R.L. Bob doing the introduction:
Advanced CAMP could mean to some people the advanced topics beyond just the basics. Bob likes to think of it as the Advance Camp out in the wilderness where you are more likely to get caught in a blizzard, get shot and generally face the wilderness.
The theme that came out was the needs around service discovery in higher education. Discussions will cover CyberInfrastructure for Humanities, Cloud/Grid, SOA, ESB. Discussion groups on data models, governance, service discovery and <your topic here>.
Workshop Format: Each participant should offer (at least): 1 opinion, 1 rant, 1 hope, 1 keen observation.
The problem space: SOA is happening across academia in variety of ways varying from Web2.0 apps, mash-ups, messaging. It happens intra and inter-institutional. This impacts how we offer a variety of services and raises a set of questions:
- How should digital tools and data for scholarship be made available?
- What metadata should be recorded about them?
- How can metadata be globally aggregated and searched?
- What operational and security environments should protect them and enable their appropriate use?
- how should their semantic relationships be codified and maintained?
Mark comments: connecting metadata to the object and having it persist and stay attached as the object moves around and is copied is a difficult area to address.
Jill: SOA is also talked about traditional administrative system but do people think about this
Why would academics would want to store their content in a central system? It might be about the ability to add metadata and re-use the content in multiple places.
Loretta Auvil: SEASR
Goal was do develop a software environment that would allow for the reuse of software components focused on data mining applications for the humanities. Looking at text analysis and music analysis doing genre analysis, mood analysis.
The components and descriptions of those components are very web centric based on SOA and Semantic Web. They are talking about a Semantic Enabled SOA. The components are written in RDF.
Looking at interesting ways of searching: Tag Clouds, Link Flows
Working on a workbench using Google Web Toolkit. Allows you to do a mash-up of the components into flows.
Example Applications: MONK – it has a custom UI that calls SEASR as a service. NEMA – music analysis service that does 10 second slices of an MP3 looks at the genre and mood.
Steve Masover: Project Bamboo
http://projectbamboo.uchicago.edu/
Flickr and del.icio.us tags: projectbamboo
Asking the question: How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?
Areas of focus:
Discovery and Analysis
Annotate and manage – including the idea of Folksonomic tagging with identifiable levels of authority.
Need to support serendipitous discovery. Search is not useful if it limits serendipity and foraging. Intellectual Property pain and accelerating interdisciplinary are motivate “commons-based peer production” (cf. Yochai Benkler) . There is impatience with copy-write. There is desire to support inter-scholar relationships. Community / Networking that support a “lattice of interest”. Legal and institutional policy are trending towards advocacy around fair use in law.
Emerging aspects of scholarly practice include: shared standards and services, social and scholarly networks, deep consortia across disciplines and national borders. There is need for a chain-of-credibility in mash-ups.
Looking less on service/tools developments and more on standards-profiling and services to facilitate interoperability. One area that they might focus on the sharing / tracking of reference use: who used a resource in what context and for what purpose, who provided the resources to the commons.
We are moving from a wedding cake stack (data and repository, middleware, application on top) to a three-side figure with mash-ups and tools on edge of the triangle.
Ken K – we heard from an English scholar that he is does not do “team english. He is a cat and he does not want to be herded”.
There is a tension between scholars wanting to know “who is using their stuff” and but not wanting to their activities monitored.
Daniel Davis: Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org/
Now a 501-3c organization. Moving from an internal grant-funded project to a community project.
Much of the work is focused on integrated services from other projects rather than re-writing code that already exists.
Splitting into multiple projects:
- Fedora Repository – original Fedora Project,
- Middleware – looking at seamless integration between other groups’ services,
- Akubra Storage – new storage plug-in architecture, transaction file system,
- Topaz – core components for semantic-enabled apps currently publishing several journals mostly in medical research,
- Mulgara Triplestore – highly scalabel triplestore.
Relevant technical trends: SOA, Web2.0, RDF, OWL and OWL-S
There are two paradigms that we are dealing with: the lightweight Web model with little trust / security and the Enterprise model where you have deep trust / security models (think HR systems). A repository can bridge these two worlds. You can easily repose content then add a trust model and policy driven controls for adding scholarly information on top of the content.
The Enterprise paradigm need to support near ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) semantics and a strong security and trust model.
Question: The idea that there is a difference between Federated Identity and Federated Repositories and how that would work. They are different aspects but related. There are discussions about shared information between the repositories like User Accounts. In one repository, that person might be an account. In the other, they might be a reference. How much do you share between the two repositories.
Jens Haeusser: Kuali Student
http://www.kuali.org/communities/ks/index.shtml
Keys: Modular, standards-based student system. Community Sourced rather than open source in that their is a board who sets direction and manages the roadmap. It is a person centric system – focused on meeting the needs of the users of the system. SOA-based.
Traditional ERPs – you tend to implement twice. Once, when you try to make it meet your current practices and then again when you accept the best practices as defined by the vendor.
Functional Vision: Support the end users by anticipating their needs. Support a wide range of learners and learning activities (traditional students but also life-long learners, distance learners, exchange students et al). Design to make it easier to change business processes. Reduce time staff spend on routine tasks.
Technical Vision: SOA and Web Services. Not delivering an application as much as they are delivering a framework for you to deploy your business processes. Using the Web Services stack: Standards-based, adhere to Educational Community License (ECL). Building the system in Java. Open Source reference Implementation.
Guiding Principles for the KS Technical Architecture as a PDF
The functional design team is gathering input from a broad range of players from both within an institution as well as between institutions.
The first thing they are working on is Learning Unit Management. Treating it more like SKUs. You can compose them together to make larger units. They have learned that the current way many systems define courses isn’t very good.
Technical Recommendations as a PDF
Database: Apache Derby
Orchestration: Apache ServiceMix, Sun OpenESB, Kuali Enteprise Workflow (KEW)
Created a standard development environment that includes a submission environment. Maven and Subversion, Google Web Toolkit (UI). Business Rule Management System (BRMS) to store and search for business rules includes a UI for business users to define the rules. Looking at the Fluid Project for support of accessibility/usability requirements.
They are using different ESB for different aspects of the framework.
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