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.
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