http://ptsefton.com "As noble thoughts the inward being grace, So noble whiskers dignify the face." Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:17:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The Fascinator is a bit of repository software, designed to show off stuff that resides in a Fedora Commons store. It was designed and built at the Australian Digital Futures Institute at The University of Southern Queensland (USQ). The software development was funded by the ARROW project with a ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/11/18/the-fascinator-dea-mmvii.htm [Update: fixed typo in title]Jim Downing tagged the presentation I posted on Tuesday What the OAI-ORE protocol can do for you as “Apart from the ORE parts, this contains a nice exposition of the difference between standards and interoperability.”That tag nails a lot of what the talk was about. ICT ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/10/20/towards-australian-repository-interoperability-using-oia-pmh.htm Chris Rusbridge points out that at the ARROW day on Tuesday week nobody mentioned Open Access Day.I knew it was Open Access day when I was preparing my talk, and I meant to mention it but I forgot* as did everyone else, apparently. So happy Open Access day everyone. I ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/10/16/happy-open-access-day.htm This week I'm in Brisbane for an ARROW week. On Tuesday there was the ARROW repositories day, which was live-blogged [1, 2, 3] by Chris Rusbridge. Chris and I met via the blogosphere talking about how many clicks it should take to put stuff in a repository. His presentation at ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/10/16/arrow-week.htm 1 Introduction – Standards2 Two examples of standards2.1 OAI-PMH2.2 XACML3 OAI-ORE4 ConclusionPeter SeftonUniversity of Southern Queenslandsefton@usq.edu.auA presentation for the ARROW Repository day 2008-12-14Abstract: Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), is an important new protocol for representing ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/10/14/what-the-oai-ore-protocol-can-do-for-you.htm I'm back in Toowoomba after a week away at the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference in Melbourne. As usual I didn't live-blog any of it but I will try to post on my thoughts from the conference over the next week or so. Not sure how I go with that as ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/10/08/eresearch-for-word-users.htm View as PDFI'm just blogging this poster from OR08 to show that it can be done. About this hyperposterThis poster is a hyperdocument designed to show some potential applications for eResearch publications.This document has embedded semantics.For example, it was written in: Toowoomba at USQ (S 27.601335° E 151.930854°), for a conference ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/09/30/ice-eresearch-for-word-users.htm I'm working on my hyperposter for eResearch Australasia 2008. This is a test to see if the mapping system here is still working.This document has embedded semantics It was written in: Toowoomba at USQ [Update: fixed spelling] (S 27.601335° E 151.930854°), for a conference in Melbourne (S 37.849925° E 144.978368°) http://ptsefton.com/2008/09/19/is-this-thing-working.htm Rick Jelliffe has posted a comparison of how foreign XML can be embed in OOXML (that's the XML format for Microsoft Office) and ODF (the Open Document Format).Rick starts with:First the caveat: Word and OpenOffice are not general-purpose XML editors. Right. That means that if you do decide that there's ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/09/09/embedding-xml-in-word-processing-documents-if-you-really-must.htm Via Glyn Moody who doesn't want to say he told us so I see that Adobe is discontinuing support for Flashpaper, a proprietary Adobe (via Macromedia) technology for disseminating documents online. This means that anyone who has put stuff in there now has to migrate all their stuff to some ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/09/05/more-ideas-about-online-and-offline-word-processor-integration-is-anybody-listening.htm View as PDFAt the Australian Digital Futures Institute (ADFI, née LFII) we have been working on a software project, funded by our friends at ARROW, to build a lightweight web front-end to the Fedora Commons repository software. It used to go by the name of Sun of Fedora, which was ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/09/03/put-on-the-fascinator.htm In my last post I said I'd write more about how Ian Barnes' Structure Guesser AKA Structure Sniffer1 might work, and how it might be able to leverage Schematron.The sniffer is part of Ian's Digital Scholar's Workbench concept, where you can upload an unstructured word processing document, and use ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/08/26/more-thoughts-on-an-application-to-find-structure-in-word-processing-documents.htm As with busses, sometimes you can wait ages for a Schematron and suddenly a whole pack of them come along together*.For those of you who don't know:In Markup Languages, Schematron is a rule-based validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees. It is ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/08/26/a-courseware-authoring-dashboard-using-schematron.htm Ben O'Steen has put up some thoughts on what he refers to as 'compound' documents and how to store them in repositories and allow for referencing of parts of a document, such as a table, a graph or even a paragraph. Why did I add the scare quotes to compound? ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/08/20/compound-documents-in-ice-and-beyond-referencing-parts-of-things.htm Via Doug Mahugh at Microsoft comes this study (Shah & Kesan 2008)⁠ on interoperability of word processing applications using the Open Document Format and Office Open XML.After outlining some possible approaches to testing conformance of applications against the standards and pointing out what a gargantuan task that would be, ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/08/11/study-shows-real-world-odfooxml-interoperability-is-not-great.htm Usability?Lock inPreservationAn alternativeThe “Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007” (AAAiMOW1) has been turned loose as a release candidate. I looked at an earlier version of this a while a ago. The name of the thing doesn't let on that it is targeting just one version of what an ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/08/05/another-look-at-the-article-authoring-add-in-for-microsoft-office-word-2007.htm This is my second post on the VALET repository deposit tool. Again, if you're not a repository aficionado you can probably move on1.Still here?One of the issues we confronted with VALET was to rewrite in Java or not to rewrite in Java? VALET is written in Perl and quite ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/07/31/improving-valet-part-2.htm This week the ARROW community is having get together for developers to work on the VALET repository ingest tool. This is probably of little interest if you're not a repository person (or rat) but if you are then this may be of interest whether you are associated with the VITAL ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/07/30/improving-valet-part-1.htm Two people have recently reminded me about Adobe's online word processor, Buzzword. Coincidence? Groundswell of popularity? Probably not as they are married to each other.Anyway, it has improved a bit since I first looked at it. At least it has HTML export now (it handles lists wrongly, nesting lists inside ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/07/24/more-on-buzzword.htm View as PDFThis post is a look at some architectural changes we're looking at for the ICE system, as we hit the limits of what we could squeeze out of the old architecture. Ron Ward has just finished a major rewrite of lots of the application, designed to make it ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/07/15/some-architectural-changes-to-ice.htm Here in the Repository Services group at USQ we have been working on a project funded by ARROW and in partnership with the National Library of Australia. It's a bit of repository software originally designed to explore the Apache Solr search application.We looked at Solr last year at USQ, and ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/27/tim-mccallum-shows-off-sun-of-fedora.htm MJ Suhonos from PKP has patiently explained where I got some things wrong about Lemon8XML in my previous hasty post.I'd like to pick up one theme from MJ's post. MJ says (with emphasis by me):The larger problem, of course, is that L8X is encumbered, in a way, by the common ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/26/a-few-words-on-magic.htm The PKP people have released a beta of Lemon8-XML, (L8X) their journal-oriented word processor-driven XML publishing system.I tried out the demo server with an ICE test document. The bad news is that the service had significant problems with my document; It could not locate author metadata, incorrectly identified some ordinary ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/23/lemon8-xml-beta-released.htm From Kay Ramme at the GullFOSS blog at Sun comes this demo of a wiki-like system using ODF as a document format and OpenOffice.org as an editor.It seems to be using WebDAV to allow users to edit documents on a server, then convert them to HTML automatically when they load ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/20/an-ice-like-odf-based-web-publishing-system.htm [update: the map doesn't seem to work well in IE - works well for me in Firefox.] View as PDFI have been thinking about how to start integrating more semantics into ICE documents. This is only a preliminary look, but it's very promising so far.A wrote a while ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/19/adventures-in-geocoding-part-2-embedding-data-points-in-documents.htm So the conversation that Chris Rusbridge started about low-effort repositories rolls on. Chris summarizes some of the responses. Including mine and broadens the discussion to bring in some of the stuff that Andy Powell has been saying:Andy wants repositories to be more consistent with the web architecture. He spoke at ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/16/more-on-negative-click-or-net-benefit-repositories.htm My thoughts on repository workflowNet-benefit repository workflowsChris Rusbridge is contributing to repository click deflation at the Digital Curation Blog with a post about Negative Click Repositories.Why deflation?At Open Repositories 20008 a group of us Australian developers entered in the Repositories Challenge, with an entry entitled Zero Click Ingest [1]⁠. ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/11/deflation-in-repository-clicks.htm I have said here many times “use styles”. So why wasn't I doing so when I could have been?Regular readers will know that I'm a bit word processor-obsessed. In the word processor a style is name for a bundling of formatting and structural information. For example, in most word ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/06/07/why-wasnt-i-using-styles-in-diagrams.htm I'm writing a paper that I hope to submit for the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference if I get it done in the next three days.I'm putting the current draft of the abstract up here for comment. What do you think? It's due on Friday, but there's still time to change ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/05/20/please-comment-on-this-abstract.htm Updated converter tableRevised view: how well does the ODF add-in work?I posted yesterday about document formats and applications.Today a couple of additions and a correction.I left the Sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Word off the list. So here's an update of my summary table. I have not been able to ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/05/13/more-on-odf-and-ooxml.htm I know I'm repeating myself a bit. But as you know there's a Wikipedia page about applications that support the Open Document Format and it gets quoted and linked to. A lot.I linked to Peter Murray Rust yesterday, and one of the commenters on his blog also talks about the ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/05/13/claims-about-odf-support-are-typically-meaningless.htm File format conversionsWhat can we do now?Some comments on the Microsoft issueThere is a conversation about file formats and word processors going on between Peter Murray-Rust and Glyn Moody.Peter made some comments about wanting access to chemistry publications in Word format so he can better extract chemical information embedded in ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/05/12/some-comments-on-ooxml-odf-and-microsoft-word.htm One of the things we're thinking about at USQ is how researchers might integrate data into their publications. This will be key to the Australian National Data Service.I have posted a few things here before about stuff like embedding chemistry, maps, and graphing. I'll start keeping track of those and ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/05/02/adventures-in-geocoding-part-1-the-toowoomba-bug-cycle-hazard-investigation-team-does-ruthven-street.htm View as PDFI have been very slow getting to this, and I missed catching up with Microsoft people at Open Repositories 2008 but I wanted to make a couple of comments on the new Microsoft Word 2007 plugin for authoring journal articles in the (USA) National Library of Medicine XML ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/04/24/some-comments-on-the-nlm-xml-plugin-for-word-2007.htm View as PDFI spent a fair bit of time during a period of enforced physical inactivity in March sorting out the home music and picture collections, getting rid of stray MP3s that nobody wants and trying to work out how to start organizing our photos a bit better. This is ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/04/24/some-thoughts-on-vendor-lock-in-from-the-domestic-to-the-institutional-is-apple-mac-os-x-evil.htm View as PDFGoogle have released some new toys: visualizations AKA gadgets.This is what we've been waiting for without quite knowing what we were waiting for.If you have some data in a Google spreadsheet, or another application that implements the API (are there any?) then you can hook it up to ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/03/25/go-go-gadget-gauges.htm View as PDFLast post here was another complaint about Google Docs and its terrible OpenDocument Format support. I've been very sick for the last little while and it turns out purely by coincidence that the next post I feel strong enough to write is another complaint about Google Docs. I ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/03/14/google-docs-as-a-blog-editor.htm I wrote last week about the way supporters of the OpenDocument Format talk-up the number of supporting applications, but for our purposes the support is not as widespread as is often claimed.Now there's a post on the Official Google Blog A renewed wish for open document standards. Note the plural; ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/27/google-claims-to-support-odf-over-ooxml-but-google-docs-has-awful-odf-support.htm I have been working on some proposals to get us a some interesting projects (with attendant money) for the Learning Futures Institute, where I work. To do this I have to work with other people's templates, which is fine, but it could be so much better if I could use ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/26/iceify-this-document.htm [Update: Fixed a typo and added two more names]I'm in paper-writing mode at the moment which means doing some actual reading-type research. I'm interested in issues like why repositories use PDF and not HTML. It's surprising how many papers there are on 'Library 2.0' or 'Repositories and Web 2.0' that ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/22/anyone-know-about-research-into-what-authoring-tools-academics-use.htm I know I've said this before, but I can't help it. Just because an application has 'Save as OpenDocument' feature that does not mean it has useful OpenDocument support.Benjamin Horst at SolidOffice points to Dispelling Myths around ODF (I don't think all the myths really are myths (and why do ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/22/opendocument-format-support-not-as-great-as-the-cheer-squad-keep-saying.htm I have written a few posts about trying to write HTML, peferably XHTML, with various word processing tools. Today was reminded of the Mozilla Seamonkey project by this post about open source alternatives to proprietary software packages. (Some things on the list are sensible, but suggesting that 'DocBook' might be ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/21/xhtml-challenge-mozilla-seamonkey-composer-is-not-suitable-for-writing-academic-papers.htm Last week we hosted Peter Murray-Rust in Toowoomba. The ICE team have been busy getting ready for some other visitors, so I have not had time to write about the visit. Peter has blogged about his stay a few times, describing it as intensive talk and hacking. Intensive ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/20/cyclone-peter-murray-rust-moves-away-from-toowoomba-cleanup-continues.htm If you're using the Zotero research tool (and if you read this blog you probably should) you should now see the little icons to add posts to Zotero up in your Firefox address bar. Save metadata for your favourite posts! Cite me! This will only work for the WordPress part ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/06/this-site-is-now-zotero-friendly-courtesy-of-the-unapi-plugin-for-wordpress.htm [Update – repost with the spell checker on, text was in Aussie English so the spell checker ignored it.]Via First Author, I see that BioMed Central has added the ability for authors to include extra web material with a paper:... to make it possible to upload collections of files that ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/05/mini-websites-of-supporting-material-for-scholarly-articles-2.htm Via First Author, I see that BioMed Central has added the ability for authors to include extra web material with a paper:... to make it possible to upload collections of files that can be conveniently navigated in the web browser - essentially a miniature website associated with the article. This ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/02/05/mini-websites-of-supporting-material-for-scholarly-articles.htm Immediate futureThe futureSummer holidays have been wrung out to the last drop. Kids are back at school. Time to start on 2008. RUBRIC is now officially finished, except that we are keeping the tech team running until the end of March to continue limited support for the RUBRIC partners. The ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/01/29/2008.htm I have complained here over and over about how bad word processors are at producing HTML, at least until you see the light start using the ICE system to style and convert your documents. I documented some of the problems last year when I looked at how an author might ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/01/25/ibm-lotus-symphony-word-processor-does-not-have-broken-html-export-like-all-the-others.htm Google Chart APIFlot Chart tool in Writer Raw dataAnd the winner is?Peter Murray Rust followed up my post on publishing interactive maps, with a post about graphing. XY graphs are so common and so important that we ought to be able to cut and paste them, preserving he semantics ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/01/04/graphing-with-ice.htm The end result: an interactive mapBut what am I trying to achieve?How do you make a map like this?How do you publish a map like this?Issues[Update 2008-01-03 – fixed a technical issue]I showed my recent post on embedding maps into blog posts to my long-suffering partner. She said that while ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/01/03/ice-mashups-part-one-take-two.htm On December 22nd 2007 I officially became the Manager, Software Research and Development, in the Learning Futures Innovation Institute at the University of Southern Queensland.This means I will (at least) look after software development for the ICE project, and for the OpenCourseware Initiative at USQ, and will continue ... http://ptsefton.com/2008/01/02/new-job-manager-software-research-and-development-in-the-learning-futures-innovation-institute.htm Last week we held a workshop at USQ where I invited a bunch of developers to come, gave them a vague theme and set them loose. The process seems to have worked well. I figured that if invited good developers, and asked them to bring a laptop then we would ... http://ptsefton.com/2007/12/19/hooking-up-authoring-processes-and-tools-to-institutional-repositories.htm I recently reported on an application called FieldHelper, that I saw at Clever Collections. FieldHelper inspired me to buy a data cable for my GPS (a yellow Garmin eTrex). The cable's not a great success, I went for a USB version off eBay and it only works on Tuesdays and ... http://ptsefton.com/2007/12/18/ice-mashups-part-one.htm Some time ago, around the time there was some discussion on why repositories use PDF and not HTML there was this thing called Lemon8-XML announced – at the time there was very little information available. I tried to get on the mailing list but nobody got back to me. ... http://ptsefton.com/2007/12/12/lemon8-xml-more-information.htm I'm a bad, bad blogger. I find it hard to write reviews of conferences as I go, or even immediately afterwards, but I'm going to try to improve on that in 2008.This is far from liveblogging, but here are some notes of my impressions from the Clever Collections conference ... http://ptsefton.com/2007/12/11/clever-collections.htm ICE Considered HarmfulI lead a project at USQ that rejoices in the name “The Integrated Content Environment”, ICE. We have had great success at getting people at USQ to use the system for writing courseware, and found that on the RUBRIC project it works well as a project intranet. Any ... http://ptsefton.com/2007/11/28/ice-considered-harmful.htm I wrote recently about how this website is about to change horses. If you're reading this then that means it has. All the old posts are still available, albeit in very plain HTML and the old Atom feed URL should now be a permanent redirect to the new ... http://ptsefton.com/2007/11/22/this-website-has-changed.htm