musica migrans - topic maps portal about the migration paths of eastern european musicians in the...
DESCRIPTION
The goal of the historical research project Musica migrans is to capture the migration and travel paths of 19th century German speaking musicians in the countries of Eastern Europe. The main focus is on gathering information about lesser known musicians of this epoch. The goal is to reveal all the hitherto uncharted relationships between people, places and institutions, collect them together in a topic map, present them in a timeline, and thereby gain new insights into the history of these communities and schools of practice. In the first stage, 25 researchers from Eastern Europe are collecting information on 1,250 musicians using a Topic Maps-based colloborative web application. For each musician information from the following categories is collected: names in different languages, dates and places of birth and death, nationality, places of study and work, and all (known) performances and references. Due to the subject-centricity of the knowledge model, all co-occurrences of two different persons (at the same point) will be gathered at one topic and hidden relationships between the musicians will come to the surface. The portal is implemented in PHP using the (extended) QuaaxTM engine and uses AJAX technologies to provide a rich user experience. The requirements of the portal required the extension of the engine with features such as a full-text index and and XTM parser/serialiser. A web service interface allows the integration of the portal information into other applications by requesting Topic Maps fragments. The portal was first released in January 2008 and a production version is planned for March 2008. This presentation describes the background to the project, the reasons why Topic Maps was chosen as the underlying technology, and the architecture of the portal itself, which can serve as a model for similar activities in the field of cultural heritage.TRANSCRIPT
Institut für Informatik
AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Musica migrans
Topic Maps portal about the migration paths of Eastern European musicians in the 19th century
TMUC 2008 Oslo, April 2008
Lutz Maicher, University of [email protected]
2TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
How it all began …
During a concert break we discussed with Prof. H. Loos,
who is one of the leading German historians about the Eastern European music history
that he dreams of a system which allows him to collectand analyse
biographical data about little-known Eastern Europeanmusicians in the 19th century.
He was interested in making usable all the relationships in the data!
This sounded like a case forTopic Maps, so we asked
Mr. Loos to sketch his domain…
3TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
… and he started to sketch the domain!
Personhas names
with a lot of different spellings
primary nationality of a person
Nationalitysecondary nationality of a personDate
birthday of a person
day of death of a person
Placebirthplace of a person
place of death of a person
Confessionconfessions of a person
Professionmain profession of a person
secondary profession of a person
Referencearchive encyclopaedia
further literature
has educational development
start and end of educational phase
place of educational phase
goal of educational phase
has professional development
start and end of a job
place of a job
profession in a job
has concerts
date of a concert
place of a concert
4TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Are Topic Maps well suited for such a project?
• Roy Lachica published the "Checklist for deciding implementing Topic Maps" in his blog
(http://fuzzzyblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/checklist-for-deciding-implementing.html)
We will follow this checklist to get our points …
5TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Do we need a flexible data model?
Do we have information consisting of diverse concepts and need to make distinctions between their relations and the roles the associations play among each other?
Are we not sure if this conceptualisation will change in the future?
3 points
total: 3/3
6TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Do we need a high degree of semantic interoperability?
Do we need a strong and accurate identification of subjects?
2 points
total: 5/5
7TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Do we need to merge semantic information from diverse sources?
Do we want to share our information with other systems?
2 points
total: 7/7
8TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Do we develop a knowledge centric application?
Is there a need for a paradigm that can collate everything known about any given set of subjects?
1 point
total: 8/8
9TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Do we access information using different navigation paths?
Do we need a technology that is tailored for displaying multiple views in networked information structures?
Do we need faceted navigation or search?
1 point
total: 9/9
10
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Do we need a strong separation between metadata and resources?
Do we have authors that work with metadata and others that add or edit resources?
0 point
total: 10/11
11
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Do we have the goal to be the first to adopt new technologies?
1 point
total: 11/12
Yes.
12
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Conclusion
our result: 11/12
"If you got a sum of 3 or more points you might have a good reason for embarking on a Topic Map development project."
it seems that we might have a good reason to use Topic Maps (-;
13
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
The perfect match …
• Prof. H. Loos provides a very interesting use case for us• we provide an interesting technology for Prof. H. Loos
• together we convinced the German federal gonvernment to spend funding for setting-up Musica migrans(Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Angelegenheiten der Kultur und der Medien)
– from October 2007 until June 2008
– funding for implementing the portal
– funding to pay 25 historians from Eastern Europe to collect all information of the life courses of 50 musicians each= 1250 biographies
Now we could start to implement the portal …
14
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Our approach for implementing Topic Maps portals …
source: http://www.jjg.net/elements/
Jesse J. Garrett:The Elements of User Experience
http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements_simpleplanes.pdf
portal as software interface
portal as hypertext system
15
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
16
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
17
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
18
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
19
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
20
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
21
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
22
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
23
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
24
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
25
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
26
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
27
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
28
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
29
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
30
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
31
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
32
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
33
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
34
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
35
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
36
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
37
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
38
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
39
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
40
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
41
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
42
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
43
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
44
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
45
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
46
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
47
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
48
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
49
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
50
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
51
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
52
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
53
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
54
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
55
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
56
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
57
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Technical Issues
• Prolog: – it's hard to win funding from German government for salaries– it's very hard to get funding from German government for licence fees
(and if you have to pay a yearly maintainance fee to the software vendor, the sustainability plan of your funding proposal will completely collapse)
• Conclusion– we needed an open source solution for building a Topic Maps web application
58
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
RTM – the first best solution
• Ruby based Topic Maps Engine currently developed in Leipzig(see Benjamin Bock's tutorial on Wednesday)
– lot of nice features for fast development of Topic Maps portals– built in model driven approach
• http://rtm.rubyforge.org/
• but not available for productive purposes when we started in October 2007
59
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
QuaaxTM – we used the second best solution
• PHP based Topic Maps Engine which uses open source database server for persistence
• http://quaaxtm.sourceforge.net/
• used for Musica migrans, but needed some customisation for productive purposes– hand-made model driven approach
• about scalability: we don't know, but have a look at Musica migrans in summer 2008 when we will have more than thousend musicians in the system
60
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Status of Musica migrans
• Productive version was released mid March 2008– development time: appr. 500 working hours
• filling in the data into the system starts slowly …
• we have money for a further half year and we are full of ideas …
61
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
What's next in Musica migrans?
• Google Maps + Musica migrans – visualisation of the migration paths
• Statistics for analysing the data in the Topic Map– i.e. detection of persons with similar relationships
• XTM 2.0 Backup (not part of QuaaxTM)• Full-text search in the Topic Map (not part of QuaaxTM)• Content negotation: get all information about a person as
– HTML – the portal we have– XTM – for interoperability with other systems– PDF – as dossier for print and email
• Logging (and undo) of change operations• Merging of Topics (via the user interface)• Optimization of layout and handling of the user interface
– filter and sorting – faceted navigation, but we don't have a query language in the engine
62
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
What's next after Musica migrans? Musica migrans II, we hope …
During a coffee break in a Musica migrans meeting we discussed with Prof. H. Loos,
who is one of the leading German historians about the Eastern European music history, as you know,
that he dreams of a system which allows him to collectand analyse
data about the changeful history of Eastern Europeanmusic institutions in the 19th century.
He was interested in making usable all the relationships in the data!
And if all this data would be wired with Musica migrans!
This sounded like a case forTopic Maps, so we asked
Mr. Loos to sketch his domain…
63
TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])
Institut für Informatik
www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung
Questions? Questions!
www.musicamigrans.deLutz Maicher ([email protected])
… we are very interested in projects using Topic Mapsin the humanities! Contact us, if you have an idea!