[Dspace-general] Questions, Relevance

Fri Mar 25 12:51:19 EST 2005

Sergio -

Thanks for the reply. Addressing your points in order:

1. I am generally skeptical of vendor announcements (even though I'm in the
process of becoming one) due to the unpredictable schedules between
announcements and delivery, disinformation efforts to deflect or dissuade
competitors from entering, and the general magnitude of the event. In my
opinion, Googling DSpace seems like a natural event which in the overall
scheme of things doesn't seem like a big deal. Alternatively, my impression
is that A9 (http://a9.com) is engaged in work that is much more relevant to
the Semantic Web. An A9/DSpace announcement would be of far greater
interest, at least to me.

2. To clarify, I wasn't suggesting that Simile is on a collision course to
displace DSpace. My question is, in light of how Simile is evolving and the
relationship I perceive between Simile and DSpace, is it reasonable to
envision Simile evolving into a cohesive platform that might come to be
known as DSpace, for lack of any other name? Additionally, others might feel
it's worthwhile to anticipate how their computing environments might evolve.

3. I think it's an exceedingly interesting question to ponder how many
Semantic Web specialists there might be. In the past month I've been to two
Semantic Web gatherings. I'd say there are far more than a handful of
qualified people capable of engaging in highly sophisticated work in
Semantic Web environments. I'm actually delighted that this is the case.

4. Finally, my intention to commercialize Semantic Web technologies is
causing me to examine DSpace very closely. To me, DSpace has spread its open
source wings and I'm not writing it off - more accurately, I welcome its
availability.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: Sergio Trejo [mailto:sergtrejo at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 10:11 AM
To: dprovost at sloan.mit.edu
Cc: dspace-general at mit.edu
Subject: Re: [Dspace-general] Questions, Relevance

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-45-20040719GoogleCrawlsInto
Academia.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
> 
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