[Dspace-general] Questions, Relevance

[MacKenzie Smith]

You make a good point, but a bit of clarification:

The Google/DSpace partnership has been subsumed under Google Scholar, and 
it involves them
harvesting all the openly available content and metadata (in good old 
HTML-encoded Dublin Core)
from all the DSpace repositories. That's one of the primary ways that 
people are finding content in
DSpace repositories now.

But SIMILE tools should help improve how people can find stuff in DSpace 
directly, through its
own UI. And who knows, if we exposed DSpace metadata in RDF to Google-like 
harvesters, no
doubt Google is thinking about how to leverage RDF and the Semantic Web too...

None of this changes the fact that you have to have manage *content* too, 
and that the SIMILE
project isn't addressing that (until that content is also expressed in RDF, 
at least).

MacKenzie

At 05:10 AM 3/25/2005 -1000, Sergio Trejo wrote:
>Some perspective from the world of non-academia using DSpace ...
>wasn't it just middle of last year that Google and DSpace announced a
>joint endeavor? I highly doubt that Similie is going to anytime soon
>deprecate DSpace and render it to the bit bucket with Google being one
>of (if not the) first commercial ventures utilizing DSpace:
>
>http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20040719GoogleCrawlsIntoAcademia.html
>
>How many semantic web specialists are there in existence today who can
>hop right into Similie? There may be a handful of Ph.D's that have the
>capacity and resarch grants to delve into the deep blue depths of
>semantic-everything, but let's first give DSpace some time to grow,
>evolve and spread some open source wings before we write it off! :-)
>
>Serg
>
>
>On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 09:01:09 -0500, David Provost
><dprovost at sloan.mit.edu> wrote:
> > For those on this list familiar with both DSpace and Simile
> > (http://simile.mit.edu/):
> >
> > It's beginning to seem as though the Simile suite will either transcend the
> > capabilities of DSpace or simply render its functionality as limited and
> > unnecessary. I'm arriving at this conclusion after reading Chris Bizer's
> > meeting notes sent Thu 3/24/05 (pasted below), reading messages from the
> > Simile list, listening to others, and just trying to think this through in
> > general.
> >
> > Am I perceiving the evolution of these technologies correctly?
> >
> > Here's how I've been looking at DSpace and Simile:
> >
> > DSpace is an abstraction layer above a data store(s). Tools from Simile can
> > then be applied to this abstraction layer to annotate/tag, create 
> views, and
> > ultimately weave together electronic artifacts no matter their type or
> > location. I also include programs in this notion of weaving (eventually, if
> > not now) that will allow individuals (in a corporate setting, authorized
> > users) to create and/or tailor the functionality they want or need.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > David
> >
> > ____________________
> > David Provost
> > 978-549-5356
> > www.davidprovost.com
> >
> > ================================
> >
> > Chris Bizer's meeting notes, sent Thu Mar 24 '05, to the
> > general at simile.mit.edu mail list:
> >
> > Hi Stefano and Emmanuel,
> >
> > we had an interesting meeting with David Karger today, focusing mostly on
> > the intermediate format a Fresnel engine could produce.
> >
> > Because Haystack supports editing data, they need the URIs of instances to
> > be passed to their widgets so that they can update the underlying RDF
> > repository if necessary.
> >
> > This wasn't included in the intermediate format I proposed 2 days ago, but
> > is no problem to add.
> >
> > This thought lead us into the direction, that it might be a good idea to
> > implement one Fresnel rendering engine that would provide all Fresnel
> > functionality and output an intermediate tree.
> >
> > This tree could then be used by Longwell, Haystack, IsaViz and Cocoon to
> > render whatever they like. Meaning that the tools would share as much code
> > as possible. I'm not implementing, so it is not my business, but looks like
> > an interesting idea.
> >
> > Seen on an abstract level (not XML), the tree would be a tree of RDF nodes,
> > where each node has a set of CSS styling instructions attached to it. 
> Pretty
> > general and the kind of input all four tool need.
> >
> > I will update the documentation and the RDFS vocabularies now and 
> freeze the
> > stuff afterwards. I will be in New Jersey over Easter and will be back on
> > Wednesday afternoon. I guess that I'm online only occasionally till then.
> >
> > David Karger will read the manual in detail until next Thursday and we will
> > meet with him then again to see if he found stuff that would make it
> > impossible for Haystack to use Fresnel. He and I don't think so, but we 
> will
> > see.
> >
> > I will fly back to Berlin next Saturday, so I will basically be at MIT only
> > two more days (next Thursday and Friday). Maybe I will spend some time on
> > defining such an intermediate language then, so just see how the Fresnel
> > issue list looks next week ;-)
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Chris
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Dspace-general mailing list
> > Dspace-general at mit.edu
> > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general
> >
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MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building E25-131d
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu