I don’t yet know if the bid is going to be successful but obviously I’ve got my fingers crossed, meanwhile I feel it’s worth getting some of my plans and ideas out there for comment.

The project is called Artnotes, the inspiration for it coming from visiting an artist friend of mine who showed me her notebook. It was full of doodles, scribblings, postcards and photographs of artwork she had seen, taped-up pages of things she didn’t want to destroy so much as save for another time. It was a beautiful and very tactile thing full of memories and influences.

It got me thinking, could you do something like that digitally? Could you use mobile devices (such as the iPhone – which I’ve been getting into coding for on my own back) to let artists and others catalogue and document their visual noodlings and found objects in a way that didn’t loose too much of the lovelyness of a real book but enabled all sorts of modern webby things – like being able to search through public image repositories and museum catalogues for images, like being able to share the book back out to the world. So I did a bit of reading around the subject, worried greatly about rights issues and risks, talked to a few other people round the community, panicked at the last minute and got a bid together.

If you’re interested, take a look at the BID DOCUMENT (reproduced here sans coversheets and budget) which explains the scope of the project and includes a bunch more mockups and planned features.

The trouble with ideas is that they tend to spawn more ideas – much of the work that went into the bid was in trying to cut it down and keep it limited to the core of what I thought the tool needed to be effective. Hopefully I’ve done this in the bid while not being too conservative.

One of the “cool” ideas that didn’t make it and is probably a separate project in its own right was to provide some kind of image recognition service hooking into the catalogues of major galleries. Along the lines of being able to walk into a gallery, snap a picture of an exhibit and be delivered a link to the entry in the museum’s (publicly available and machine readable obviously) catalogue. I’ve been following the work of the Museum API efforts set up by Mike Ellis and contributed to by many others which seems to be making some inroads into getting the necessary underpinnings of this in place. Of particular interest are technologies such as hoard.it which already does data aggregation across a number of museums, the exemplary Brooklyn Museum API which lets you dig deep into their collection, and on the image recognition side Tineye which does a very similar reverse-image-search on the web at large.

The service which for the sake of convenience I’ve dubbed GIRDS (Gallery Image Recognition and Discovery Service) at first cut be a web-api (and probably a very lightweight browser-based interface) and would work a little like this:

girds diagram

Better names for it are obviously most welcome!

If anything the GIRDS service would fit more in the category of mad than Artnotes and perhaps would have been a better one to submit for the call. However to my mind getting the nice user interface through the iPhone done first and then adding the image recognition capabilities through GIRDS later seems the right way to go about it. Unless of course anyone else fancies pitching in with either project (they are both going to have to be open source after all).

Irrespective of whether my bid for Artnotes is successful I’m feeling very strongly that this work is taking me back to my roots – dreaming up nice workable tools which can potentially be of some benefit to learners, teachers, researchers or the wider community.

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Funkadelic's classic album: Maggotbrain

Emboldened and inspired by this I re-purposed many of the things I talked about (and even shamelessly stole the session title from the previous year: Mashup Market) to run a session at Manchester’s Social Media Cafe last Wednesday night. The #smc_mcr as it likes to be known for short is Manchester’s branch of the Tuttle Club, a mixture of media types, bloggers and technology enthusiasts and a fair few ed-tech folk with things to say and ideas to germinate. The ed-tech force was in fact particularly strong this time with David Bird from MMU also running a session on social media in education in parallel with me.

While we may not have got quite as baroque as one would have at CETIS it was excellent to be sharing the wealth with a wider community.

Walk this way the full writeup of the SMC_MCR Mashup Market on Samscam

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The scenario is as follows: I have an OpenLDAP directory with several hundred users in it. For the records I’m using the normal inetorgperson schema.

I want to add an openid attribute for my users (in a responsible and proper way) so that I can associate users with multiple arbitrary external OpenID providers.

All I’ve managed to find on the net about this was a blog at oracle discussing how this is an issue and how it would be a really good idea to do something about it.

I’m all at sea – how on earth am I supposed to do this? Do I create a new subclass of inetorgperson and migrate everyone on to it? Can I do this without breaking everything? Do I hackily use the “labeledURI” attribute and just shove things in there?

Come on lazyweb!

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Before we go on I’ve written an FAQ on the PROD wiki which you are all advised to have a look at…

The PROD Vision:

PROD is a dynamic directory of JISC projects providing an easy-to-use way to locate projects and get a view of their current status and activity. Through integration with the Standards Catalogue and e-Framework it will also provide an overview of interoperability standards used by projects and their rationale for doing so.

PROD draws information on projects from a number of sources including the JISC website, individual project sites and project RSS feeds. We have also developed import mechanisms for legacy spreadsheets and catalogues.

The data in prod can be exported in standard formats (including RSS, ATOM, DOAP and CSV) to facilitate re-use in other catalogues.

Progress report

People oriented activities:

We are currently looking at how this data can facilitate integration with efforts at OSSwatch and with the JISC PIM system. We had a meeting in London to discuss how we can leverage doap across the different systems to exchange data and avoid duplication of effort. Present included Ross Gardler from OSSwatch with SIMAL, Yvonne Howard and Dave Millard from Southampton with their e-Framework Knowledge Base, Neil Chue Hong from OMII in Edinburgh, and Simone Spencer who is heading up the JISC PIM. It was pretty satisfying to feel we all agreed that with a bit of work on our respective DOAP implementations we would be able share core project data and thus concentrate on the more individual value-adding aspects of our projects.

Here in Bolton we are holding a workshop tomorrow on how we plan to use PROD internally to help us with the process of ”technical audits” of projects and how we can go about integrating PROD with the other JISC CETIS web offerings.

Ongoing development work:

DOAP, RSS & CSV export for collections of projects through the browse/query interface. We’re also thinking about making widgets to embed this in other places (like the main JISC CETIS site – or your own personal iGoogle or Dashboard if you like!)

OpenID associations for existing users – this is part of the general OpenID implementation across JISC CETIS sites. Currently it works to enable commenting.

Selectively elevated privileges for project staff and programme managers. This will happen automatically through existing data where available, we will also put in a “claim” button to users to assert a relationship to a project where a connection is not already held.

General review of data held, sanitisation particularly around people, organisations, themes. This will include a manual trawl for project sites, feeds etc where they haven’t been auto-discovered. Administrative interfaces may also see some improvement.

Integration with Standards Catalogue. Users (CETIS staff, projects, etc) will be able to associate projects with relevant standards and comment on the rationale for their use or implementation. The standards catalogue bit is working fine now.

Integration with main JISC CETIS sites – highlighting relevant projects within domain pages and other CETIS output (blogs, e-learning focus etc). This activity will be of particular relevance to ongoing comms work including the “technology & standards briefings”.

Highlights of completed development work to date:
(Roughly in order of implementation)

• Core data model
• Core interface
• Old directory import
• JISC spreadsheet import
• DOAP export
• Search interface
• Funding status indicators
• AJAX editing (administrators only at the moment)
• JISC web-scraper
• RSS feed-scraper
• Data-sanitisation utilities (for admins)
• Activity indicators
• Comments
• Browse & querying interface
• OpenID authentication (for commenting)

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