Audit

It seems like a good idea to take stock of my recent foray into publishing landscape-Portrait data into the public realm. My first plan was to create several pages in Wikipedia, these would consist of a page about Landscape-Portrait, a page about the discipline of Digital public art and Digital Community Art and one about my own postcode N19 4EH. My plan was to link all these together, and hopefully the next time DBpedia (DBpedia is the Semantic Web mirror of Wikipedia) do an import of semantic data from Wikipedia, turning all the data into RDF LOD these pages would be included. Unfortunately several pages were rejected as a non remarkable concept - the only ones that survived were the LP and Digital public art page. That said I did add some of the video's about N194eh to the upper holloway page, so it will be interesting to see how ts works (there is a live SPARQL query @ http://live.dbpedia.org/page/Digital_Public_arts but it seems to be down at the moment.)

My next thought was to upload all the video content and metadata to Archive.org. Jeff from Archive has been very helpful and this seems a good solution for archiving the work, but it is not available as semantic data, it does however offer a fixed URI for the content so this could be utilised as part of RDF schema based around a postcode, also it allows batch uploads which Wikipedia does seem to offer to new users. With this in mind i have been looking at Freespace, a Google funded initiative which operates in a similar manner to Wikipedia. I created a page for my postcode N19 4eh and referenced the my own video portrait from LP using the fixed URI, however like Wikipedia the page was deleted. The plan now is to work out how to associate this resource with other URI resources which talk about the same entity - i.e. the N19 4EH postcode. I've posted various questions to OKN forums.... waiting for a replay.

I've also suggested an idea to have half hour online surgeries where practitioners, such as myself, can talk to an experienced practitioner about the ambition for a particular project and receive some guidance.

URI smilarity log

Trying to find out if there is an attribute of a URI which records some type of 'SameAsValue' - so different resource stores that relate to the same entity are in some way linked. If this is the case, then it would be possible to 'connect' different attributes, such as the geographical makeup of a postcode with the experience - in video say - of living there.

Video to text transcription

All the video uploaded to Archive.org will be accompanied by a spread sheet of metadata. I was thinking to add a field containing the spoken text within each video. Unfortunately most software based - automated  audio to transcript convertors - are not of a good enough quality. This means that they are used in conjunction with hand made transcripts, such as commercial service SPeakertext.   

Other non commercial academic software convertors come with a caveat concerning there accuracy, such as transana.

Archive V's FreeSpace

By using Archive.org a permanent URL can be obtained for the video interviews from LP, these can then be referenced as attribute by RDF as part of a fixed resource for each entity (postcode) referenced by LP. The question is where to locate this resource, archive.org or some derivative of Google's such as FreeSpace.

Struggle

Really straining with the structuring of the final phase of LP. If I put the video content on Archive.org that's good - the metadata could be stored as a dataset on the OKN CKAN/data hub site or http://thedatahub.org/dataset/freebase. Freebase (owned/Housed by Google) would allow me to publish all the content and the metadata in one place, it can also be queried in a language like SPARKL, mmm choices. K

Harwood

Whilst working away at this technical issue of open data, data in the public realm, access and accessibility there is something at the back of my mind which I am uncomfortable with. Its sort of generated by the embrace of 'openess' within Open data at a governmental level. How it is portrayed as an inherently good thing to push all this data into the public realm, which seems like an act of disavowal, kinda 'here take it, so I don't have to be responsible for it any longer'. This unease is amplified in an essay by artist Harwood,

Government data produced under this notion of transparency can be viewed
as operating the ventricles of an enlightened power, interconnecting the
domains of government and population. The relative openness of the data
can be seen as an attempt to unfold ârationalistâ attempts to evidence
decisions. This transparency debate creates a protocol between
government and non-government Database Management System administrators
and ethical statistical analysts who summon the latent energies
contained in the new knowledge to power their differing political
factions. This is a data exchange between those who can already perceive
data from its modes of representation or to put it another way
understand the construction of the data and wish to exploit it as a form
of self-reflexive critique of government.

There is then a sense that this 'Openess' masks some other forms of systematic manipulation. In reading about Matta-Clarkes engagement with durational works, such as window blow out  there seems some connection between the robust, irrefutable logic of 'Open Data' and the need to make works which are anything but, and in this way perhaps
some of this instrumental logic is exposed.

Archive.org wins

Finally getting some idea of how to locate the content from Landscape-Portrait
in the public realm, and hopefully rendering it accessible via the use of RDF
Linked data markup.

Just has an email from Jeff at Archive.org. There is a way to batch  upload
data and metadata to the archive, what is better still is that there is a
static URi, so this content can be included within a structured publication
of Open linked data.

With this in mind I have stopped uploading content to WIkipedia, as I no
longer think it is the right place. My plan had been to upload new pages
for each of the postcodes featured in Landscape-Portrait but this has proved
an unsuccessful approach and extremely time consuming. Far better to
create my own linked data page for each postcode and feature the video
content their.