CNI 2009 Fall Memebership Meeting

I spent a lot of the CNI 2009 Fall Membership Meeting in discussions with people about our current data publishing project and work planning for Year 1 activities for the Data Conservancy. I did manage, however, to make it to a number of the sessions.

Here are few highlights from the CNI 2009 Fall Memebership Meeting:

- A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) presented about their work thus far on a framework for annotation of scholarly (and other) resources. Dubbed the Open Annotation Collaboration, the work has its foundations in the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) work, in which the principals were heavily involved. This framework will allow annotation for a wide variety of applications and will provide strong support for annotation of immutable objects.

- A team with members from LANL and Old Dominion University presented on Memento, a system for viewing the web of the past. The system takes advantage of OAI-ORE and a facility of Web Architecture known as content negotiation to provide more seamless interaction with services that provide archive versions of their content (e.g., Internet Archive, Wikipedia). In addition to the development of a new for describing the relationships between the different temporal versions of a resource, the project has developed an application programming interface (API) that allows the various archives to expose their archive content in a consistent manner.

- The meeting ended with a talk from Bernard Frischer, the Director of the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory at the University of Virginia. He talked about using new 3D tools to support the work of humanists. He argued that most humanists rely heavily on 2D objects (printed text on the page) and would benefit tremendously from the availability of two more dimensions -- the third spacial dimension and the temporal (or time) dimension -- to support their research, teaching, and learning. He showed various examples of new tools and how they might help. The last thing that he showed us was a 3D animation of gladiators fighting, from which it was clear that his work would benefit from engagement with the gaming industry. The kinds of animation he showed are already available in video games.