Monthly Archives: January 2007

Same Cubicle, New Title, New Challenges

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Here is a bit of personal news to report. Tom Sanville, OhioLINK’s executive director, announced today that I am changing roles at OhioLINK. Here is what he said:

I’m pleased to announce that Peter Murray will assume the position of Assistant Director, New Service Development effective immediately. In light of the formation of 13 task forces to pursue investigation of our strategic priorities it is critical that we have a skilled OhioLINK staff member with primary responsibility to analyze, recommend, and coordinate plans for the introduction and use of new information technologies and services by OhioLINK and its member institutions. Through Peter’s tracking and contact with information and library hardware, software, and database vendors, he will provide leadership and support to the OhioLINK staff, committees, task forces and other planning groups.

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Presentation Summary: “Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project”

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Richard Rodgers presented this talk based on the work of he and MacKenzie Smith in the Digital Library Research Group at MIT. The original abstract of the presentation was:

Many questions are raised as previously unreachable digital content is found in and among new repositories–is each repository an island or a separately searchable resource? SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in Unlike Environments) has developed an extensive ‘tool chain’ for gathering and manipulating data assets. Richard Rodgers and MacKenzie Smith, MIT, will demonstrate how tools developed by the SIMILE project can be used as powerful instruments for the federation, discovery, exploration, and curation of metadata.

This is a preview of Presentation Summary: “Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project”. Read the full post (521 words, 2:05 minutes estimated reading time)

Presentation Summary: “MPTStore: Implementing a fast, scalable, and stable RDBMS-backed triplestore for Fedora and the NSDL”

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Chris Wilper gave this presentation on behalf of the work that he and Aaron Birkland did to improve the performance of the Fedora Resource Index.

Version 2.0 of the Fedora digital object repository software added a feature called the Resource Index (RI). Based on Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples, the RI provided quick access to relationships between objects as well as to the descriptive elements of the object itself. After about two years of use using the Kowari software, the RI has pointed to a number of challenges for “triplestores”: scalability (few triplestores are designed for greater than 100 million triples); performance; and stability (frequent “rebuilds”).

This is a preview of Presentation Summary: “MPTStore: Implementing a fast, scalable, and stable RDBMS-backed triplestore for Fedora and the NSDL”. Read the full post (596 words, 2:23 minutes estimated reading time)

Open Source for Open Repositories — New Models for Software Development and Sustainability

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This is a summary of a presentation by James L. Hilton, Vice President and CIO of University of Virginia, at the opening keynote session of Open Repositories 2007. I tried to capture the esessence of his presentation, and omissions, contradictions, and inaccuracies in this summary are likely mine and not that of the presenter.

Setting the stage

This is a moment in which institutions may be willing to invest in open source development in a systematic way (as opposed to what could currently be characterized as an ad hoc fashion) driven by these factors:

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George Siemens to Provide Keynote at ODCE Conference on March 5th

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Join George Siemens — a leading theorist on the implications of technology and societal trends on learning and knowledge — to examine how changing learner expectations impact educators, institutions and the process of learning. Siemens will present the opening keynote address, Connectivism: Content, Connections, Conversation, on Monday, March 5, 9:45-10:45 a.m. at the Ohio Digital Commons for Education (ODCE) Conference in Columbus, Ohio. Siemens will also do a wrap-up session on March 6 to close the conference. Register by February 8 and receive a $50 discount off the regular conference rates.

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A Vision for FEDORA’s Future, an Implementation Plan to Get There, and a Project Update

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This morning, Sandy Payette of Cornell University and FEDORA project co-director, gave an update on the FEDORA project including a statement of a vision for FEDORA’s future, information about the emerging FEDORA Commons non-profit, and a status report/roadmap for the software itself. Below is a summary based on my notes of Sandy’s comments and slide content.

Vision for FEDORA’s Future

From her perspective, Sandy sees many kinds of projects using FEDORA, and she sees them fall into these general categories: Scholarly Workbenches — capturing, managing and publishing the process of scholarship; Linking Data and Publications — complex objects built up of relationships with different types of internal and external objects; Reviews and Annotations of Objects — blogs and wikis on top of information spaces; collaborations surrounding a repository object; and Museum Exhibits with K-12 Lesson Plans.

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Open Repositories Presentation: Building an IR Interface Using EJB3 and JBoss Seam

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Below is the outline of the Ohio DRC presentation from today’s FEDORA session at Open Repositories conference. Comments welcome!

This is a preview of Open Repositories Presentation: Building an IR Interface Using EJB3 and JBoss Seam. Read the full post (90 words, 22 seconds estimated reading time)

Blogging About Open Repositories 2007? Use the ‘icor2007′ tag.

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Are you blogging the Open Repositories conference in San Antonio this week? Are you posting pictures to Flickr?

if so, may I suggest using the ‘icor2007′ tag when posting your content. When doing so, the HitchHikr service will aggregate content from Technorati and Flickr based on that tag. (Why not simply “or2007″? — it looks like that tag picks up extra cruft in a non LATIN-1 character set.)

The text was modified to remove a link to http://hitchhikr.com/index.php?conf_id=75 on August 27th, 2012.

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Scripted Searches for Java Code in Popular Source Code Search Engines

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Sometimes the best way to solve a programming problem is to see how others have done the same thing. When that happens, having immediate access to the various search engines helps get you back on track quickly. Here are OpenSearch plug-ins (suitable for Firefox and MSIE7) that will search the Java code in five of the more popular source code search engines.

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Getting Around Drupal’s Prohibition of @ Characters in User Ids

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A while back we created an LDAP directory to consolidate account information for various back-room services, and when we created it we decided to use the individual’s e-mail address as the account identifier (uid in LDAP-speak). It seemed like the logical thing to do — it is something that the user knows and it is a cheap and easy way to assume that the account identifiers will be unique. This is not uncommon for many internet services, of course.

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