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.