MDR SIG meeting: Birkbeck, 12th Feb 2008

Note: Meeting outputs are available from the meeting wiki page

This week, the MDR SIG held its first meeting of 2008 at Birkbeck, London. A fog-bound City airport caused Phil and I to arrive late after our original flight was cancelled…thankfully, John Robertson got down from Glasgow on time to ensure the meeting ran smoothly from the beginning.

Onto the presentations and a rearranged programme saw Sarah Currier and Lara Whitelaw involve the attendees with DC-Ed use case exercises. Arriving late meant I was unable to gauge first-hand the usefulness of the session but comments later suggested it had been a worthwhile exercise. Pete Johnston gave an update of the progress of OAI-ORE, highlighting what he felt were the four main documents and the general lightweight approach. Mike Taylor followed with using standards to make vocabularies available. Mike’s overview of vocabularies and vocabulary bank examples were a useful reminder and I liked the sound bite re vocabularies – “use increases both recall and precision of searching.” Additionally, he wondered if these sort of facilities were helpful, and how they might be used/made useful.

Into the afternoon and Kora Golub introduced us to the EnTag project, looking at investigating the combination of controlled and folksonomical objectives. By investigating indexing aspects, and tagging by readers and authors, the aim is to compare simple social tagging against social tagging with a controlled vocabulary. Testing, which will involve fifty graduate students tagging up to 100 documents each, will seek to prove if a controlled vocabulary can enhance social tagging and eliminate some of the ‘free tagging’ pitfalls. Kora also briefly mentioned a new project, TRSS, a scoping study looking at issues relating to the potential delivery of a terminology registry.

Sarah presented again, this time with a short demonstration of a desktop deposit tool using the SWORD specification. The drag-and-drop tool can deposit files such as images or content packages and publish instantly (if desired). Scott Wilson followed with a similarly-themed demonstration of the FeedForward project, with a successful look at creating a sample reading list from aggregated resources. Seeing both these presentations work interactively was extremely useful; so much so, Scott’s presentation was blogged about the very next day. Host David Flanders finished the day by talking about the SOURCE project, describing an “open content marketplace” and showing an alpha client tool and beta demonstrator.

Nineteen attendees – around two-thirds – provided feedback on the meeting, with only one not finding it at least useful. This suggests that we got a good choice of presentations and, along with the more specific feedback, we will try to feature a similar standard at the next meeting.

The day went well – travel problems aside – and feedback on the day was encouraging. Unfortunately, my travel problems worsened with a near three-hour delay in returning to Edinburgh