Encode, rename, upload, tag

Spent all putting together a workflow so I can encode, rename, upload and tag the video files from Bournemouth. First up the files are archived as flv's and Archive.org, and the WikiMedia commons do not allow proprietary codecs, therefore they only allow .ogv or .ogg files. I managed to find a ogg binaries for Quicktime here, meaning I could batch export the flv's. Then needed to rename the files from the native upload names using this. After that each file needs a csv of all the metadata, which can then be linked to via a RDF dump. Usefully Archive.org makes this metadata available as xml for both the parent project and the video files, so w should be able to use this in the RDF ?

Archive Org

The plan this week then is to upload a set of video's to Archive.Org - using this URI format:

www.archive.org/download/Landscape-portrait2010/Kevin_Carter/v10heora.ogv

from this I can develop the RDF - it's really important that I get a working version of this before plunging back into the writing.

Then need to publicise the content by uploading the RDF file to CKAN's datahub and notifying the semantic search engines via this:

semantic search engine notification URL and Software here.

http://pingthesemanticweb.com/api.php#1

RDF schema

Spent the day trying to visualise the schema that would be required to describe the Landscape-Portrait project overall as well as some of its video elements, from this I can hopefully develop a template which can be produced by Paul as part of a script.


Here is the schema:


Red is the entity, green properties, yellow classes etc, from this I was able to map different vocabularies for most of the entities, properties and classes; see here:

Interestingly I couldn't find a entity of either a 'question' or an 'answer' - I thought these might be sub properties or classes of a entity but could
not find it.

Found some interesting art related ontology's here:

http://dlib.york.ac.uk/ontologies/Openart/index.html
http://linkedevents.org/ontology#sec-namespace

Which were taken from here:

http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-12/FebMar12_Allinson.html


What is interesting is the degree of sophistication that is permissible in some spaces and not others, think we'll need to create 'community art' as a ontological term as none that I can see come near to it - Fro instance when looking at the FOAF ontology I was interested to see this property

http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_myersBriggs

Which has 16 personality classifications which can be used to describe a person -

RDF/RDFa/DataDump/Ontologies

Working through the different options I am now thinking to make either a RDF file, or include a RDFa snippet into the web page. Problem is that the Landscape-Portrait site is dynamically generated and there is not page that explicitly contains the video elements. Therefore we might create RDF pages for each postcode, an include all the portraits that relate to the postcode. What is also of interest is the idea that I might create (how do you create) a ontology to describe community artworks, this might include all differences of method and methodology.

Alongside all of this will be a data-dump of the metadata of Landscape-Portrait, so other users can download and make use of it.

I am not a programmer

Ever since deciding that if the rhetoric of Open Data is meaningful then i should be able to publish the Landscape/Portrait data fairly easily I have been bashing my head against a wall trying to think of a way this would work easily. Basically I have an ASP database with all the metadata that I need to translate into a RDF formatted LOD. Been messing about with Kasabi allday and whilst I like its point and shoot interface i can't see how to load large datasets into it. I think that maybe RDFa is the way forward, so a semantic snippet might be included on each page, but I need to work this through via a tutorial.

Open Data Art.

Read some interesting, if slightly optimistic things about the relationship of Open Data and art. I am now into the process of transferring the dataset created during the making of Landscape-Portrait into the public realm, ideally as linked open data (LOD) or/and as a Open licensed data dump. The problem with making available as LOD is I need to services of a programmer and this is not cheap. Also part of me thinks that their should be freely available tools so that a fairly technically adept person, such as myself, should be able  to do this, otherwise the rhetoric of Open Data is, as I have stated before, is severely constrained around technical ability and economics. So the option at moment is to output the data from LP in a CSV file and load that to various free platforms, such as OKF's Datahub, Kasabi (a commercial platforms currently free as its in Beta), Talis (who are commercial but offer free hosting for not for profits) as well as data sharing sites such as Googles Fusion Tables. The data will also be uploaded to Archive.org as well, to allow it to be used and viewed in the future. Another idea is to give the dataset to a hackday and allow it to be processed in that way.
It would be interesting to find a site that specialises in publishing art datasets, not data about art as Rob Myers has described, but the dataset as art object. Not found that yet ?

Consumer Focus: From broadcast to conversation – making open data work for you workshop

Spent this morning at the consumer Focus "From broadcast to conversation – making open data work for you" workshop aimed primarily at the voluntary sector making use of Open Data. First speaker Mark O'Neil from the cabinet office and part of the recently formed Government Digital Service (DGS) - he talked about the 'single domain' which is the governments replacement of direct.gov. The website is built around a API allowing data to be shared, however it is currently a beta and provides services. He also talked about 'agile delivery' methods, which equates to the wisdom of doing things quickly in a focused manner, rather than spending years building a massive system that is either inappropriate for use or no longer relevant. (Which is a bit similar to James Wallbank's promotion of 'good enough ICT') Mark stressed that he spent a lot of time talking to users, which seemed primarily to mean business users who provided services to what I would call the 'general public'. Within government he identified four areas of operation, at the level of citizen, business, inside government and specialist area of operation. He was then asked about the issues of read /write access and admitted we are a long way of that yet. He was up for email conversations though, contact mark.oneil@digital.cabinet.office.gov.uk.

Next up was Ed Parks who also worked for the cabinet office (is there a theme developing ?), in the transparency team. He talked a bit about the process which promoted Open Data to its current position as an explicit part of Open Government project (this came about as a result of a request from the PM), and although a project of transparency and citizenship, was mostly justified against business metrics. As he stated "Open Data as an engine for growth". Someone in the audience queried the method for deciding which datasets are released, as his company had come into direct competition with another government agency. The point was that the decision to publish particular datasets is driven by financial and political agendas, and that Open Data was used, as the last speaker said, 'as a Trojan horse'. Ed mentioned the the public data group was recently set up to offer the possibility to query the governments policy, and we should all take part (address here) He also mentioned a recent Guardian article (here is a response to it) that addressed some of these concerns, other initiatives included the setting up of the Open Data Initiative in Shoreditch, to help small business take advantage of Open Data, the Open Data/Privacy white paper and the Open Business forum and the government consultation group that featured the stars of Open Data promotion in this country (Rufus Pollock (OKFN) , Tim Berners-Lee W3C and Nigel Shadbolt. Cynically Harwood's  "people who are awaiting power'  springs to mind.

Next up was Dan ? from Nominetrust ?. He consulted with charities in their possible use of Open Data. These included wheelmap.org, RSPB and Barnsley hospital. He gave the example of the toilet map whereby a service (http://toiletfinder.org/about)  (there is also one built by  a charity around incontinence issues) also acted as a campaign tool, as in 'Why are their no toilets here". Dan cited the Indigo Trust as an organisation that had done considerable work in making use of and talking about the difficulties of implementing Open Data practices in charities.

Javier Ruiz Diaz from the Open Rights Group talked about the realities of Open Data publishing. He talked about three basic types of government data, PSI (Public Service Industry) this is core data - geotagged public data, this is where the money is (OS, Census etc). The second Policy/Accountability and the third public services. He also made reference to the use of Open Data as a Trojan Horse under which government ministers (Francis Maude) could include plans to share welfare data with private company Experian to reduce welfare fraud. He cited a recent UK based survey that the majority of the public want public data to Open and available. And again referring to the usability of Open Goverment data he cited the example of the publishing of a central government data set which contained all the expenditure for a particular year which was largely unusable due to the lack of metadata to contextualise it. So the metric used for volumes was not detailed 300 what ? the frequency per year/month/week ? etc, rendering much of the data unusable. He also pointed to some non commercial projects which have made use of Open Data, the Europeana has published Open Data about may of the cultural archives held across Europe, and on speaking about broken data cylces (i.e. the government not allowing read/write privileges of open government data) he invoked a distributed methodology whereby the dataset with the most users would be the one that was used, and would be default by the one that was most uptodate. Some interesting companies were mentioned most prominently Swirrl who provide consultancy to large public entities, in this case Hampshire County Council.