IST-Data Services Blog

The Office of the CIO and Information Services and Technology are working with the UC Berkeley community to develop a campus strategy on how to use technology to best support collaborative work on campus, now and in the future.

You have an opportunity to shape this strategy and hence the future of collaborative technology used on campus.

As we did with our findings, today we are releasing a draft of the collaborative tools strategy for review and comment.

We are distributing this strategy widely in draft form to elicit comments, feedback, and guidance from the campus and higher education communities.  We believe only through that method can we develop a strategy that will support the creation of an environment where collaboration is easy and natural. We would greatly appreciate any guidance, perspectives, corrections, or suggestions.  The development of the strategy to this point has been heavily dependent on the insight, comments and feedback we have from well over 200 people throughout the process.  Our thanks to everyone who has taken the time to participate.

It is only through further input that we will be able to refine this into a strategy that is truly useful across campus.

Review the Strategy

Strategy, Draft 2 (PDF, 11 pages)

Several of the goals in this strategy are discussed in more detail in individual “Spotlight” documents. If you have particular interest or expertise in those areas, we would also appreciate feedback on those documents.

Providing Feedback

After reviewing the draft strategy, you may comment directly below, in the comments section of this blog post.  We may include quotes from any comment posted below in the report. If you’d like to be acknowledged for any quotes from your comments, please include your name, title, and organization in your comments. If you wish to submit a comment that will not be shared beyond the project team, send it to Ian Crew at icrew@berkeley.edu.

For quite awhile now, I’ve been thinking about the value of aggregating content and information in museum collections. I think it is generally accepted now that museums and collections of many kinds need to make larger portions of their collections available online to the public, and efforts to digitize collections and webify collections data are producing wonderful results. At the same time, aside from good public relations, what’s in it for the museums and for scholarship in general? What new information or new research directions might emerge from aggregations of museum content? Not surprisingly, in natural history and biodiversity research, the power of numbers, of volume, has been recognized for a long time. Single specimens are nice as types, but in order to learn something about ecological systems and evolution, you need statistically valid numbers. In cultural heritage collections, the possibilities are less clear. Some recent work in England has been interesting though perhaps more from the perspective of studying the history of museums and even of colonialism. Museum studies are still especially interested in the individual object or the subcollection. Rather than focusing on the unique individual object or specimen, what can we learn by unlocking and aggregating content in collections? What research questions emerge? What are the limitations and the opportunities?

Here’s one idea I’ve been thinking about that would pertain to Anthropology and Archaeology collections. We could look at the combinations of material and technique across culture, time and space. We’d expect certain combinations to be visible, but I suspect we would be surprised on numerous occasions. The semantic index that supports the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology’s Delphi system could be an excellent source for this project. I might even revisit some of my dissertation materials. Yikes…

What would be problematic about such a study? Data quality within and across collections would be an important consideration. Would we know which objects were documented at a sufficient level of detail? Would we know which parts of the collection were studied more closely? Would we know which museum specialists were “good” at their jobs? Would we know which objects or collections had been reviewed by multiple museum specialists? The number of biases would be large and problematic. But hey, I’m an archaeologist by training. I’m used to studying a messy data set and making a large number of assumptions.

What kinds of things can be done to address these biases? We could select only sets of data that had been carefully studied, but that in and of itself will create bias. We could try to enrich the data ourselves, but the sheer scope of that effort is terrifying. That’s where crowd sourcing, tagging and annotation could come in. By getting our collections online and allowing other experts (including the public) to enrich our content, we can incrementally improve the quality of our information. Other projects are showing how this can be productively done. However, how much work has been done on assessing the quality of tagging and annotation in a setting such as this? Interestingly the CalPhotos system has been allowing reviewers to annotate and re-identify species for many years. CalPhotos then might provide a good context in which to study the results of annotation and review.

U. of Illinois is getting a chunk of NDIPP money to develop their BECHAMEL framework that identifies semantic vulnerabilities in metadata, as a means of supporting digital preservation services. What does this mean? Here’s a good quote:

“For example, the meta-data for a digital file—a photo or map or document—might include a field called “creator.” Putting a name like “John Smith” in this field might seem sufficient, but does that really identify the creator of the information? In 50 years will a future researcher be able to pinpoint which of the world’s many “John Smiths” created the information?

BECHAMEL flags risks like that one, or such as numerical values that aren’t accompanied by error ranges.”

There’s only a little more info in the article, but there are some papers on a research page at the uiuc site. David Dubin’s recent paper provides some better details. He describes their earlier BECHAMEL work as “a research environment for proposing and testing theories of the meaning of markup.” It is a Prolog app connected to an RDF store (Kowari, losing favor to Mulgara).

It sounds like some of what they’re doing is to recognize that lots of so-called structured markup (including, im my opinion, lots of RDF) is actually semantic-free and amounts to free text annotations with some weak hints (e.g., “dc:creator”). The question is whether the project will yield useful tools or more guidelines that are unrealistic in deployment. Their near term goal seems to be the conversion of entity references in free text (e.g., in  a dc:creator element) to RDF references to vocabularies. Is a reference to the concept of “San Francisco, CA” in a gazetteer more useful than the same free text? Probably. But will an RDF pointer to a FOAF description of “John Smith”be much more useful than the free text? I doubt it.  Nevertheless, a project worth watching.

On August 1, Project Bamboo launched a wiki-centric community design effort open to all comers. The structured activities laid out by Bamboo’s program staff aim to organize thousands of ideas and suggestions offered at four similarly-organized workshops in the months following the inception of Bamboo’s planning phase. Community design participants will synthesize the “Workshop One” artifacts (all available for review on the wiki) into a thematic overview of Arts and Humanities scholarship and a set of proposed directions for the Mellon-funded cyberinfrastructure project. Initial suggestions regarding consortial models appropriate to a Project Bamboo implementation phase are also being solicited on the project’s Planning Wiki, http://wikibamboo.uchicago.edu/display/BPUB/Home. The wiki, built on Atlassian’s Confluence platform, is viewable to the world, and anyone who wishes can create an account in order to join the community design effort. Participation in the wiki-focused work is one of four prerequisites for participation in the next face-to-face Project Bamboo workshop, currently scheduled for the week of October 13 on the west coast of the United States (more info at http://projectbamboo.org/join-us).