I feel that there was a huge disconnect between some groups of participants at #opengovt (http://groups.google.co.nz/group/nzopengovtbarcamp) in Wellington last weekend. This is my attempt to illuminate the gaps.
The gaps were about data and data modelling and underlying assumptions that the way one person / group / institution viewed a kind of data was the same as the way others viewed it.
This gap is probably most pronounced in geo-location.
There's a whole bunch of very bright people doing wonderful mashups in geo-location using a put-points-on-a-map model. Typically using google maps (or one of a small number of competitors) they give insights into all manner of things by throwing points onto maps, street views, etc, etc. It's a relatively new field and every time I look they seem to have a whizzy new toy. Whizzy thing of the day for me was http://groups.google.com/group/digitalnz/browse_thread/thread/b5b0c96ce08ca441 . Unfortunately the very success of the 'data as points' model encourages the view that location is a lat / long pair and the important metric is the number of significant digits in the lat / long.
In the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector, we have a tradition of using thesauri such as the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. Take all look at the entry for The Wellington region:http://www.getty.edu/vow/TGNFullDisplay?find=wellington&place=&nation=New+Zealand&prev_page=1&english=Y&subjectid=7000512
Yes, if has a lat and a long (with laughable precision), but the lat and long are arguably the least important information on the page. There's a faceted hierarchy, synonyms, linked references and type data. Te Papa have just moved to Getty for place names in their new site (http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/) and frankly, I'm jealous. They paid a few thousand dollars for a licence to thesaurus and it's a joy to use.
The idea of #opengovt is predicated on institutions and individuals speaking the same languages, being able to communicate effectively, and this is clearly a case where we're not. Learning to speak each others languages seems like it's going to be key to this whole venture.
As something of a worked example, here's something that I'm working on at the moment. It's a page from The Manual of the New Zealand Flora by Thomas Frederick Cheeseman, a core text in New Zealand botany, see http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-CheManu-t1-body1-d22-d5.html The text is live on our website, but it's not yet fully marked up. I've chosen it because it illustrates two separate kinds of languages and their disparities.
What are the geographic locations on that page?
* Nelson-Mountains flanking the Clarence Valley
* Marlborough—Kaikoura Mountains
* Canterbury—Kowai River
* Canterbury—Coleridge Pass
* Otago—Mount St. Bathan's
The qualifier "2000–5000 ft" (which I believe is an elevation range at which these flourish) applies across these. Clearly we're going to struggle to represent these with a finite number of lat/long points, no matter how accurate. In all likelihood, I'll not actually mark up these locations, since the because no one's working with complex locations, the cost benifit isn't within sight of being worth it.
Te Papa and the NZETC have a small-scale binomial name exercise underway, and for that I'll be scripting the extraction of the following names from that page:
* Notospartium carmichœliœ (synonym Notospartium carmichaeliae)
* Notospartium torulosum
There were a bunch of folks at the #opengovt barcamp who're involved in the "New Zealand Organisms Register" (http://www.nzor.org.nz/) project. As I understand it, they want me to expose the following names from that page:
* Notospartium carmichœliœ, Hook. f.
* Notospartium torulosum, Hook. f.
Of course the name the public want is:
* New Zealand Pink Broom
* ? (Notospartium torulosum appears not to have a common name)
Note that none of these taxonomic names actually appear in full on the page...
Yes is, clearly, an area where the best can be the good and visa versa, but the good needs to at least be aware of the best.
Tampilkan postingan dengan label place names. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label place names. Tampilkan semua postingan
Senin, 31 Agustus 2009
Senin, 02 Februari 2009
Report from the NDHA's International Perspectives on Digital Preservation
NOTE: I'm a computer scientist by training and this was largely librarian/archivist gig, so it's entirely possibly I've got the wrong end of the stick on one or more point in the summary below. It's also my own summary, and not the position of my employer, even though I was on work time during the event.
The NDHA is about to announce that the NDHA project has been completed on time and under budget. This is particularly pleasing in light of the poor history of government IT failures over the course of the last 30 years and a tribute to all concerned. Indeed, when I was taking undergraduate courses in software engineering a contemporary national library project was used as a text-book example of how not to run a software development undertaking. It's good to see how far they've come.
The event itself was a one-day event in the national library auditorium, with a handful of overseas speakers. I'm not entirely certain that a handful of foreigners counts as "international," but maybe that's just me being a snob. Certainly there was a fine turn-out of locals, including many from the National Library, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage and from VUW, including a number of students, who couldn't possibly have been there for the free food.
There seemed to be an underlying tension between librarianship and archivistship running through the event. I see this as being a really crazy turfwar, personally, since I see the chances of libraries and archives existing as separate entities and disciplines in fifty years seems pretty slim. The separation between the two, the "uniqueness" of objects in an archive seems to be to be obliterated by the free-duplication of digital objects. I've heard people say that archives also work access controls and embargoes for their depositors, but then so can libraries, particularly those in the military and those working with classified documents.
It seemed to me that the word "reliability" was used in a confusing number different of ways by different people. Without naming the guilty parties:
The organisers told us the presentations would be up by tonight (the evening of the presentation), but you won't find them on google if you go looking, because they tell google to please f**k off. I guess this is what someone was referring to when they said we had to work to make content accessible to google. The link is http://ndha-wiki.natlib.govt.nz/ndha/pages/IPoDP%2009%20Presentations and most were up at the time of writing.
I was hugely encouraged by the number of pieces of software that seemed to be being open sourced, as I see this as being a much better economic model than paying vendors for custom software, particularly since it's potentially scalable out from the national and top-tier libraries/archives/museums out to the second and third tier libraries/archives/museums, which by dint of their much larger numbers actually serve the most users and have the most content. It was unfortunate that the national library hasn't looked beyond propriety software for non-specialist software but continues to use AbodePhotoshop / Microsoft Windows, which are available only for limited periods of time on certain platforms (which will inevitably become obsolete), rather than openoffice, GIMP, etc, which are cross platform and licensed under perpetual licences which include the right to port the software from one platform to another. I guessPhotoshop / Windows is what their clients and funders know and use.
With a number of participants I had conversations about preservation. Andrew Wilson in his presentation used the quote:
“traditionally, preserving things meant keeping them unchanged; however our digital environment has fundamentally changed our concept of preservation requirements. If we hold on to digital information without modifications, accessing the information will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible” Su-Sing Chen, “The Paradox of Digital Preservation”, Computer, March 2001, 2-6
If you think about what intellectual objects we have from the Greeks (which is were us Westerners traditionally trace our intellectual history from), the majority fall into two main classes: (a) art works, which have survived primarily through roman copies and (b) texts, which have survived by copying, including a body of mathematics which were kept alive in the Arabic translation during a period when we Westerners were burning the works in Latin and Greek and claiming that the bible was the only book we needed. I'll grant you that a high-quality book will last maybe 500 years in a controlled environment, maybe even 1000, but for real permanence, you just can't get past physical ubiquity. If we have things truly worthy of long-term preservation, we should be striking deals with the Warehouse to get them into every home in the country, and setting them as translation exercises in our language learning courses.
I had some excellent conversations with other participants at the event, including Phillipa Tocker from Museums Aotearoa / Te Tari o Nga Whare Taonga o te Motu who told me about the http://www.nzmuseums.co.nz/ site they put together for their members.
Looking at the site I'm struck by how similar the search functionality is to http://www.nram.org.nz/. I'm not sure whether their relative similarity is a good thing (because it enables non-experts to search the holdings) or a bad thing (because by lowering themselves to the lowest common denominator they've devalued their uniqueness). While I'm certain that these websites have vital roles in the museums and archives community respectively, I can't help but feel that from an end-users perspective have two sites rather than one seems redundant, and the fact that they don't seem to reference/suggest any other information sources doesn't help. I can't imagine a librarian/archivist not being forth-coming with a suggestion of where to look next if they've run out of local relevant content---why should our websites be any different?
I recently changed the NZETC to point to likely-relevant memory institutions when a search returns no results (or when a user pages through to the end of any list of results).
I also talked to some chaps from Te Papa about the metadata they're using to to represent places names (Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names) and species names (ad-hoc). At the NZETC we have many place names marked up (in NZ, Europe and the Pacific), but are not currently syncing with an external authority. Doing so would hugely enable interoperability. Ideally we'd be using the shiny new New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names, but it doesn't yet have enough of the places we need (it basically only covers places mentioned in legislation or treaty settlements). It does have macrons in all the right places though, which is an excellent start. We currently don't mark up species names, but would like to, and again an external authority would be great.
It might have been useful if the day had included an overview of what the NDHA actually was and what had been achieved (maybe I missed this?).
The NDHA is about to announce that the NDHA project has been completed on time and under budget. This is particularly pleasing in light of the poor history of government IT failures over the course of the last 30 years and a tribute to all concerned. Indeed, when I was taking undergraduate courses in software engineering a contemporary national library project was used as a text-book example of how not to run a software development undertaking. It's good to see how far they've come.
The event itself was a one-day event in the national library auditorium, with a handful of overseas speakers. I'm not entirely certain that a handful of foreigners counts as "international," but maybe that's just me being a snob. Certainly there was a fine turn-out of locals, including many from the National Library, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage and from VUW, including a number of students, who couldn't possibly have been there for the free food.
There seemed to be an underlying tension between librarianship and archivistship running through the event. I see this as being a really crazy turfwar, personally, since I see the chances of libraries and archives existing as separate entities and disciplines in fifty years seems pretty slim. The separation between the two, the "uniqueness" of objects in an archive seems to be to be obliterated by the free-duplication of digital objects. I've heard people say that archives also work access controls and embargoes for their depositors, but then so can libraries, particularly those in the military and those working with classified documents.
It seemed to me that the word "reliability" was used in a confusing number different of ways by different people. Without naming the guilty parties:
- reliability as the truthfulness of the documents in the library/archive. This is the old problem of ingestors having to determine the absolute veracity of documents
- reliability as getting the same metadata every time. This seems odd to me, since systems with audit control give _different_ results every time, because information on the previous accesses is included in the metadata of subsequent accesses
- reliability as the degree to which the system conformed to a standard/specification
The organisers told us the presentations would be up by tonight (the evening of the presentation), but you won't find them on google if you go looking, because they tell google to please f**k off. I guess this is what someone was referring to when they said we had to work to make content accessible to google. The link is http://ndha-wiki.natlib.govt.nz/ndha/pages/IPoDP%2009%20Presentations and most were up at the time of writing.
I was hugely encouraged by the number of pieces of software that seemed to be being open sourced, as I see this as being a much better economic model than paying vendors for custom software, particularly since it's potentially scalable out from the national and top-tier libraries/archives/museums out to the second and third tier libraries/archives/museums, which by dint of their much larger numbers actually serve the most users and have the most content. It was unfortunate that the national library hasn't looked beyond propriety software for non-specialist software but continues to use AbodePhotoshop / Microsoft Windows, which are available only for limited periods of time on certain platforms (which will inevitably become obsolete), rather than openoffice, GIMP, etc, which are cross platform and licensed under perpetual licences which include the right to port the software from one platform to another. I guessPhotoshop / Windows is what their clients and funders know and use.
With a number of participants I had conversations about preservation. Andrew Wilson in his presentation used the quote:
“traditionally, preserving things meant keeping them unchanged; however our digital environment has fundamentally changed our concept of preservation requirements. If we hold on to digital information without modifications, accessing the information will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible” Su-Sing Chen, “The Paradox of Digital Preservation”, Computer, March 2001, 2-6
If you think about what intellectual objects we have from the Greeks (which is were us Westerners traditionally trace our intellectual history from), the majority fall into two main classes: (a) art works, which have survived primarily through roman copies and (b) texts, which have survived by copying, including a body of mathematics which were kept alive in the Arabic translation during a period when we Westerners were burning the works in Latin and Greek and claiming that the bible was the only book we needed. I'll grant you that a high-quality book will last maybe 500 years in a controlled environment, maybe even 1000, but for real permanence, you just can't get past physical ubiquity. If we have things truly worthy of long-term preservation, we should be striking deals with the Warehouse to get them into every home in the country, and setting them as translation exercises in our language learning courses.
I had some excellent conversations with other participants at the event, including Phillipa Tocker from Museums Aotearoa / Te Tari o Nga Whare Taonga o te Motu who told me about the http://www.nzmuseums.co.nz/ site they put together for their members.
Looking at the site I'm struck by how similar the search functionality is to http://www.nram.org.nz/. I'm not sure whether their relative similarity is a good thing (because it enables non-experts to search the holdings) or a bad thing (because by lowering themselves to the lowest common denominator they've devalued their uniqueness). While I'm certain that these websites have vital roles in the museums and archives community respectively, I can't help but feel that from an end-users perspective have two sites rather than one seems redundant, and the fact that they don't seem to reference/suggest any other information sources doesn't help. I can't imagine a librarian/archivist not being forth-coming with a suggestion of where to look next if they've run out of local relevant content---why should our websites be any different?
I recently changed the NZETC to point to likely-relevant memory institutions when a search returns no results (or when a user pages through to the end of any list of results).
I also talked to some chaps from Te Papa about the metadata they're using to to represent places names (Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names) and species names (ad-hoc). At the NZETC we have many place names marked up (in NZ, Europe and the Pacific), but are not currently syncing with an external authority. Doing so would hugely enable interoperability. Ideally we'd be using the shiny new New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names, but it doesn't yet have enough of the places we need (it basically only covers places mentioned in legislation or treaty settlements). It does have macrons in all the right places though, which is an excellent start. We currently don't mark up species names, but would like to, and again an external authority would be great.
It might have been useful if the day had included an overview of what the NDHA actually was and what had been achieved (maybe I missed this?).
Sabtu, 04 Oktober 2008
Place name inconsistencies
I've been looking at the "Dataset of New Zealand Geographic Place Names" from LINZ. This appears to be as close as New Zealand comes to an Official list of place names. I've been looking because it would be great to use as an authority in the NZETC.
Coming to the data I was aware of a number of issues:
(grammar edit)
Coming to the data I was aware of a number of issues:
- Unlike most geographical data users, I'm primarily interested in the names rather than the relative positions
- New Zealand is currently going through an extended period of renaming of geographic features to their original Māori names
- The names in the dataset are primarily map labels and are subject to cartographic licence
- Names can differ only by punctuation. There is a "No. 1 Creek" and a "No 1 Creek".
- Names can differ only by presentation. There is a "Crook Burn or 8 Mile Creek", an "Eight Mile Creek or Boundary Creek" and an "Eight Mile Creek" (each in a different province).
- There is no consistent presentation of alternative names. There is "Saddle (Mangaawai) Bivouac", "Te Towaka Bay (Burnside Bay)", "Queen Charlotte Sound (Totaranui)", "Manawatawhi/Three Kings Islands", "Mount Hauruia/Bald Rock", "Crook Burn or 8 Mile Creek" and "Omere, Janus or Toby Rock"
- There is no machine-readable source of the Māori place names with macrons, and the human readable version has contains subtle difference to the machine-readable database (which contains no non-ASCII characters). For example "Franz Josef Glacier/Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere (Glacier)" and "Franz Josef Glacier/Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere" differ by more than the macrons. There appears to be no information on which are authoritative.
(grammar edit)
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