Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I've told all the members of my research group they should watch this, so I thought I might as well make the same recommendation to the rest of the world... Herbert Van de Sompel presented "Towards a Machine-Actionable Scholarly Communication System" at LIBER 2011 in Barcelona, Spain on June 30, 2011. You really have to simultaneously watch the video and review the slides to get the full impact of the presentation. The first part is a succinct review of various projects, but starting at slide 16 ("nanopublications") things really get interesting. Well worth the 40 minute investment. Towards a Machine-Actionable Scholarly Communication System View more presentations from Herbert Van de Sompel --Michael

Online annotating service is a tool that helps to annotate different resources with different authors and give this annotation a separate URI that can be shared using a Facebook post, blog post, tweet, etc. Web annotations can be described as a relation between different resources with different media types like text, image, audio, or video. The web annotation service will be able to provide: A unique URI for every annotation. Persistent annotations. Annotate specific part of media. Keep track of the resources. Present annotation in browser. Meet the OAC model requirements ( alpha3 release ) . Open Annotation Model: This service will generate annotations that meet the OAC model specification. In an annotation that contains different resources, the OAC will introduce a new resource that describes the relationships between the resources that make the annotation. Example: A user who is interested in wildlife is browsing a page about elephants in Africa, and he was interested in the map...

I've just finished attending the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) Phase II Workshop in Chicago, IL (March 24-25, 2011). The quality of the presentations was very high and I was surprised at how much the OAC community has grown in a relatively short time. Although I've served on OAC technical review panels before and my student, Abdulla Alasaadi, has worked on a small prototype (to be presented at JCDL 2011 ) for using SVG instead of the W3C Media Fragments for specifying an annotation target, I haven't been keeping up with the OAC community as closely as I should. The Workshop has all the presentations online , as well as a wiki that contains various commentary, use cases, etc. (also, the hash tag is " #oacwkshp "). Although all of the presentations generated a lot of discussion from the attendees, the presentations that I learned the most from were: Annotation Supporting Collaborative Development of Scholarly Editions ( Jane Hunter and Anna Gerbe...

I've just finished up a pretty busy four week stretch that involved one workshop, one conference, one proposal review panel, the space shuttle, a working group meeting and the end of the spring semester. In the last week of April I went to Raleigh NC for the Linked Data on the Web Workshop ( LDOW 2010 ) and the World Wide Web Conference ( WWW 2010 ). I drove down to Raleigh Monday evening after giving the last lecture (on Memento ) in my CS 751/851 class . In addition to myself, from the WS-DL team Scott Ainsworth and Jeff Shipman were able to attend the pre-conference workshops WS-REST 2010 and LDOW 2010 but they both had to return to work after that and missed the WWW conference itself. WS-DL alumnus Frank McCown was able to attend WWW and it was good catching up with him. From the Memento team, Herbert & Rob were there for the entire week as well. We had a Memento paper at LDOW: Herbert Van de Sompel, Robert Sanderson, Michael L. Nelson, Lyudmila L. Bala...

Herbert , Rob and I were at the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2009 Membership Meeting in Washington DC, December 14-15, 2009. The CNI meetings are always good and this one was no exception. We gave a presentation about Memento (direct link on vimeo ): Memento: Time Travel for the Web from CNI Video Editor on Vimeo . Note that this presentation was based on the initial version of Memento first presented in November 2009, not the slightly updated version from February 2010. While we were there, we were also interviewed by Gerry Bayne of EDUCAUSE . Here's an embedded version of the interview: Also at CNI Fall 2009, Rob gave a presentation about the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC), of which I am on the technical committee. Rob's presentation is also available: Interoperable Annotation: Perspectives from the Open Annotation Collaboration from CNI Video Editor on Vimeo . We also did a short interview about OAC with EDUCAUSE: Rob...