Fedora Commons Launched

For those who haven't heard yet.... this is great news.

Carol also has some pictures from the launch celebration over at NSDL Road Reports.

Here's the text of the official announcement:

FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES

(Ithaca, New York, August, 2007) - Fedora Commons announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide.

With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.

Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate in software development, application deployment, and community outreach for Fedora Commons. This network of partners will be instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit organization that will support and incubate open-source software projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation, access, collaboration, and preservation.

According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, "the new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that make it possible for academic and scientific communities to publish, share, and archive the results of their own work in a free, open fashion, and make it possible to analyze and use content in novel ways."

"Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have enduring impact. The unanticipated cross-disciplinary uses of this open platform are the hallmark of this revolutionary infrastructure," said Jim Omura, technology strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Payette also noted, "The open-source software that is developed and distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what is often referred to as "e-Research" and "e-Science," including storage of experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer review, publication of findings, and the reuse of published material for the next generation of scholarly works. We will also continue our work with libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of digitized collections, making previously locked away material available to wide audiences. Also, building on our attention to digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system, Fedora Commons will continue to stress the importance of the sustainability of digital information in applications of our work."

About Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage. Since 2001, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and the University of Virginia have collaborated on the Fedora Project which has developed, distributed, and supported innovative open-source repository software that combines content management, web services, and semantic technologies. The Fedora software has been adopted worldwide to support an array of applications including open-access publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries, e-science, archives, and education.

Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Executive Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the Fedora architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora Project. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides leadership from multiple communities, including open-access publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities. For more information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation's Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields. For more information, visit http://www.moore.org.

CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson@moore.org

FTP ASCII unmangler

FTP text mode is evil.

I made the mistake of transferring several important binary files from OS/X to windows last night, using FTP. Actually, a few mistakes were made along the way. 1) I didn't check that I was in BIN mode first, 2) I didn't verify the integrity of the files after the transfer, and 3) I deleted the sources.

Luckily, it was Unix-to-Windows, which means all #10 octets were replaced with #13#10. First I tried dos2unix with no luck. Then I wrote a program to replace all #13#10 sequences with #10 and crossed my fingers.

It worked. Here it is in all it's inefficient glory. Maybe this will help someone else someday. No guarantees, but it's worth a shot if you're desperate.

import java.io.*;

public class Unmangle
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        InputStream in = new FileInputStream(args[0]);
        OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(args[1]);
        int prev = 0;
        int b = in.read();
        while (b != -1)
        {
            if (prev == 13 && b != 10)
                out.write(13);
            if (b != 13)
                out.write(b);
            prev = b;
            b = in.read();
        }
        if (prev == 13)
            out.write(13);
        out.close();
        in.close();
    }
}

Social Bookmarking == Free Metadata

Metadata is expensive. Librarians aren't the only ones privy to this fact.

I remember the pain we went through in bringing HP's FTP site to the web. The first step was converting the old README files to HTML. Perl made this a snap, but somehow it didn't address the now-more-apparent quality problem. So we slurped it all into a Paradox database had a big metadata entry party.

Ok, the word "party" might be a stretch. There was technically pizza involved, but it was more of a bribe. It lasted days, and nobody really celebrated 'till it was over.

I distinctly remember the phrase "metadata monkey" entering my vernacular at that point.

I don't have anything against monkeys. Monkeys are cute. Monkeys at keyboards are even cuter. But metadata entry has long been viewed as a thankless job.

Now, sites like del.icio.us have figured out a way to get metadata monkeys to work for free. The incentive? Not pizza, not even bananas: just the ability to store our own descriptions, share those descriptions with others, and access it all from anywhere.

It makes me wonder about the role of the library in creating authoritative, versus curating social, metadata.

Resources, Representations, Repositories, and RDF

Last week, Carl Lagoze gave an update on the OAI-ORE work at Open Repositories '07. ORE is a new project that intends to specify how heterogeneous repositories can exchange information about the digital objects they hold. Although they're not necessarily going after a new protocol, I still think of it as taking OAI-PMH to the next level. It's not just about metadata anymore.

For me, the most interesting parts of the talk were webarch-related. It all started with the statement (to paraphrase) "we must build on the web architecture". Carl then pointed out how representations are essentially second-class citizens on the web.

That got me thinking. At the most basic level, repositories are all about managing bitstreams (whether they're considered data or metadata). In webarch, bitstreams seem to equate to what they call "representation data". And a representation is defined by how it relates to a resource:

"A representation is data that encodes information about resource state."

So, in w3c-speak, a repository manages representation data. Okay, that's just a terminology change. But what about this statement:

"For robustness, Web architecture promotes independence between an identifier and the state of the identified resource."

That makes a whole lot of sense for the web when you consider how often web pages change. But what does it mean for repositories? How do we manage bitstreams if we can't identify them? The answer must be one of the following:

• Indirect identification. Identify the associated "resource" in order the work with the bitstream(s).
  
• Reification. Elevate the bitstream to a "resource" so we can talk about it.
  

How about if we want to model the repository as an RDF graph? Well, we know that representations can have metadata in addition to the payload. So in order to do this modeling, we need to reify. Internal to a repository, representation triples might look something like:

representationA represents urn:example:someTextFile
representationA contentType "text/plain"
representationA payloadLocation "/path/to/someTextFile.txt"

I think the OAI-ORE work is going to attempt something like the above: a model (and maybe a format?) for expressing resource-representation information in a repository-neutral way. It will be interesting to see what pops out.

A good source tree

A good source tree:

• Has a root-level README file.
  
• Contains all compile-time dependencies.
• With versions noted.
• With originations and licenses noted.
• With transitive dependencies noted.
  
• Can be compiled and linked easily.
• With one command.
  
• Without a network connection.
• Can be unit + integration tested easily.
• With one command.
• Without a network connection.

Hardly coding

URGENT ASSISTANCE!!!

HELP I CAN"T COMPILE>>> ERROR!!

[checkstyle] C:\work\mptstore\trunk\src\java\org\nsdl\mptstore\query\
provider\TriplePatternSQLProvider.java:35:45: '3' is a magic number.

I EVEN TRIED INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PROGRAMMER??

http://secretgeek.net/howtobeaprogrammer.asp

SO I SERCH GOOGLE LIKE A GOOD PROGRAMMER AND FOUND THE ANSER:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPzAjiLr5Zw

BUT HOW TO I PASTE VIDEO I"M USING ECLIPSE??

THANK YOU!!!

Reducing Firefox Memory Consumption

Firefox uses incredible amounts of memory. Some of this is caused by various undiagnosed memory leaks. Looking around on the net, I found a few things that can help, short of restarting all the time:

1. Make sure you have the latest version (currently 1.5.0.5)


2. Enter about:config in the address bar.


3. Right click, add Boolean: config.trim_on_minimize (true)


4. Right click, add Integer: browser.cache.memory.capacity (32768)


5. Restart Firefox.


6. If things get sluggish, minimize the window and restore it.

Using a tool like CachemanXP can quickly show how well the "trim_on_minimize" setting is working.