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Archive for August, 2007

eIUS: e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models

The UK is entering a period in which online collaborative environments, distributed computing and data resources, advanced analytical tools, together with support and training, are becoming readily available for researchers in all disciplines. Within some subject areas, for example, high-energy physics and bioinformatics, e-infrastructure already underpins everyday work; whilst other subject areas are still investigating the applicability of existing resources for their research and making recommendations for future development. The deployment of e-infrastructure, whether within institutions, nationally or internationally, has the potential to increase the pace, impact, and efficiency of research both within and across disciplines (link).


What is e-Framework?

The e-Framework for Education and Research is an initiative by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Australia’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). The primary goal of the e-Framework is to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research through improved strategic planning and implementation processes (link)


Research Portals in the Arts and Humanities

The RePAH final report concluded that arts and humanities researchers would find most useful a managed research environment that offers:

  • Workflow Management tools that give the researcher greater personal control over digital project resources, especially more evolved bookmarking features and some form of automated copyright management system to facilitate the growing concern with usage permission and intellectual property rights was also highly valued.
  • Resource Discovery tools that provide greater control over web-based resources including the ability to filter the quality of hit returns, search multiple databases
  • News feed features that by-pass personal email accounts, but notify users of conferences, funding, jobs and new research publications.
  • Collaborative research tools for social bookmarking, uploading and sharing resources, annotating digital resources, shared document editing, attaching metadata to personally-created digital resources, and contributing to the authentication of digital content.

Rather than a single monolithic research portal, it recommended the development of interoperable portlets that can be used to embed portal type functionality in institutional and community web sites. To illustrate how this might work we have created a demonstrator that shows how a researcher can add selected research tools to their personal research portal page at their own institution and use these to carry out workflow based, collaborative, research (link)


What is HASTAC?

A consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists, and engineers from universities across the country, HASTAC (”Haystack”) is committed to new forms of collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and communities to promote creative uses of technology. Since 2003, we have been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums, and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure. Our aim is to promote expansive, innovative uses of technology in formal education and lifelong learning (link).


What is Mashable.net?

Mashable is a news site for the social networking movement (link).


Only one party’s in the game for attention in cyberspace

From the Melbourne Age

Kevin Rudd has a genuine presence on the web. The Coalition seems to be lagging, writes Catherine Deveny.

LET’S be honest here, it’s a bit hard to sex up Kevin Rudd. Sure, he’s probably a good bloke. Actually, he must be a good bloke seeing that Howard and his mates have done their best to dig up dirt on him, and all they found out is that he speaks Chinese. The H Team kept opening closets hoping skeletons would fall out and all they found were doilies, neatly folded linen and a tea towel that read “WANDILIGONG! IT’S ABORIGINAL FOR PARTY!” (link)


FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson@moore.org

FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES
(Ithaca, New York, August 10, 2007) - Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.

Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate in software development, application deployment, and community outreach for Fedora Commons. This network of partners will be instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit organization that will support and incubate open-source software projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation, access, collaboration, and preservation.

According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, “the new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that make it possible for academic and scientific communities to publish, share, and archive the results of their own work in a free, open fashion, and make it possible to analyze and use content in novel ways.”

“Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have enduring impact. The unanticipated cross- disciplinary uses of this open platform are the hallmark of this revolutionary infrastructure,” said Jim Omura, technology strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Payette also noted, “The open-source software that is developed and distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what is often referred to as “e-Research” and “e-Science,” including storage of experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer review, publication of findings, and the reuse of published material for the next generation of scholarly works. We will also continue our work with libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of digitized collections, making previously locked away material available to wide audiences. Also, building on our attention to digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system, Fedora Commons will continue to stress the importance of the sustainability of digital information in applications of our work.”

About Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage. Since 2001, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and the University of Virginia have collaborated on the Fedora Project which has developed, distributed, and supported innovative open-source repository software that combines content management, web services, and semantic technologies. The Fedora software has been adopted worldwide to support an array of applications including open-access publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries, e-science, archives, and education.

Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Executive Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the Fedora architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora Project. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides leadership from multiple communities, including open-access publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities. For more information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation’s Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields. For more information, visit http://www.moore.org.


Carol Minton Morris
Communications Director
National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://NSDL.org

Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org

Cornell Information Science
301 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 255-2702
clt6@cornell.edu


From Google to gaggle

From the Guardian Unlimited.

People quoted in featured stories on Google’s US news site now have the right to reply, marking a fundamental shift in the search engine’s role (link).


What is Web 2.0 and Service Orientated Architecture (SOA)?

A good article from the Melbourne Age; although this doesn’t only effect ‘corporate computing’. (link)


Intute: FREE Internet tutorials for the Arts

Intute has just released eight new FREE Internet tutorials for the Arts
and Humanities in the Virtual Training Suite.

The tutorials, authored by university subject specialists, are designed
to help students develop Internet research skills for their university
or college work, and can be used by lecturers and librarians to support
their courses.

1) Internet for Music
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/music/
By Sarah Taylor, Manchester Metropolitan University; formerly of the
Royal Northern College of Music

2) Internet for Architecture
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/architecture/
By Sarah Nicholas, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University

3) Internet for Art and Design
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/artdesign/
By Rosemary Shirley Birkbeck, University of London

4) Internet for Media and Communication
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/media/
By Jez Conolly, University of Bristol

5) Internet for English
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/english/
By Dr. James A J Wilson, University of Oxford

6) Internet for Fashion and Beauty
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/fashion/
By Sara Hall, Manchester Metropolitan University

7) Internet for History and Philosophy of Science (HPS)
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/hps/
By Dr. David J Mossley et al, Leeds University

8) Internet for Learning Languages
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/langs/
By Dr. Shoshannah Holdom, University of Oxford

This is part of a major programme of change to update and revise all the
tutorials in the Virtual Training Suite in time for the new academic
year.

To access all the tutorials visit:

http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/


Digital resources in the Arts and Humanities, Dartington College UK, 9-11 September

A brief reminder that this year’s conference on Digital resources in the
Arts and Humanities will be held at Dartington College of Arts, 9 - 11
September inclusive.
Visit the conference website at http://www.dartington.ac.uk/drha07 now
to see the draft programme and register for this unique and
extraordinary event.
* Plenary speakers (in alphabetical order) *Paul Ayris*, *Gavin
Bryars*, *Greg Crane*, and *Deke Weaver*
* Panel sessions on *After the AHDS*, *Second Life*, *Representing
Performance*
* A dozen themed sessions on Virtuality; Performance and documentation;
Linguistic Resources; Textual Resources; Digital Media and Community
Building; Digital pedagogy; Tools and Resources; Music and musicianship.
* A concert from leading British contemporary music ensemble Icebreaker,
performing their recently recording of Philip Glass’ “Music with
changing parts”
* Performances from Blind Ditch, Avatar Body Collision, Tim Sayer,
Michael Young, and others
“DRHA continues to defy the border guards and challenge cultural
hegemonies, by demonstrating how Going Digital enriches our
understanding, our abilities, and our achievements. A splendid time is
guaranteed for all.”
Lou Burnard and Chris Pressler

The Portable Film Festival

A tiny word from the people at Portable.
www.portablefilmfestival.com

Speak to anyone who has attended a free bar event recently and
you’ll find out it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
Especially when that good thing is champagne. But here at Portable
we deal in content not alcohol, and we’re chucking the stuff
around like there’s no tomorrow.

There are over 450 free downloads featuring some of the year’s
best short films, music videos from Willy Mason and The Shins,
and online serials including Lonely Girl 15 and Galacticast.

Log yourself in at www.portablefilmfestival.com and get glugging


The Art of Building Virtual Communities

A article on building an online community building. There is a lot of this stuff out there now; it has become as important as the actual software that enables the communities themselves.

Anyone who has ever thrown a party or held a meeting has had this unvoiced fear: what if after all the work of preparation, nobody shows up? Or worse, people show up, take a quick look around, decide it isn’t worth their time and leave (link).


Social networking boom reaches the workplace

After years of socialising, Facebook and MySpace mean business.

The sites, which started as a way to help people stay connected with friends, in the past year have begun catering to professionals, offering networking and advertising opportunities (from the Melbourne Age).


Cyberinfastructure for Collaboration and Innovation (selected papers)

selected papers from the conference 29-30 January 2007 (link to First Monday)


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