darcusblog

I’ve been following the discussion about extensible metadata in HTML 5 from afar, not really having the time to get any more involved. The bottom line for one of the primary use cases I provided was, can I represent what’s embedded in my home profile and publications pages? This isn’t just about data relating to me and my pages, but linking them to other data, elsewhere. For example, I will be changing my subject pages to link to the new Library of Congress id service, such as subject headings. Can I do that in HTML 5?

The group (well, let’s be real, Ian Hickson) released a first draft of a proposal today. I haven’t really looked at it carefully and thought through all the implications, but my initial take is it seems an attempt to split the difference between RDFa and microformats. So one can encode metadata properties, for example, using either plain string tokens (the microformat way), or using URIs (the RDF/RDFa way). I might well prefer to use RDFa, but perhaps with some tweaks, the microdata proposal might well allow the most important pieces of RDFa. At least I hope so.

But there are places where there seem some arbitrary restrictions. For example, I see no way to define a microdata item’s identity as anything but local to the document (the spec only allowing local IDs; not global URIs). If I have that right, that’s a critical and arbitrary flaw, and needs to be changed.

And, as Shelley Powers points out, it’s really, really strange and arbitrary to allow one to use a “reversed DNS identifier” as a global identifier alternative to an HTTP URI, but not allow other prefix mechanisms (such as CURIEs), particularly when the common argument against namespace prefixes in general and CURIEs in particular if they are too difficult. I’d rather see all three, or only URIs.

Finally, the “item” attribute is odd. It’s effectively equivalent to the RDFa typeOf attribute, in that it allows one to type the related properties. But then a) why not just call it typeOf?, and b) related to my point about identity above, the notion of an “item” is quite ambiguous, and seems to confuse identity and type.

I’d really love if the relevant open-minded experts in this space could find time to have a f2f meeting over this proposal, and iron out these sorts of details.

I recently learned that, as part of their lawsuit regarding Zotero, Thomson Reuters has successfully forced GMU to release the contact information for all 286 people who have SVN and Trac accounts at zotero.org.

I don’t personally care, because I’m sure these lawyers already know my name. But this seems nothing more than yet more thuggish intimidation.

It’s hard not to notice MIcrosoft’s new add push against Apple. The punchline is that buying a “PC” (the ads never mention Windows, oddly enough) tends to give a consumer more choice and better value compared to buying a Mac.

As a longtime Mac user, I tend to agree. Except the logical extension to the argument is to point out that Windows isn’t the only non-Mac OS in town, and that Linux-based alternatives such as Ubuntu offer the same value proposition: more choice and better value (not to mention “free’).

So it’s with that thinking in mind that I finally bought a new laptop after casually looking around for something to replace my aging Mac iBook G4. I wanted a machine with the following characteristics:

1. good battery life
2. good screen
3. excellent keyboard (since I intend to use it for writing and notetaking)
4. light weight
5. rugged
6. inexpensive
7. decent performance

I seriously considered one of the recent larger netbooks, but ultimately went with a Thinkpad X61s. I got a refurbished model for less than $700 direct from Lenovo, complete with 3 GB of RAM, a 9-cell battery, and a free bag.

Is it quite as elegant from a design standpoint as a Mac alternative? Not in the least! But despite being last year’s model, it’s really fast, it’s really light, it has very good battery life (haven’t really tested it, but I expect to get over four hours of real use out of it), and a great keyboard and screen. It’s also really nicely built.

So what about the OS? Some version of Linux was clear (I did boot into Vista at first in order to prepare the USB boot image, but subsequently wiped it out completely; good riddance), but which one? I started out with Arch, but gave up when I couldn’t establish a network connection to finish the basic installation. I then moved over to Ubuntu, which installed and configured without a hitch; everything simply worked: wireless network connection, suspend and wake, etc., etc.

But one thing I really like about Mac OS X is the design aesthetics. There’s something nice about working in a beautiful environment. Sadly, Ubuntu is not that for me. But xubuntu, on the other hand, is right up my alley! So a quick addition of the xubuntu packages and I’m happy.

The only thing that makes me a little hesitant to do a wholesale switch off of the Mac OS is it’s superior support in the image editing arena. If and when GIMP catches up to the ease-of-use and resolution-independent editing of Lightroom and Aperture, that will probably be it for me.

I’ve had an idea for awhile that it’d be a really useful thing to have metadata about periodicals (journals, newspapers, etc.) available as linked data. After some informal chats about this with some people at Talis (and Ed Summers), Chris Clarke decided to throw out a somewhat more concrete idea for wider input.

The most important initial step is to find sources of good, clean data that can be issued under an open data license. If you have any ideas or would like to help, please followup on the Bibliographic Ontology Specification Group.

Kris Oldes posted a link to an interesting article about an effort to use a multi-user WordPress-based blog with social networking functionality (BuddyPress) to integrate four different courses around a broader theme. This is the sort of thing that’s impossible to do in any LMS that I know of, but which has the potential to be a really valuable experience for students and faculty alike. Moreover, the intellectual work embodied in the course can endure beyond the semester, and the small group of students involved.

I’m interested in doing something like this (though more modest; only one class) next term for my Global Change course. At some point, though, I need to talk to people about the technical (how best to do it; Elgg vs. BuddyPress) and privacy issues involved in such an effort. I really like the idea of doing public blogging and comments, for example, but am not sure how to deal with privacy issues around that

A public answer to a question about my experience with/thoughts on Sakai or Moodle …

I have not used Moodle or Sakai except for playing around with demos, which does not really qualify me as an expert. But that aside, in each case I came away feeling something like Michael Feldstein; that all LMS’s are pretty good/bad. On my superficial look, however, I would give the nod to Moodle for three reasons:

1. Usability: notwithstanding absolutely atrocious default design aesthetics, Moodle seems to be pretty clean and intuitive.
2. Hackability: Moodle is built on PHP, not Java. While I really dislike PHP, there’s no denying that it’s widely used, and easy to find people that can work on it.
3. Community: there seem more people contributing to Moodle’s development; I suspect this goes back to my ‘hackability’ point. OTOH, when I read comments like this from people I respect, I have to wonder about Sakai. Projects without strong communities tend not to do well.

So I’m not exactly supremely impressed with Moodle or Sakai, though I think either are at least as good as Blackboard.

In my ideal world, however, I’d really like a seamless melding of the traditional course-centric LMS, with the more free-flowing learner-centric model enabled by social networking applications like Elgg. This is the vision behind the in-progress Sakai 3 effort (try the demo; promising, but not as nice as Elgg). It is also surely what will be at the core of the nascent Pinax-LMS effort (Pinax is a new generic social networking and site development framework, so the LMS features would just be added as modular applications). I would expect that the best way to achieve that now is some sort of integration of Elgg and Moodle, though I am unsure of how seamless that integration can be technically.

Anyone with more direct experience with any of this have feedback?

So Jonathan Rothkind picked up the same link that I saw: a fantastically cool, potentially very useful, set of RDF triples that describes a certain widely used library classification scheme which here I will not name because its copyright-holder (the OCLC) has a rather tainted history of aggressively guarding their turf.

What’s cool about this effort is not just the data (and as Ross notes in a comment, it really is very cool), but how it was constructed. As I note in a comment:

If you look at the code, it constructs the RDF from publicly available data: wikipedia.

Jonathan and Ross also note the irony here that all of this interesting and useful work is being done by people from outside the world of formal library committees and such. Ross:

Ed is singlehandedly dragging libraries into the linked data cloud. And it’s all pretty much under the radar and totally outside of any library knowledge. It will be interesting to see how the library world deals with the fact that, despite their person-decades of committees to deal with modernizing library data, the entire outside world will already have been working with it for almost a year.

The real question is, what next? As I also note:

While I don’t doubt the OCLC may well try to get it taken down given their past behavior (come on people; get with the 21st century), would they really have a legal to stand on?

If they do, then they probably ought to go after Wikipedia too. I dare them to do that.

So my public challenge to the OCLC:

Don’t be small-minded here. Recognize efforts like these for what they are: useful and productive enhancements to library data that can be of broad benefit to OCLC members.

If, on the other hand, you cannot yet wrap your arms around the inevitability of this open web of knowledge, then I dare you: send a cease and desist to Wikipedia.

As for me, I’m really interested in starting to link together all this stuff: this new Decimalised Database of Concepts, Ed Summer’s similar effort with the Library of Congress subject headings (which I understand will be coming back soon at loc.gov), the Open Library’s serving up of RDF for all their data, and maybe convincing Zotero to tie in their data as well.

You can see my own small effort at my new site I’ve been slowing working on. Why, after all, should I, as an academic author, leave it up to libraries and publishers alone to hold data about me and my work?

So Jeni Tennison (who once very graciously helped me out awhile back on the XSLT list with trying to wrap my mind around XSLT 2), describes a very intriguing demo of integrating RDFa into web pages that could point to some interesting possibilities for scholarly publishing. So when you load the page, you see this:

So what’s going on here? A JQuery-based plug-in is extracting RDF triples from the page, and displaying that information in the panels on the left. That’s cool enough, but consider what happens if you add a note at the bottom of the page that “Erasmus Darwin was Robert Darwin’s father.” You get this confirmation:

So there’s some natural language parsing going on here that converts that into additional triples. These triples then get added to the human-facing display.

Hmm .. I might have to experiment with this when I get some time.

In other RDFa-related news, how cool is it that the new recovery.gov site makes use of RDFa (via John Breslin), or that slideshare does as well (see Ed’s post)?

Martin Fenner discusses issues related to a recent post of mine, and concludes, first:

Both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice should open up their citation APIs to third-party tools. This would create better citation tools, allows the easier exchange of documents between authors (journal submissions), and would it make easier for smaller tools such as Papers to integrate with word processors (a workaround is described here).

I guess it depends on exactly how the APIs work. My view is that they probably need to allow users to easily connect different kinds of data stores, which then send back the relevant metadata, which gets embedded in the document in a standard way. Citation processing, then, probably needs to happen closer to the document than the bibliographic plug-in (or whatever).

The citation processing also likely needs to be pluggable. Microsoft’s XSLT-based solution, for example, is not very good. OTOH, if they were, say, to write a fast C# or F#-based CSL processor that fully supported the spec, that problem would go away.

Second, he warns:

If they wait too long, we will probably see the online word processors such as Google Docs, Zoho Writer start adding an API for citations and bibliographies and all of the sudden become very serious alternatives for writing scientific papers.

I’m not holding my breath, given all the other limitations and problems I see in Google Docs. And if they add it, they still need to consider the document interoperability concerns I note above and in the earlier post. But coupling APIs with standardized and embedded document metadata can help solve all of these problems.

With the start of the PInax-LMS effort, a real world use case …

I teach a course that feels constrained by the traditional LMS. It is a course called Global Change (current, not-so-great, syllabus is here), and it explores the breadth of geography through analysis of contemporary issues: climate change, urbanization, water, etc. For that reason, it is team-taught.

So without going through the whole history and background behind where I want to go (partly covered here), let’s just imagine this:

On the first day of class, we collect information of student interests and experience. We use that information to divide up students into various topical groups. Those groups will be responsible for maintaining bookmark links and notes related to online readings they gather, and will work on various projects that consolidate their knowledge of their area of focus. Those groups will also be responsible for coordinating outside class work they will present in class.

In addition, individual students will be responsible for blogging reactions to course discussions and readings; probably on a weekly basis. Students are also encouraged to comment on each other’s work.

So, from my perspective, I need to be to able to easily have access to all that’s going on in the different groups. I’d like to also be able to easily bring in bookmarks and blog entries I create that may exist outside of the course proper. I also need to be able to maintain grades for the students.

From a student perspective, the sort of work and collaboration here needs to be as seamless as possible. Ideally, when they login, they can see what’s going with a network which certainly includes the class, but may not be limited to it. This might look something like Elgg’s dashboard.

At the same time, students need to be able to understand what is course-specific; so, integration, but also distinction. They should, for example, be able to easily see their grades for the course.