't want to deliver large bits of RDF from Joseki
<marbut> but I think you can just deliver a localised region, a data object
<marbut> in joseki, there is a concept of a fetch
<marbut> ericm: but it also strikes me that we could have the objetcs 
<marbut> outside of the server, on a normal server
<marbut> kevin: but then the information might get out of sync?
<marbut> ericm: Yes but any sort of web harvesting might do that. If you do
decouple it, that's the penalty we pay, 
<marbut> Kevin: I'd like to see one canonical source, and people get data
from the URL e.g. the Joseki server
<marbut> ericm: So we had a similar architecture in the Pearl stuff
<marbut> Kevin: we can talk about this next week
<marbut> ericm: That's a good idea, what you say makes sense, we haven't
talked about the notion of RDF harversters yet, but in the future
<marbut> people may be interested in integrating our data with other sources
a lot easier
<marbut> ericm: I think there are only three solutions here, so there are
not too many solutions
<marbut> mark: at least if we have discussion in the morning, he will be on
the telecon
<marbut> ericm: Has this discussion moved to controlled vocabularies in this
context?
<marbut> Kevin: Mark and I had a long discussion off list about whether
keywords should be placed in URI space
<marbut> So now for expediency we are turning them into URLs, but I think
there is a mismatch between URLs and keywords
<marbut> ericm: It depends, some people think of keywords in controlled
vocabulary sense
<marbut> Kevin: I do think of them in that way, but as we are not an
authority I don't think pointing them at our URL is useful
<marbut> It's easy to find utilties to do things like word stemming, case
folding, the hierarchies etc
<marbut> ericm: But they are not mutually exclusive
<marbut> Kevin: That's why we tabled it, 
<marbut> ericm: We need labels on the keywords
<marbut> Kevin: I need to add labels - which namespace?
<marbut> Mark: RDFS
<marbut> ericm: We don't want to lose information here.
<marbut> That makes a really compelling demo, when the librarian can set up
equivalence relationships, it turns out to be a powerful way of leveraging
both free text tools and semantic web tools
<marbut> Kevin: Should I put a language indicator in?
<marbut> ericm: Yes, if its right. Adding language there is a good thing.
This will be useful in phase 2 when we connect with CIDOC
<marbut> Mark: They get it wrong in CIDOC - all the latin and german is
marked English
<marbut> ericm: Yes, but in the future we need to get it right
<marbut> Does CIDOC get it wrong?
<marbut> mark: yes it just says english at the top, but it uses a mixture of
german and english
<marbut> http://web.mit.edu/simile/www/documents/demoscript/demoscript.htm
<marbut> Kevin: script 1 - I need someone who is both a learner and a
teacher
<marbut> I need someone with access to the Artstor db, as they dont share
their data with everyone
<marbut> hence the actors
<marbut> the scenario deals with a course on art history
<marbut> 20th century art is relevant to things like advertising, so I think
this is relevant to a two year college
<marbut> SteveGarland: I really like the background in scene 1 here. Some of
the concerns may be state specific, but I don't think that matters
<marbut> I found it really helpful on focussing on who the users are going
to be.
<marbut> SteveGarland: The problem you raise is a real one.
<marbut> ericm: These kind of demos apply social / peer pressure to make
that a reality.
<marbut> kevin: because this is the mode of artstor, all of the resources
artstor has are owned by one of the museums / colleges in the consortium
<marbut> ericm: it a bit more complicated, but let's stay with that
<marbut> ericm: I hope that people will realise thumbnails are metadata
<marbut> mark: can we hear steve questions?
<marbut> SteveGarland: they are more about how does this work? 
<marbut> this guy visits his friend, and is then able to access information
he couldn't before, how does that work?
<marbut> Kevin: Its just he didn't know, he knew about the data before, but
not how to tie them together
<marbut> SteveGarland: So the situation he was in that if he treated them as
separate databases he would have a lot of extra work.
<marbut> There's lots of stuff you kind find, but how does it compare with
the amount of work he would need to do before?
<marbut> I have the same question about all three scripts. People can do
this kind of thing already, with Google, the question is how is it improved
with SIMILE
<marbut> ericm: I think this is a good idea, we need to know how these
things are better than before
<marbut> or if one person makes the connections, we need to record it so the
next person doesn't need to do the work
<marbut> kevin: This was all background originally, so I was going to fill
in with actual steps that the actors took
<marbut> SteveGarland: That would be great
<marbut> ericm: BTW, I really like this direction
<marbut> If we incorporate the value added dimension, then we have strong
justification for the demos we are doing
<marbut> We need to ground the SW in real applications
<marbut> Kevin: There was one thing that Mark brought up, in that it starts
with OCW and goes to Artsot
<marbut> that's because its easy to justify
<marbut> It's harder to go the other way
<marbut> ericm: What courses are this image part of?
<marbut> Art professors are like curators, so to the extent other people
have done this, that's value added for them
<marbut> but you can easy to see that connection there
<marbut> SteveGarland: its just as if we were teaching a course of computer
science?
<marbut> kevin: But why go to artstor to begin with, not IMS?
<marbut> ericm: Start with Artstor, then ask the question: what's the most
popular resources in courses?
<marbut> It's a kind of link analysis
<marbut> SteveGarland: I have an image, then I want to know how different
organisations deal with it in their curriculum.
<marbut> ericm: i don't think we need to flush out all the scenarios to a
high level detail, but I'd suggest you put in question marks, then throw it
out to the rest of the group
<marbut> SteveGarland: For example in OCW, you might have two professors
teaching the same course, I want to compare the syllabi
<marbut> There are alsorts of useful things that can be done here. 

Dr Mark H. Butler
Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
mark-h_butler@hp.com
Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/

Received on Thursday, 11 December 2003 12:13:42 UTC