Convergence of metaverse modelling tools

Obviously SL isn't the only player in town but it is nevertheless significant that it is moving towards making it possible to import and export from other environments: modelling tools like 3D Max or other virtual worlds.
3pointD.com: Second Life Build Tools Support More Formats
Not that I need to spell it out, but if this is the start of a pattern then we will see greater incentives and lower risks to museums (and everyone else) to invest in Second Life, or more fundamentally in virtual objects that might be used in such environments, and corresponding improvements in sustainability.s
And why do I ALWAYS insert an unnecessary "e" in "environment"?

Somehow the API will make you pay for the honey

Nat Torkington on Six Basic Truths of Free APIs. Ties in well with my Paper 2, especially around the ecology of applications that API providers need to develop value for themselves - if this fails then they will have no incentive to support or develop the API. We have seen Google, for example, shifting the ground from under the feet of developers, and frankly it's a case of buyer beware (well, "freeloader beware" sounds a bit too judgemental). Brian Kelly's work on risk assessment is right in this area.

OSMOSA

3 point D points us to the new Open Source Museum of Open Source Art in Second Life. Lots of fun! Interesting to see that they are talking about documenting and archiving this thing, and of course there are relevant issues relating to authority, reality, value, fun, impact, education, mission and, indeed, whether it's all that museum-like at all. They do frame the background article in museological terms, it will be as interesting to see how the debate progresses as the museum itself.

Jeremy Keith on Identity and authority

Funny where stuff turns up. Jeremy Keith often has interesting things to say but I would not necessarily have expected him to talk about something that so directly hits a museological button - until, that is, I thought about it. After all, everything I've been writing for the last year has been observing and depending upon this sort of connection between disparate areas. So, Adactio talks about the problem of authority in the fragmented, distributed environment and I find I can use it almost without translation in the discussion I'm working on about museum authority and the impact of the web
Adactio: Identity and authority

The apps that just went online can now go...offline again

Brady Forrest wrote Dojo Offline Toolkit Released. There will presumably be a flood of taking-web-apps-offline technology in due course, once more changing the nature of the online/offline dynamic

Virtually altered state

Nicholas Carr's posting Go ask Alice's avatar
Those wild and crazy guys!
This is one for the reality/VR/authenticity file.

Salad Bowl alpha

A couple of weeks ago I put the Salad Bowl thing on to the MoL server here: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museumObjects/index.aspx. Since access to this blog is, as from today, unrestricted I guess I need to explain this a little bit. I have imagined the stub of a museum object microformat (really the stub at the moment, hardly any of the data structure is really sorted, and I may drop it in favour of work-of-art anyway). Core parts of m-objects include identification with an institution, a URI and a unique identifier for the item (plus a name). To do something with data in this form (which I have enabled on a few of our catalogue driven sites like London's Burning and Exploring 20th Century London) there is a bookmarklet which highlights objects and lets you submit them to an application where your collection of objects is held - the Salad Bowl.
Right now it needs a log-in to see even the intro, which I should change. Anyway, the thing is full of bugs but essentially the bookmarklets work (on Mozilla and IE) and the new version, which submits data via forms rather than querystring, seems OK (as long as you are logged in BEFORE you submit an object, something else to fix). Once your objects are in there you can tag and describe them but no more at present. Obviously doing something cool with the tags would be best but this is a proof of concept and I'm not going to try to replicate work that could be borrowed from e.g. Steve.museum.
If you are interested in trying out the very alpha application, leave me a comment.

Brian Kelly's thoughts on SWTT and the MW2007 presentation

UK Web Focus: UK Museums and the Semantic Web Thinktank
Brian's input at (especially) the closing meeting was useful; it was helpful in keeping the balance between the various possibilities open to us, and in maintaining the focus on end users. It's nice to see, though, that he has also (like the rest of us) realised that there are more areas where SW may have an impact than we first thought, specifically in terms of intra-and inter-organisational communications of collections data.
My own preoccupation is with ensuring that there is evident reward for anyone that's putting effort into this, so that funders and directors see benefits and so do curators, documentation professionals etc., and it seems plausible that doing relatively simple stuff facing end users is a way to do this, so I'm to some extent in agreement with Brian. Equally, attacking SW from the other side with a more hard-core approach for collections data etc. will have its own benefits, and the two may meet in the middle to the advantage of all.

"Repatriating" some of our collection

An organisation would like to use our data and images relating to objects we have on long-term loan from them. This is an opportunity to develop an (overdue) API or some other means for distributing content dynamically.

Why we should help:

·         it's their collection

·         we should anyway open our cleaned collection data to anyone for reuse (expansion of museum domain and role)

·         a model of good behaviour for the hub

·         a model of techniques for the hub – building distributed use with centralised authorship

·         opportunity to try new techniques – web services (broadly speaking), AJAX, Semantic Web or just RSS, perhaps m-objects.

How we could do it:

·         Assume minimal technical know-how and no facility for server-side scripting

·         Assume we want to keep the source data under our control so that we can amend as we please (although perhaps supplemented with input from the organisation in question?) This will mean less work for them on the basis of the first assumption

·         Offer AJAX interface onto a service or onto a static XML file. This will take a string of IDs. Alternatively, it could look to an RSS feed from my m-objects application)

·         We would supply

o       JS snippet and files to insert into each HTML file (including an onload() for the body tag)

o       Spreadsheet of objects and IDs

o       The XSL and possibly CSS

·         Methods for passing IDs could be via a hidden form element, JS include or querystring

·         If accessing (loading) static XML, XSL will need to deal with a string of IDs. If accessing a dynamic service need only transform whatever is returned

·         Other functions of service could include filtering by keyword, date, collector. Keyword needs to look at related people and themes

·         What format of data? OAI with unqualified DC? CDWA Lite? Talk to Mia.

·         Alternatively could develop the API to my app so that they can pick what they want

Gunter Waibel on DAMS and digital preservation

GW making the point that DAMS is NOT digital preservation, although many museums see them as equivalent. A quote from his chapter in a forthcoming book:

 

"Since commercial DAMS systems are created with the intent to manage present-day digital files for use rather than for posterity, a conservative view of their capability to preserve digital files according to established standards seems prudent. Rather than a silver bullet solution, the DAMS could be seen as a museum’s first major point of engagement with the thorny issues of digital preservation. Beyond all other obvious benefits to museum operations, implementing a DAMS is a first step towards better stewardship of digital assets, which may develop into a full-blown institutional digital preservation strategy down the line."

My postings and comments elsewhere

http://culturalsemanticweb.wordpresscom/2007/02/23/jeremys-key-outputs-from-the-va-meeting-1922007/ (SW V&A outputs, and comment from Sebastian)

http://culturalsemanticweb.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/the-future-is-hereany-day-now/ (silly)

http://culturalsemanticweb.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/semantic-web-in-dutch-museums-more-than-a-pipe-dream/ 

http://culturalsemanticweb.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/google-investigating-semantics/ (comment)

http://hangingtogether.org/?p=195 (comment)

Online/offline

A trend to keep an eye on, as web-based applications push ever more into the area once occupied solely by desktop applications, is the ability to work both on- and offline. As this starts to mature we will see ever fewer reasons for traditional desktop apps and ever more for web-based software, which is going to affect what we as museums are offering (and using). Presumably worth keeping an eye on for this project. Here are some examples of the sort of app that's making the shift I'm talking about:

• http://www.zimbra.com/desktop
• Adobe's Apollo will enable this
• Apparently Firefox 3 "will allow sites to work offline by accessing local datastores", although I'm not sure how different this will be to the usual caching and "work offline" mode

MW2007 papers online (already), including some nice SW stuff...

The list of speakers with links to their abstracts is here. Not checked it all out yet but there are a couple of Dutch SW projects:

http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/abstracts/prg_325000959.html (main project page at http://e-http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/speakers/index.html) and http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/abstracts/prg_325001116.html.

Holy cow, someone's doing it! (sort of)

http://microformats.org/wiki/work-of-art

This is aimed at artworks, and it takes rather a different approach to mine (in which, crucially, I include a pointer to a source of authoritative data) but I had been thinking about using CDWA Lite to both model the m-objects MF and to hold the record in native XML at that source location, and stumbled across this. Very interesting and it's probably worth confirming their progress before going any further with my own version

Shame on the complainers: Jam splats

BBC Jam is offline, at least for now and probably for good (unless the Ofcom draft paper that I was given, proposing a "public service publisher" role comes to anything). This is apparently down to commercial interests whingeing to the EC about unfair competition, even though a review of impact of the service in this area was already scheduled for this year. Whingeing morons! I don't give a damn if the BBC is treading on the ground that others also want to tread on; their remit was restricted from the very start, and they offer to students what the commercial providers don't, and fully within the educational remit of the Beeb. They commissioned most content from independent producers anyway, and for the users they provided great value.

 

The relevance for this project comes in the threat that commercial enterprises seemingly pose if they can strike at any public-service activities with claims of un-competitive behaviour. Will museums become targets, too, if they undertake, say, educational activities that overlap with those that for-profit businesses are involved with? Might we invest in services only to find that they're illegal according to the EU? Where does public service go?

Nicholas Carr on "Customer value and the network effect"

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/the_value_of_ne.php

Talking about the value to the "company" of users who (to use Lorcan Dempsey's favourite term) provide the flow around their business even if they don't buy anything themselves. He identifies two-sided markets - essentially, I take it, those where the locus of activity is an agent between other two parties - that must attract both buyers and sellers. Without understanding the value of the non-paying "customers" (i.e. buyers, who don't pay eBay) it's hard to know how much effort to put into attracting them versus sellers (who pay). But the elements of that side of the network effect equation are hard to weigh up since they're not paying, but feed into the whole buzz, UGC etc.

 

For us, we are not really serving a "paying" party, but nevertheless we are interested in generating some sort of value. It may be that we should include various intangible network effects that sustain that value even if the activities themselves are not valuable. Here's a quote that Carr cites from Sunil Gupta (interviewed here http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5595.html) who is currently

 

"working on understanding and modeling complex network structures such as those of MySpace. Here the issue that we are grappling with is the tangible and intangible value of customers. In other words, customers provide tangible value to a firm through direct purchases but they also provide intangible value through network effects or word of mouth. It is quite possible that some customers have low tangible but high intangible value. Traditional models would label such customers as low value and would miss a huge opportunity for a firm."

 

Physical as metaphor for virtual!

Karen Schneider on the ALATechSource blog (http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2007/03/dear-library-of-congress.html):

"The paper-based book is already a metaphor; books are now born in digital form"

 

Cross-post: thougts from SWTT at V&A

I thought I would get down a few notes from our meeting at the V&A (and I promise to do something for the earlier ones too, to add to the reports and transcripts already there). The subject of that session – collections – both drew me and made me a little wary. Collections are the most obvious case for doing SW in museums since they are so central to our activities and purpose, but I suspect that a lot of the time we are tempted to broadly equate SW in our context with multi-institution collections search, because we’ve dreamed of this for so long. This is rather lazy, albeit unsurprising, and I am hoping that we’ll develop a much bigger vision that this in these think-tank meetings. Happily I can say that we are doing so, and of course collections are vitally important to all of us, so a meeting like this is absolutely core to the whole series.
We had some new faces at the V&A session and some stimulating debate, but I thought when things drew to a close that only a couple of ideas had really captured my imagination. Actually, looking back on it, there was plenty, but I think this hadn’t sunk in partly because my brain went into hibernation in the air-con (until Dan figured out how to definitively kill it) and it took me a long time to emerge from my torpor. I’ve done a little digesting and here are the things that made most impact on me personally (not really in an order but it wouldn’t show the unordered list properly). Most if not all of these are points that were raised in the meeting, though I’ve not always identified an individual for fear of mischaracterising their ideas. Some of them might be my own responses to the discussion and demonstrations – my notes are a bit confusing :-}

1. Semantic Web approaches could be helpful in designing internal systems architecture: the learning potential of systems like JEROME and the ability effectively to represent/understand business processes via RDF etc. may make this aspect a good way of building a service-based system (obviously not the only way, but an intelligent way
2. Making the business case for SW as a solution for internal problems that also has benefits beyond the institution may be more productive than trying to convince directorate and funders of the need to go SW just for the sake of the Web
3. Despite my reservations about over-emphasising collections, outlined above, they are the obvious place to start for both external SW and for re-jigging the internal architecture – the key, as Suzanne Keene and Nick Poole pointed out, to knowledge management.
4. Suzanne suggested a future role for museums as “information broker” instead of information source/authority. A weighty idea.
5. Frances Lloyd Baynes pointed to the scale of the problem and possibilities arising from SW as a threat to curatorial control/authority because of the need to make certain choices about the creation and management of information. There’s no sector-wide view, either, and we often see each other as competitors.
6. Our measurements are wrong. Big problem if a lot of our activities and the value that arises from them then go un-measured. Not that many measures we currently use are great proxies for value anyway… and not that we know what we value online either.
7. There are complications in getting funding – if collections-related activities are seen as core then they won’t get project funding; but if they’re project funded then they won’t get ongoing support. Often museums are unaware that they need to provide this support themselves and expect project funding to continue indefinitely. Consequently we need a model for moving towards SW that recognises this reality – or else we need some external force to change the rules, for example by changing the standards expected of documentation or of web presence.
8. Documentation and search are not the same as presentation (Areti Galani, Nick Poole and others). However SW is in large part about search/discovery of resources* (although this function may be used for user experiences that don’t feel much like search) so this may not matter.* SW is also about building a framework of knowledge, a source of information to analyse, and we shouldn’t forget this aspect and think only of resource discovery.
9. Aside from RDF and (if you want to include them) microformats, a few useful data structures are already in play that may serve, e.g. FOAF, SIOC (for online communities) and stuff like DOAP that I’ve even less idea about.
10. JEROME! Wow, fantastic, and also very encouraging in that it offers an example of the merging of what we’ve started to refer to as “SW” and “sw”. By mapping microformats, UGC, profile information, FOAF etc onto RDF via graphs (I think?!?), great semantic power is extracted from diverse material. I’ve banged on about finding a path to SW that allows museums to take lots of small steps in that direction with a pay-off at each one, and JEROME lets me see a little more how this might work. Thank you, Sebastian Kruk and his gang.

[cross-posted from the UK Museums and the Semantic Web blog]

Data curation education

Lorcan Dempsey talked about this programme. The definition of data curation is of interest for its overlap with our problem, since it's focussed more broadly than preservation as I have characterised it:

Data curation is the active and on-going management of data through its lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship, science, and education.
Data curation activities enable data discovery and retrieval, maintain its quality, add value, and provide for re-use over time, and this new field
includes authentication, archiving, management, preservation, retrieval, and representation.

Here comes the monetisation...

Google Launches Apps Premier
So here is their web application suite money-shot shot at the money. One to watch.