IST-Data Services Blog

As reported on the UCB home page, the Keck Hydrowatch sensor network project was featured on the July 22nd edition of KQED’s science program, Quest. Collin Bode, a programmer who occasionally sits in the BSCIT office when he’s not working in the field stations, makes a few appearances in the video. Collin is working with Ginger Ogle and John Deck to develop a system for the retrieval, storage, and display of automated time-series data from the sensor network deployed for Keck Hydrowatch. They are implementing a data architecture designed by CUAHSI called the “Observations Data Model” (moving it to the open source MySQL database and extending it to handle logging and other capabilities) and developing the necessary scripts and libraries to input data from multiple sources. In the second phase of the project, a web-based system for viewing and downloading the sensor network data will be developed.

Nina Simon (who writes the Museum 2.0 blog) recently wrote about her impressions of the IMLS Meeting on Museums and Libraries in the 21st Century that took place last week. The meeting was preliminary to a large report that NAS is commissioning on the subject.  It is an interesting survey of the state of attitudes in the industry, from the perspective of someone who wants to see things move forward.

She includes notes on the six topics that the workshop discussed:

1. How do you plan for the future?
2. What are the essential differences and similarities between libraries and museums?
3. How do you measure and articulate the value of museums and libraries?
4. How can our expertise and assets be applied towards new ends?
5. Who owns the stuff? Who controls the experience?
6. How do we reimagine physical space and assets?

Her general observations:

1. Some leaders are more radical than I hoped, and these people have a hard time advocating for change when their accountability is to those who have not changed.
2. Some leaders are more conservative than I feared, and these people are alternately smug and desperate about maintaining their power.
3. Meetings about the future end up being about the present. We were much less creative and forward-thinking than we could have been. Dream big, share it in the comments, and help this be a more productive study.

Read the post - it is interesting, and a good introduction to that blog, if you do not know it already.

I just came across the http://scholarz.net/ project that wants to be a destination for scholars doing research, collecting notes on projects, sharing information about sources, projects, etc. At this point, it seems to combine basic Wiki functionality (including tagging) with a basic social network app (a la Facebook). Some pieces are kind of nice, but it lacks the workflow integration of Zotero, of which I am very fond. And Zotero is soon to release a more community oriented version of their tools, which will make it much more powerful.  Still, Scholarz.net looks like a project to watch.

The folks at Xerox put out a nice little summary of Semantic Tech and what it offers to the enterprise. It reads a lot like some other recent posts on the bottom up vs. top down approaches (a characterization that I am not really comfortable with). It is also slightly behind the times, given the MSFT acquisition of PowerSet. Nevertheless, worth checking out to get a sense of what a big Document Engineering/Processing company sees in this field.