Nik Honeysett on planning for the "digital museum"

NH writes about a few of the challenges involved in planning here. Of interest is his observation of the recent LoC Flickr move as a way of avoiding the problem of knowledge becoming embedded in individuals who then leave. Flickr is a large, established service with the backing of mega-player Yahoo!, so the LoC's effort has been put into something that should require relatively low maintenance on their part and has a good chance of being durable.

OT: b3ta is the nazz

Oh what fun. I fear this idea could prove a great distraction for me. b3ta.com challenge: extending album art

Another vote in favour of the NLP take on the Semantic Web

ReadWriteWeb reports on Inform, which is taking a text-crunching, NLP approach to inferring semantic links between their clients' content (and potentially their content and that of other sites). No marked-up content, no RDF, no OWL, no ontologies required. As RWW comments, it would be nice if they at least took their work and used it to create some of the latter to start making some hooks that could tie together the classic vision of the SW with this brute force and NLP-based vision. They're not the only ones doing this, and clearly this vision is running away with the SW project at the moment, although it probably can't (presently) achieve lots of the things that the more formal and explicitly structured approach can. But since the latter is lagging, it would be good to see some bridges being built.

An interesting extra dimension to mapping

Brady Forrest points out some funky Flash-based maps from MySociety, integrating geographic data (house prices in London localities) with time (travel times from those locations to central london). Actually it's two sets of geo data, because apparently the times are calculated already and assigned to localities, but in any case it's a nice app. Not quite "representing time" on a map as BF suggests, but rather an example of how time and geography intersect.

MILE - Metadata Image Library Exploitation

So, do you think these guys are working with the EDL? There's no mention of the latter on the MILE website, and I've not seen MILE on the EDL WP2 list, and perhaps it will turn out that there's not as much overlap as it appears to me in my ignorance, but I do worry that we've got a scenario where two EU projects under the same initiative (i2020) aren't really working together. Perhaps someone with an overview of i2020 does co-ordinate them, but d'you really think so?

...and Yahoo! using user-created tags

TechCrunch reports that Yahoo! is starting to put delicious rankings with its search results. It's unclear if delicious tags are actually used to calculate rankings, which would be a great test of the power of the lower-case semantic web, based on UGC/social tagging. Fingers crossed. Next we'll have to push them to look at other sources of socially tagged data. Come on out, Steve

Google as science repository

From TechCrunch (and all over): Google To Become Open Source Science Repository

So the questions include: what form of access will there be; what tools online; what steps will this take towards semantic interoperability; and how might museums use the opportunity to make their data available, if at all?

More distributed services. Databases this time.

LongJump looks pretty cool for hosting databases, both for the non-developer and the techy type. I don't think an ODBC-like connection is possible but a REST or SOAP interface is available. This might be a useful tool for institutions (including museums, of course) that don't have the tech skills or perhaps the desire to develop or host DBs themselves. Sustainability implications? good and bad, as ever, I suppose.

Yahoo! and OpenID

Take back your digital ID

OK, not much to add to this, another one on board and a very big one at that. According to RWW, this triples the number of people with and OpenID (or access to one) or will when it goes live at the end of the month.

Alex Iskold on "The Danger of Free"

The Danger of Free - ReadWriteWeb

The question we've perhaps ignored rather. It's true, we're all perhaps a bit too keen on getting stuff for free. We see stuff delivered through the screen as intangible, but that doesn't always equate to us thinking it has no value or should be free, so why is this so with web-delivered services and content? Is it just a habit, and one we can back out of if we see that it's going to mean poorer quality goods, or is it just in our nature to go for the free or to feel suspicious of the value we'll get from stuff on the web? If we have confidence that it will be trustworthy and value for money are we more likely to pay?

DataPortability.org gets real muscle

ReadWriteWeb points to some potentially very significant news on the data portability front:
Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org
Data portability and identity management are related to semantic web, to UGC, to interoperability and doubtless many other essential issues today, so as a user and a developer this is pretty promising news.

Museum 2.0: Setting Expectations: The Power of the Pre-Visit

Museum 2.0: Setting Expectations: The Power of the Pre-Visit
A well thought out reminder of the importance of the pre-visit role of the website in contrast to the oft-emphasised post-visit role. Timely whilst we're planning the role of the digital experience in Capital City.

The Reg: no fan of the PSP (I don't mean the Sony one)

The Reg is clearly not a great fan of Ofcom's Public Service Publisher idea!
TV licence fee 'to fund Welfare For W*nkers' The Register
I'd say not a huge fan of the Guardian either...

Cross-post: The web-monkey speaks

Cross-posted for completeness from our MoL blog

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Hi. My name is Jeremy and I’m a museum web developer. There, I’ve said it. I’m a keyboard-jockey burdened (or as I see it blessed) by at least two sorts of geekdom: a late-born pleasure in ‘pooters; and a long-standing love of museums, and of the special sort of residue of our world that flocculates there (especially, it must be said, “real” things).

Seven-odd years ago I thought about setting up a museum-orientated web development company, to be called MuseioNet or some such nonsense. Thankfully it never got much beyond a cheesy name, because now I’m starting at least to get an idea of what I don’t know about the subject of building web-based resources for museums. I would have crashed and burned horribly if I’d tried to go it alone back then. I’ve been at the Museum of London about 6 years now, learning on the job. That’s pretty much inevitable anywhere, I suppose, and certainly in technology it’s a basic requirement owing to the speed of change – no matter how much you are on top of your chosen specialism today, tomorrow you’ll be slipping backwards.

Mia has already talked about her job, and although hers is more database-y and mine more webby, our roles have a fair degree of overlap so I’m not going to say much about what we do in a general sense; I want to talk instead about some current projects.

First thing to say is that roughly half of my time is spent on project-related work. Right now I’m really just wrapping up some odds and ends and catching up with some of the day-to-day stuff that’s piled up – bug fixes, data extractions, style-sheet changes. The odds and ends include a map interface for the London Sugar and Slavery website, which gives another way of exploring some of people and events that feature in the gallery of the same name. The map can be found in the gallery too. Things have been somewhat held up by our attempts to make the interface simpler and more intuitive for users, which often makes things dramatically more complex behind the scenes. I don’t know how many more
such applications we will build: we use ESRI products in-house, and their ArcIMS product powers the LSS map (and this one), but the power and flexibility of free mapping applications out there (Google and Yahoo! are amongst the most prominent) make them increasingly attractive. It would be a bit of a learning curve to learn to do all the things we want to do with these but ArcIMS is pretty complex too. We’ve already used Google Maps here and Yahoo! Maps to show our location map in context.

Another project that I dearly hope will soon be wrapped up is a very cool tool for creating quizzes and presentations, primarily for use within the context of our Learning Online site. The tool is complex and there have been problems with its development and implementation but you can see examples of what it has been used to create in the Black History section of that site. Teachers can use these interactives in a classroom situation on interactive whiteboards or regular desktop computers. The application is being developed by a Brighton company and my role has been as an advisor and in integrating it technically with our systems, as well as testing the darned thing when a fix is applied.

Mariruth Leftwich, who is overseeing the latter project, is also responsible for the recently launched poster maker, built by e-bloc to Mariruth’s brief. We can load up a bunch of images on a theme and visitors can put together a poster with them, print or submit it and finally see it in a gallery. It’s pretty cool. Again, my role was as advisor and in ensuring that it would work with our core systems and that we’d be able to live with it long-term without needing too much support. Mariruth is leading on another project I’m advising on too, which is a site for key Stage 1 kids about the Great Fire of London. This is a partnership with several other London organisations, which will fill a gaping hole of decent online resources on that subject for that age group.

The question of long-term sustainability is a key one to me, and has become so in large part because of another “project” on which I am working, namely my PhD on sustaining digital resources in museums. The museum gives me a great deal of support in this, and hopefully I am starting to return something to them as I develop as a practitioner. It’s not just me, I think that we’re all thinking a little more explicitly about the question of longevity now, bringing to the surface something that was always at least in the back of our minds. There’s a whole host of things going on in the MoL Group that tie into the question of digital sustainability: the projects I’ve mentioned and many others (not least Mia’s social software, including this blog); a review of records management; the evolving plans for IT in the Capital City Galleries that will open a couple of years hence.

Well, I’ve gone on enough for now. I should have said less about maps and more about Capital City but this is a week late already and I’d better get it online. It’ll wait till next time. Bye.

Fotowoosh breaks cover

IIRC, you can download the necessary code to run Fotowoosh or whatever they originally called it yourself, but who wants to do that? Now (I discover, thanks to OUseful) they have made it available through Facebook. I hope I'm not breaking any rules that I've not read about by embedding here an instance that I've made through that site. Here you go, anyway, a view of the Getty Museum with LA in the background. It's evidently not the perfect sort of photo for the job but you get the idea.

RWW's interview with Dr. Paul Miller

A good read. Talis seem a really interesting company (which I'd already gathered from what Keith Alexander was saying earlier this year). Which reminds me, I must find the time to pursue that lead properly... Too much on, dammit! Anyway, RWW are well into SW at the moment, likewise TechCrunch, and they're right, there is a lot going on and some really exciting convergence with social software. Can we keep up?

Semantic Technology In Action: An Interview with Dr. Paul Miller

OpenID in HE

eFoundations reports on last week's OpenID meeting which looked at the situation from the perspective of higher education (in part).

Brooklyn Museum and social software

Nins Simon has posted this interview with Shelley Bernstein on Museum 2.0. Interesting from the POV of museums experimenting with various current social software gubbins, and how they feel this fits in with their mission.

Odds and sods 3

Well what with disease, conferences and various other out-of-office experiences I have had very little time at my desk to do real work, let alone meta-work like this and I have some catching up to do. However real work must come first, so this will have to be super-skimpy.

First, Ross's new book should be out any day now. I can't wait to read it. I just flicked through the proof in his office and know it's going to be a great and stimulating read.

We've opened a new gallery at MiD , "London, sugar and slavery", which I can't wait to see tomorrow when I'm at Museum in Docklands for the MCG meeting. My part has been to do with the ArcIMS mapping application, which isn't yet on the web but is in the gallery. Let's be honest, ArcIMS is a pain in the rear and you need a pretty good reason to justify the effort involved if you choose to use this over one of the free mapping apps, although of course they also have their learning curves and limitations. What they don't have is installation issues; OTOH you can't install them, and hence your client machines must have web access enabled. As our experiences this summer with web access on gallery machines was so dreadful we're keen to avoid this, although from past experience we know it's perfectly possible to do this safely and effectively - we just seem to be lacking the skills at present. On the subject of installation, I should say that the current version of IMS is actually pretty straightforward, perhaps disturbingly so - I think I was looking for all sorts of post-installation configuration changes to do that didn't actually need doing. But there are always complicating factors, and it's still taken me the best part of 3 days to get the thing working on our internal CMS server.
Anyway, our app uses ArcSDE, a new departure for us, and Pete's written some cool queries to make this a little more interactive than some of our previous efforts. We've got some bugs to iron out, to do with our merging and over-riding tool behaviours, but it's reasonably presentable.

Next up, Mia. Our social software torch-bearer has been working hard in all sorts of directions trying to get us off the ground with blogs, forums etc., not to mention organising our chaotic efforts with Flickr and the like. She's now got us going here: http://mymuseumoflondon.org.uk/. BIG congratulations, we're in the 21st century! Now we need to work out our management practices, encourage authors, look at how to embed and integrate this with our main sites, and see how it takes off.

I guess I should mention Jonty, but I'd rather not. If you insist you can check him out on our sites or on YouTube.

CHArt: the conference last week deserves a post of its own. For now, I'd like to give honorary mentions to J Milo Taylor, Tara Chittenden, Jon Pratty and Bridget Mackenzie, Tanya Szrajber, and Douglas Dodds, whose presentations I particularly enjoyed.

EDLNet. Did I write about this yet? I hope so. Watching over the mail list and looking at some discussion documents (so far simply lurking) I have some hope that the project will place the right emphasis on function over interface, given limited resources. Jon and Bridget talked about "Your Paintings" at CHArt, so far just a proposal but one that I would think could be designed to mesh well with EDL. I hope to talk more to Jon about this tomorrow.

Martin Bazley and Nick Poole are keen to get together with some of the people involved in IT in the London Hub so we've set up a meeting at MoL next week to see what we can draw out, initially to help them with a strategy for the SE Hub. I'm interested to see what they come out with for a strategy there. I also know that Martin wants to pursue some of the issues around stats that Dylan and I were talking about before, since he has got the job of writing a report for the London Hub on the question. I'm just a half-blind opinionated fool on the subject but if I have anything useful to offer I'll try.

Kurt Stuchell has put together a widget bringing together podcasts and blogs from/about museums worldwide. I reserve judgement on the thing itself, which I'm sure will be of use to some, possibly me included. The main point is that it's nice to see this happening in museums, full-stop. There must be lots of other imaginative ideas out there for what museum material can be widgetised. The Rijksmuseem's widget is perhaps obvious but effective nevertheless and perhaps we should do something a little similar: push object data out in an RSS feed to be consumed via a client-side JS snippet, perhaps. As I say, not that imaginative but worth a crack.

Micah Blue Smaldone. Do yourself a favour and get some. He may not be your cup of tea but you need to find out for yourself. The more I hear the more I'm ensnared. Follow far enough from the link above and you'll reach this where you can hear some spell-binding live renditions.

What else is going on...APIs again

There's a lot to say about EDL since I attended the meeting of Working Group 3 (which concerns users) last week. I haven't the time right now, but I should note that (a) I was quite taken aback by the way that my arguments for an API ended up sending the whole meeting onto a different track, about which I felt a little guilty, and (b) I am now clearer that an API is the essential thing, but that a portal site really does have a place, and that an API can help ensure that its potential is realised by opening up the possibility that third parties can build widgets etc to work within it, or integrate their applications with the portal. But a lot of the talk was like juggling jelly: so many things are not firrnly established, or at least weren't clear in that context (like data structure, or the location of the content vs the catalogue metadata), and it makes it rather tricky to keep all these unknowns in the air and have a sensible conversation. But it keeps me coming back to the point that concentrating on the functionality, not the user interface to it, is where EDL should expend its efforts.

 

On a very related tip, Andy Powell on eFoundations today mentions the "repository as platform" idea (http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2007/10/repository-as-p.html), in respect of recent ePrints developments. I haven't read a digested this lot properly yet but it's pretty much where I think EDL needs to be at too.

 

Finally, Google's latest endeavour finds them offering as a standard an API model for social networks, OpenSocial. Along with OpenID, we may find that this takes us a good way to standardisation. The next thing is for maps, perhaps. At present you can use libraries to negotiate the different APIs for the various providers, but a standard API would be better. More sustainability for all!