Amy Guy

25th - 31st March

A busy, non-PhD-related activities filled week.

Social computing seminar on Friday. 

18th - 24th March

I went to Belgrade for Resonate.io, and wrote about it here.

Experimenting with running this entire website from the age-old Blogger backend.

Beating it gradually into submission with help from Temple of Doom stripped down Blogger template, and some pro tips from Blogger Sentral.

Because, why not?  I have a lot of stuff on this blog.  Time to organise it how I want.

11th - 17th March

Had a sensible conversation with Ewan about when I should stop reading and start actually producing something.  The answer is sooner, rather than later.  I'm aiming for a literature review that is "neither a first nor final" draft by the end of April.  I started outlining topics that should be in it, and began faffing about with LaTeX (and Markdown and Pandoc).

Then started panicking and promptly quadrupled the amount of things on my to-read list.  Oops.  I blame Matthew Rowe.

I finished reading his first year review (2007) as well as his paper about Meervisage: Community-based Annotation for the Semantic Web.  I compiled a massive list of more things to read from his lit. review, and then looked up what he's been doing since then.  A lot.  Mostly relevant.  At the very least, interesting.  Damn.  Don't worry, I'll prioritise that list, and don't aim to finish it before I start writing.

Going to Serbia on Tuesday, for Resonate.io.  What should I bring back?

• Information about creative processes for digital artworks.
• Anything to do with open data or decentralized social networking movements.
• Potential case studies or people to work with.
• ... to be discovered?

Rowe, M. (2007)  Meervisage - A Community Based Annotation Tool. ‘Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0’ Conference at the University of York 5-6th September, 2007.

The 23rd of February was International Open Data Day.  Since this fell at the end of the ILWhack week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take advantage of the momentum and engage the stirring Edinburgh Open Data scene.

Many ODD were organised around the world; most of them were hacks.  In Edinburgh we went for a different approach, thanks largely to input from local community activists like Freda, Leah, Andy and Ally.  Some might call it 'social hacking'.  Our aim was to gather together people with little knowledge of Open Data, people with data that may or may not be open, and developers and technical types.

With Open Data stuff exploding worldwide, and developers going nuts creating cool apps and services that make use of data being released, it's important, you see, for {local, small-scale, voluntary, grassroots} groups and individuals to get involved early on.  Such parties are arguably likely to benefit the most from empowerment by data, and if they're not part of the discussion early on we might well see a lot of services developed that meet needs imagined by a not-quite-connected but well-meaning tecchie.

So on that note, we want to spread the word about Open Data to those who might normally be left behind.  When these groups know what the possibilities are (we can show them successful projects, locally (eg. ILWhack) and worldwide), what is available, and what could and should be available, we empower them to take action that will benefit them.  More specifically, people can find out that the English government has released data about such-and-such-of-interest, and politely demand that the Scottish Parliament or local councils do similarly.  They can interface early on with developers who are keen to start making, and make sure their real problems get solved (or at least prioritised over potential imaginary ones).  They can get involved with things like ILWhack, and have a better idea of what it's all about.

Between 10am and 2pm, we gathered around 35 people in the Informatics Forum and, fuelled by tea, coffee and biscuits, began the discussion.

We started with an hour of ten minute talks, about a variety of topics:


Sally Kerr told us about Open Data at the City of Edinburgh Council; the progress they've made so far and where they hope to go in the future; NESTA's local government Make It Local programme helped Edinburgh Council to move forward with Open Data.  She gave a nod to the ILWhack projects that made use of Council data in the week prior.

Alex Stobart of MyDex talked about big, open data, and the challenges this presents to citizens and politicians.

Iain Henderson explained the Standard Label; an easy to read specification for data holders to present to their users how the user data will be used.  Like nutritional advice, but for data.. Other ODD events were centred around hacking with it we spoke!

Bob Kerr talked about OpenStreetMap and GeoRSS.  I love the obsessive hyperlocal detail in some places, like where the animals live in Edinburgh Zoo.  On a serious note, OSM has really empowered local governments and NGOs in developing countries.

Andy Hyde discussed asset mapping for voluntary groups; how ALISS collate dispersed health and wellbeing information into a central, open repository, ripe for manual and programmatic access.

From Lizzie Brotherston we heard about the Post-16 Learner Journey Project; helping the Scottish Government understand the learning landscape.  They're holding a hack in April.

Next it was unconference time!

We had a short while of whole-room discussion, before identifying three key areas:

• Standardising visualisation (headed by Bob Kerr)
• Small scale voluntary organisations (headed by Leah Lockhart)
• Sustainability of data projects (headed by Ewan Klein)

NB. It looks like Joined Up Edinburgh will come under the umbrella of the Scotland branch of the Open Knowledge FoundatioN, so http://scot.okfn.org will be a good place to keep an eye on now.  And to keep in the loop, join the Joined Up Edinburgh mailing list.

Other people have blogged about this too.  Check out these by Leah Lockhart and Dave Meikle (more links welcome).

4th - 10th March

I played with the Tell Me Scotland SPARQL endpoint to put Scottish public notices on an OpenStreetMap: http://rhiaro.co.uk/publicnotices/map.php.  It works intermittently, as the TMS endpoint is a 'proof of concept'.  Okay, that's not PhD related, but it's still interesting.

I went to the 5th OKFN Edinburgh meetup at Napier.  Look, evidence, I'm in the picture!

Dave Robertson asked me hard questions about how I'll turn my vague research interests and intentions to make something useful into a PhD with genuine contributions to knowledge and I floundered a bit, but he agreed to be my second supervisor nonetheless.  I hadn't properly thought about it in those terms, and I'm still figuring it out with like, words.  (As opposed to a gut feeling).  I'd always planned to plough ahead enthusiastically and hope for the best.  That's how I approach everything, actually.

I started reading Community-Based Annotation for the Semantic Web by Matthew Rowe (2007); I think it was a first-year PhD review, and I was primarily reference-harvesting.  More on that next week.

I attended a Social Informatics Cluster meeting, and heard about the Smart Society project; very much in its figuring out stages, but worth following as it appears to have many diverse goals, and various crowd-computation related outcomes might be relevant to what I'm doing.

I went to an ESALA lunchtime talk entitled 'Data Objects', by Ian Gwilt of Sheffield Hallam.  I have to admit, I was expecting something more technical and internet-of-things-y.  Actually data objects are primarily tangible visualisaitons; 3D printed, carved out of wood or sculpted from bronze.  The research was about how people reacted to and understood data differently when it was presented in different forms.  Interesting, and they got some very pretty artefacts out of it, but not directly relevant so I don't have room in my head to store it unfortunately.

I attended the new Social Computing interest group kick-off meeting, coordinated by Dave Murray-Rust.  Everyone introduced themselves, and we arranged a time slot for future meetings.  It looks like I'll be presenting there at some point in the probably not-so-distant future (it was decided that everyone should).  There were a very diverse bunch of people there, and 'social computing' hasn't been defined officially for the group yet.  Quite a few people are attending to essentially see what all the fuss is about.  I'm hopeful that there will be a hardcore technical leaning, because that's where most of the gaps in my knowledge are.  Well, I'm more gaps than knowledge about everything, but that's where I feel particularly vulnerable.

I spent a good deal of time during January and February helping to organise a couple of Open Data oriented events.  At least, that's the excuse I'm sticking to for not having done much of my PhD in that time.

The Smart Data Hack, also known as ILWhack (Innovative Learning Week* hack) came first, between the 18th and 22nd of February.

* Innovative Learning week at the University of Edinburgh is an annual week of off-timetable activities for students, designed to enhance their learning experience.  Arguably every week in higher education should be innovative and striving provide the best possible education...  And Innovative Learning implies the student should be making the special effort and I don't think many would be happy with the idea of paying so their tutors can have a week off, so maybe Innovative Teaching week would be more... better.  But that aside.

The hack was targeted at first and second year undergraduates in Informatics on the basis that third and fourth years would be busy with final projects.  This was by no means a restriction however, and we harboured hopes of enticing along design students and data buffs from other departments to mix up the skill set a bit as well.

I knocked up a website with two primary functions.

1. Students could pre-register, add some info about themselves and start to form teams online.
2. Anyone interested in getting involved who wasn't a student could figure out where they might fit in and get in touch.  This included people who could sponsor prizes, present real-world challenges to solve, offer data to be wrangled, or provide technical support to participants.

Lovingly crocheted over a couple of days.  No pattern, all approximated, with scraps of wool of the appropriate colours I just happened to have.

I started with a chain the length of the width (shortest side) of my Nexus 7, and single crocheted in each stitch down both sides, and carried on round; so I did the very bottom first and worked my way up in a flat rectangular spiral.  I dunno if that makes sense, but it immediately begins to take shape.

Tell Me Scotland publish public notices for things like traffic, planning permissions... And they have a SPARQL endpoint!

I'm hacking around with the ultimate goal of creating an interface that allows people to generate a GeoRSS feed for a particular area.  Ally of GreenerLeith suggested this, so that they can use this to feed into their own apps.  A stage beyond that is to smoosh the whole lot into a Wordpress plugin, to make it accessible to anyone (who uses WP).

So far I've got the notices on an OpenStreetMap.  I haven't had a whole lot of time, but will make more soon.

I'm using the PHP library ARC2 to deal with the linked data.

NB. the TMS endpoint is, at the moment, flaky at best.  I think they're working on this.

25th Feb - 3rd March

I spent most of this week in a remote village by the sea in the Scottish Highlands.

When I came back I read and made notes about the Semantic Web and social machines by TBL; and typed up some notes from a while ago about OntoMedia and the Semantic Web and communities by K. Faith Lawrence.

I also translated all of my written meeting notes into Evernote, which promptly glitched out and doubled the amount of typing I had to do.  (I considered switching back to Google Docs, but I need labels).  I sure love technology.

I refamiliarised myself with the structure OWL.  Awesome diagrams here.

I did some more thinking about how I need to work with amateur content creators to make an ontology that fits their workflow.  I should have finished the planning stage of this ages ago, but.. I blame the ILWhack.

I keep wondering about the best way to have a system of consistent URIs across a network where the information can move from server to server on the whim of a user.  During this wonderment I discovered that purl.org's login system is broken.  I joined the mailing list, and people complain about it and have it re-fixed fairly regularly, so I'll just wait..

Lawrence, K.F., schraefel, m.c.: Bringing communities to the semantic web and the semantic
web to communities. In: Proceedings of WWW2006. (2006)



Research into SW communities:

• Communities of practice
• Social networks, eg. FOAF

Compare with other definitions of communities outside of SW.
Concept: Internet Based Community Network, has properties of COP and SN.
Case study: Amateur Fiction Online.

Early community definitions, Howard Rheingold: "..webs of personal relationships in cyberspace."

1996 CSCW Conference defined prototypical attributes of communities (Whittacker):

• Shared goal / interest / need
• Repeated active participation, emotional ties and shared activities.
• Shared resources and access policies
• Information, support and services reciprocated between members ( overlap with ^ ?)
• Shared context (culture, language)
• Can be applied to virtual and offline communities.

-> More attributes = clearer example of community.

Preece:

• Social interaction
• Shared purpose
• Common set of expected behaviours
• Computer system that facilitates and mediates communication

^^ Things in common.  Whittacker's is more inclusive/broad.

So for a SW SN:

• Accessible via browser
• Explicit links between users
• System supports creation of these links
• Links are visible and browseable

COP or SN may describe a community, not necessarily.  IBCN will do, and could be a COP or SN too.

Problem of Amateur Fic. is fluctuation of archive.  Personal sites go down etc.  How to find a story you remember a bit of?

IBCN is also combination of WBSN and virtual community.
Lack of incentive to use FOAF (eg. on LiveJournal etc) (Plus ignorance).
Doesn't offer anything they don't already have.
They don't use much metadata, just tons of human-readable stuff.

SW would allow:

• "better integration of distributed systems"
• "improved searching and filtering"
• "more personalised services"
•   experienced users
• expand options
•   new ways to interact
•  new users
•   ease introduction re: unwritten rules, expectations, terminologies

FOP extension to FOAF for anonymous identities.
('Fan Online Persona' - why not just 'Online Persona'?)
Consistency likely in community-based system because of advantages of reputation etc.  Identity cost.
Shared set of behaviour values, or risk losing rep.
Reputation gained by taking part.  (definitive part of community).
Additionally by creating works.

foaf:document and foaf:groups allow users to give details about their own creations and review work of others.

OntoMedia to describe content complements FOP.
Options in FOP gathered from study of metadata of works in mailing lists, websites and groups.
Recommender system -> notification system.

Allow SNS of writers to be studied at friend level and collaboration level.

Application to allow users to create FOP under development...

Michael O. Jewell, K. Faith Lawrence, Adam Prugel-Bennett, and m. c. schraefel (200?) Annotation of Multimedia Using OntoMedia

Check out a bit of discussion about this paper on Ontologies with a View.

OntoMedia for representing "diverse range of media".

Others for media:

• CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (museums)
• ABC Ontology (multimedia in libraries and digital archives)
• Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (attribute and relationshops for task performed when consulting bibliographic records)
• FictionFinder - FRBR to Online Computer Library Centre
• WorldCat db - Metadata about characters and fictional places
• Describe contents of films & comics etc for tracking things down to share you forgot?

None quite did what was needed.
So created to map to current models but specifically describe media content.
Hierarchical approach.

1. Overview
Entity / Event system
Entity: object, concept
Event: interaction between one or more entities
0 or more Entities are modified OR new Entity created
Entities not destroyed, but may have not-exists attribute


Decompose to sub-ontologies.

ontomedia.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ontologies

Mediate? Graphical interface.  interaction.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ir/projects/ontomedia/ontomedia

Sub-ontologies

• Core
• Expression (primarily elements and subclasses; Entity, Event)
• Media (binding between media and Expression objects)
• Space (extension of Signage Location Ontology, buildings, and regions of structures)
• Extensions (more detailed subclasses to Core)
• Being (people)
• Trait (attributes of Entities)
• Events (extends Core->Event)
• Action
• Gain
• Loss
• Travel
• & properties thereof
• Fiction
• Character (on Being)
• spoiler info. and accuracy
• Media
• More detailed than the one in Core; includes audio, image, photo, text and video subclasses
• Misc - classes used by any or all of other classes, eg. colour, geometry

Specified in OWL
Developed in Protege and SWOOP.

2. Case Study
Scene from Total Recall annotated.  Represent script and characters, and characters from related book, and links between two forms.

Screenplay annotation - SiX - Screenplays in XML.
Wraps around existing content.
Transition (cuts, fades, blackouts), location, dialogue and direction (action taking place in the script)

SiX allows for DC, for creators, date, descr, title.
Custom XSL to conform marked up scripts to Oscar requirements for readability.

Script Item extends Media Item to link script representation to OntoMedia.
Use has-expression to tie to OntoMedia:Expression.

Describing places and access etc, like lift, like IF.
- For describing character continuity, eg 'can character really see x' etc.

Must describe events that don't occur.  Characters want to occur, etc.  Multiple timelines, dreams.

Declare events.
Create timeline and add occurances.
- events can be reused, and coincide.

3. Testing / querying
Imported into Sesame triplestore.
RDQL queries (subset of SPARQL, simpler, only ever has 1 graph pattern, doesn't use RDF data typing)

4. Conclusion
No examples of pictures - how to annotate comics?

Combining OM with other apps.
Stuff integrated into Mediate.