Unit 13 - Protégé OWL & Conclusion

Discuss your experiences this semester and summarize what you think are the most important concepts and lessons learned.

The Protégé OWL tutorial was a challenging and rewarding assignment. Like many of the units this semester, it made me more confident in the installation and management of my VMware servers. It was finally fun to see a GUI on the server rather than a simple command line. Creating and editing a hierarchical ontology was markedly more frustrating than other tasks, however I believe it had much more to do with the learning curve of the software than the ontology theory.

Like so many units this semester, troubleshooting was as important as learning the software which we surveyed. Rarely do things work exactly like they say in the instructions/tutorials. Having taken some technical writing courses, I can sympathize with the writers of the tutorials, because versions change and steps are changed. In this case, my inverse properties of sibling objects were supposed to automatically update when I created the inverse property of the first object, but this did not happen. I ended up modifying all the objects manually. At least in this instance, it was only a matter of extra work, rather than total malfunction.

My take away from this course is that there are several digital collection management application out there. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Some are more socially engaging like Drupal. Others are more focused on one part of the information lifecycle like DSpace is strongest in preservation. All have different documentation and support communities. The only documentation that I hope to never review again is that of JHOVE. No collection management software was without its advantages and any new collection under consideration should be weighed against those pros and cons when selecting software.

VMware, Omeka & Plugins

Although the files are large, it’s possible to create a working virtual machine for download and playback in your Virtualization software (although in practice, it’s almost as much work and sometimes difficult to troubleshoot). In your blog, discuss the possibility of downloading a pre-installed VM versus building your own, from a learning and pedagogical perspective.

I think that Omeka plugins are much more fun than discussing the VM, but I'll touch on both. I think the fact that I preferred to download and install the GoogleTranslate plugin at the command line will give you the idea that I enjoyed setting up and configuring my VM. For known tasks, it is much faster to "wget http://etc" "unzip" and "sudo mv /target/directory" rather than going through WinSCP or other transfer program. By the time I log in to the VM through the program, I could have done it a the command line. Unfamiliar tasks are quite different and in those cases, I would benefit from visually dragging and dropping files (or whatever the tasks might entail). It's just the difference between recalling a command from memory or recognizing it in a list.

Since we did not do our assignments via the download and playback method, it is hard to be fair to both methods. I am happy we built the VMs from VMware and managed them at the command line. I'm no longer intimidated by the command line like I was at the beginning of the summer. The parenthetical, "although in practice, it’s almost as much work and sometimes difficult to troubleshoot" is not selling me on the alternative either.

Unit 11 - IR Home Sites

Harvester and jhove compete for the most mind-numbing software documentation. One long web page of sections and subsections are a hurdle to overcome. Yes the information is there, but most readers do not enjoy a long wall of text. When other software offer at least some screen shots or even video tutorials, these two are falling behind. Omeka is slightly better off in the textual department, dividing documentation into ‘getting started,’ ‘working with Omeka,’ and ‘advanced topics.’ Then there are screencasts that cover approximately the same information, but offers another way to find it for users that might learn better from audio & video. Eprints went the wiki route and features sections colorfully chunked into ‘getting started,’ ‘configuration,’ ‘customization,’ or ‘how-to guides’ and ‘technical reference.’ It is an environment which most users will find familiar and useful. DSpace and Drupal documentation and training are easy to navigate because they generally use a linear list of nodes that can be worked through in order or referenced individually. Drupal’s follows the familiar pattern of guides from installation to theme customization. I appreciate omeka, eprints, dspace, and drupal for all using screen shots that help identify what/where on the software the user is working on. Nearly all of them have mailing lists, discussion forums, or both. I do believe that the usability and currency of all these resources should weigh heavily on the users’ choice of software so they know how quickly or easily they will find answers to the inevitable bumps in the road.

Unit 10 - OAI Harvesters

Try some searches, and also see if you can identify the collections they draw from (there's usually a link somewhere to the list of contributing collections). In your blog, discuss what you think makes a good (useful) federated collection and why and how the service providers you selected did (or did not) create a good (useful) service.

Citebase is seeded by namely the arXiv.org database, a couple of EPrints databases, and some medical databases including Pubmed. The good features of this federated search are that it includes in the results line the number of times the article has been cited. On the detailed item page it lists what other articles cited the current item, easy access to references, and a tab listing similar articles, “cites similar articles to.” Considering its experimental state, the site is in very good condition. The results text could use some formatting to make it easier to read than its current lengthy black and blue text over white background.

8a - EPrints Install

I wish I could have recorded my description of my EPrints install that I told Bethany this week. I was lucky enough to cover a shift at a different library branch and so happened I was able to meet one of my classmates.

As usual, prof. Fulton's notes are very detailed and very precise about how to install step by step. My trouble this week did not come from the installation necessarily, but in the configuration phase. The user profile I created to admin the EPrints repository was without a password. This is documented in the install guide. We were to use sudo su eprints to begin configuration in the eprints directory. Whatever commands I attempted to run, the server kept demanding a password for eprints (which didn't exist). Other students had the same problem (or just confusion?) and documented it in the technical discussion forum. I thank them for that, but where those students had epiphanies, I was still lost. I could understand that eprints is not a sudo user, but that did not solve my trouble that the server insisted on the password. Again, as usual, I decided to start over from scratch the next day to better understand each step I took. Due to luck and persistence, I side stepped the problem and continued configuration per the documentation.

Comparing visual customization against DSpace and Drupal is difficult, since I hardly changed aesthetics on those installations. I can say that swapping the EPrints logo was easy and the documentation on altering html/css in EPrints looked quite straightforward.

Unit 7 - DSpace Cont.

I can see the value that both Drupal and DSpace bring to digital collections. Each has its own drawbacks too. The purpose of a project would determine which one is better suited to that collection. Drupal, for lack of a better word, is more casual. Yes, the administrator can create strict permissions for which users are allowed to post, edit, and delete in each sub-collection. But monitoring posts comes after they have been published to the site whereas DSpace has the ability to configure a structured review of posts before they are made. It is akin to having an editor go over the work before it is posted. This is just one example of how the purposes for which each of these applications were developed differ from one another. Drupal's ability to add thumbnails makes the collections and communities more blog-like. DSpace's workflows, Google interoperability function, and Dublin Core metadata standards which all work "out of the box" remind me more of an online database such EBSCO where context is sacrificed for control.

Since my collection is more like a sample of course documents a French teacher might post for a class and expect students to use as a one-stop place for that course, I can sacrifice the bit-level checksums, file format conversions, workflows, metadata control, and Google scholar "push" cataloging that come with DSpace. Instead, I am gaining a more visually appealing, community tagging, user commenting, and modular application that may take more effort to configure, but ultimately suits my purpose better in this instance.

Unit 6 - DSpace Install

The DSpace install took some time. I was caught off guard by how long the Maven package took to install. I would definitely need to follow a tutorial a couple more times before I felt comfortable doing the install without step-by-step instructions.

I have to say, DSpace was much more functional "out of the box" than I remember Drupal. There was much more configuration to be done with the Drupal install, "go to site building, configure, save, go to site configuration, configure, save, go to site building, etc." DSpace was ready to go with Dublin Core metadata prompts by default. If someone were unable or unwilling to take the time to configure Drupal with all the modules needed to function as desired, then DSpace would be the obvious choice. A user can practically just install it and start adding communities, collections, and items. The new user training units are a great resource for getting started.

Now that I have a small collection of my French lesson recordings entered, I would benefit from going back over the new user training to fill in the gaps that were a little foreign the first time through. Like Drupal, I am afraid that this software takes little time to begin using as an amateur and promises to take lots of time and energy to master. The volume contained in the DSpace Manual is intimidating or it could just be the "wall of text" that is the table of contents.

Unit 4 - Drupal Cont.

This week, you might choose to comment on how suitable Drupal might be for your collection. Begin to develop some criteria you would use to judge how well an application such as Drupal meets the needs of your collection and its users. We will expand on this problem over the semester.

It seems that the advantage of Drupal is, in short, management. In order to benefit from the management features, there need to be contributors. Hopefully, if building a digital library of items, people would not be assigned such a project alone, so I see Drupal being very beneficial for any project involving several contributors and regular updates.

My collection is a small sample, so it is difficult to see the benefit in the case of fifteen items which will remain static so long as I am the only one working on it. Features in content management, user management, and site building do show a great deal of flexibility. I can regulate which authenticated users control precisely which actions (e.g. creation, editing, deletion) in precisely which areas of expertise (e.g. planes, trains, automobiles, you name it, etc). Modules create even more options to explore, but from those that I used (date & cck), they were options which I could already control from site building. Well, the modules do speak for an active community of developers and certainly contain useful tools (if you can find them).

Unit 1 - Gathering a Digital Collection

It took me a couple of weeks to decide on a digital collection that would: 1) Not be made up of vacation photos, 2) Potentially useful/informative to others and 3) Be a subject on which I have some knowledge. Most of the digital collections I visited had historic photos or historic texts on subjects from transportation to baseball. Since I am not a historian or a sports fan, I finally settled on a series of French lesson audio files.

When it comes to categorizing the files, format and date are of little use. My first inclination is to allow tagging them by difficulty level, subject, author, and location where the conversation is supposedly taking place (e.g. Paris, Nice or Senegal).

Unit 11 - Course Retrospective

All the nuts and bolts finally got put into place to put a web server online, create a database, host it online, and make the information retrievable with the power of PHP & MySQL queries. Technical aspects aside, my feelings toward digital collections went from "it would be great if I could" to "now I can actually put a searchable database out on the web." I don't think that my perspective on digital collections has changed, because my goals for information sharing are still the same. I am still moved by the same cultural projects that communities gather and put online to educate themselves and others. If my perspective has changed somewhere it would be with the power of open source software and the role it can play in similar projects.

Unit 10 - MySQL

I thought that MySQL was easier to learn than some other concepts presented in the course, because it is human readable. "Select photographer_lname from photographers" is not very cryptic. Even getting into some of the commands such as joining tables, order by, where like %, and counting are still understandable. It does take some practice to see how these operators work together and to practice writing well formed queries without mistakes, but overall this was unproblematic. In fact, this is the point in the course where I began to feel that there was some power within my keystrokes. I could write a table, write a query, and see the fruits of my labors in the results. Finally, I was creating information and asking the program to find patterns in the data.

Unit 8 - Technology Planning

During these readings, I was not surprised by the lack of effective planning in technology industry especially to do with software development, because I have read about this for some other courses. But what I was tickled to learn which I did not know was that more projects fail for running overtime than for running over budget. There seems to be a culture of "just do it" in the technology field with a minority of companies that weave an effective "let's plan it!" into the project. But we should all know by now that spending ten percent of our project time making a blueprint for a house will save use ten times the reworking pain when the home does not meet homebuyer's requirements or construction code, heck the chimney went in the bathroom! Doers have a reputation for being great at doing, but must be convinced that planning now is not a waste of time, but a time saver later when the work does not have to be reworked. My friend is experiencing this right now, because no one thought the project warranted a plan. Now, team members are learning that they have very different ideas about the basic goals of the project and how it is supposed to look. Rather than defining goals, they have been assigned tasks and milestones (all well and good), but when they reach those milestones, the manager discovers the work is not what was desired and the vicious cycle continues.

Unit 7 - XML and hosting

The w3schools tutorials are very helpful to me and usually give enough information to get started. I prefer a textual tutorial rather than pausing a video, rewinding it, and listening over again if I was unclear. The textual guides let me read/learn at my pace rather than the pace of the speaker. This was my first experience with XML and it showed me just how flexible it is. Rather than being restricted to the preconfigured tags of a language like HTML, XML allows me to categorize items as I wish. This freedom does create the problem of whether certain lines should be an element or an attribute. As is usually the case with an organization scheme, it depends on how one will use the information. There is some gratification in thinking through whether to write an attribute or an element and its justification. Here is the XML scheme that I wrote for practice.

Unit 6 - HTML

In order to refresh my memory on HTML, because the basics have not really changed, I worked my way through the www.w3schools.com HTML tutorial. I created a practice file that links to a couple of other practice files within a folder.

After working through the HTML tags in an essentially draft document with no real content, just to use the tags, I rewrote my u.arizona.edu homepage with an updated biography, updated photo, and links that I have discovered through this last school year. Now, my page may not use all of the formatting and styles that I learned from the tutorial, but now I have a reference file with my own notes that I had see when I need to implement a new convention on my web page.

Unit 5

The course has referenced a variety of mediums for learning the content needed to navigate Linux, networking, and ultimately the LAMP project running. In previous courses I would had definitely said that I learn best from reading articles or textbooks. If I read a text, write some notes, and review them, I remember the content better than other styles. That seemed to work well when studying history, English, or philosophy, but the medium that has greatly helped me with configuring programs for 672 has been video. In the world of words and discussion, reading texts is my best way to learn the subject, but in the world of computer screens it has been very helpful to see and listen to someone performing the task, then repeating it myself. Once I have seen a video, then a document with instructions and screen captures would probably be a faster reference if I had to refresh myself to repeat the task.

Unit 4

This unit on creating users and groups in Linux cleared up some of my previous confusion about user permissions. For the moment, I have written down the permissions given by each number on a post-it and displayed it prominently next to my monitor.
1 = execute only
2 = write only
3 = write and execute
etc.

The text spent several pages going over the importance of encrypted passwords stored in the shadow file and the security risk posed if a user's password is easily guessed, e.g. "password." What jumped out to me was that some programs will allow the user to create a long password, but will only remember the first 8 characters. I have on occasion jumbled the last couple letters in a password and still been granted access to my account. Now I have some idea why that works, although I could not predict which programs do this or not.

In order to install Webmin this week and practice adding users using a GUI via web browser, I had to install Perl which turned into a long frustrating search for a typo.

The file I needed was libmd5-perl_2.03-1_all.deb whereas I had been been omitting the "d."

Week 2:

This week consisted of using the virtual private network (vpn) and virtual network computing (vnc) to remotely gain control of a computer running Ubuntu 10.04. From there, I spent most of my time going over the tutorials on command lines and putting them into the command line interface (cli) or terminal. The easy part of this was getting the VPN and VNC running. Those posed no problem to me. The tricky part was getting the CLI to do what I wanted.


Using "cd" to move up and down the directories in the terminal was fine. It helps to navigate and figure out the maze of /home/user1/folders/etc or going back to the root / then navigating to /usr/share/example-content. Then ls, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, and file all worked as expected. I rejoiced. The "less" command gave me problems. In theory, this should allow me to view text files in a readable format, but all I got was gobbledygook. Since I have installed Ubuntu on my hard drive as a virtual machine, I will continue to experiment with less and see if I can't figure out what is going wrong.

The most confusing part of this week's tutorials is ownership and permissions. Logging in as the Super User, I can change the permissions of a file with chmod, chgrp, and chown. So a file which is rwxrwxrwx is readable, writable, and executable by the owner, the group, and others. So, I see how in binary 111 makes something rwx or 101 makes it r-x. What gives me trouble is that
100 = 4

101 = 5

110 = 6

111 = 7
For the time being, I think I'll be sticking to an alphabetical approach i.e. chmod a+rwx

Week 1:

So, there are lots of threads about common problems such as installing, network connections, browser problems, USB problems, audio, printers, etc. The threads are all very active, forty in the last three hours just in Beginner Talk. Some acronyms that I am still getting accustomed to seeing are WINE & GNU. I find it funny that the community likes to name things after what they are not. Wine is not an emulator and GNU is not Unix. “Thanks guys, glad we cleared that up.”

My first thread into the Ubuntu Forums and I am already a fan of this community. One of the sticky threads in the Absolute Beginners Forum is calling for a Users Day, June 5^th, where veterans of the community teach beginner topics to new users. It seems that the idea grew out of discussions in November of last year and had some success in January. Anyway, it appears to be great timing in conjunction with our course, as if there were not enough venues for finding assistance as we get Ubuntu OS running on our PCs. Past topics were installation, getting help, command lines, partitioning, and more. To participate in Users Day, people must log in to an IRC session for Q&A with the community. The last time I tried using IRC was probably ten years ago. I might prefer the asynchronous method of using the sticky thread: New to Ubuntu? Start Here…

For more on Users Day, try here