Project Bamboo in Oxford Terena EMC2 29 Jun 2011 Outline - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Project Bamboo in Oxford Terena EMC2 29 Jun 2011

Outline ● Background ● VRE projects ● Bamboo Planning Project ● Bamboo Technology Project ● What the project as a whole are up to ● What we're doing in Oxford

Building a VRE for the Humanities ● JISC Virtual Research Environment programme (2005) ● Requirements for an Institutional VRE for the Humanities in Oxford ● Capturing user requirements from researchers across the division ● How do the Humanities differ from large scale Science? ● No predefined technology

A VRE for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts ● JISC VRE2 programme (2007 – 2009) ● Narrows focus down to specific group ● Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents

VRE aims ● Support Collaboration ● as if a group of scholars sitting round the table ● works in a web browser

An example application: The Frisian Ox? New Frisian tablet. transcription by Original A.K. Bowman, transcription by R.S.O. Tomlin, C.W. Vollgraff, and K.A. Worp, 1917 -- “ De 2009 tabella forthcoming -- emptionis “ Emptio bovis aetatis Traiani Frisica : the nuper in Frisia ‘Frisian ox sale’ reperta ” reconsidered”

Discussing the Frisian stilus table

VRE aims ● Support Collaboration ● as if a group of scholars sitting round the table ● works in a web browser ● Customisable ● choose and arrange the things you need

Project Bamboo planning ● Funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ● Increase efficiency in humanities projects through a common platform Chris Mackay (Mellon): Mellon spends approx 2/3 of the cost of humanities projects on building and sustaining the technology to support them, and only 1/3 on scholarship. A shared platform which future projects adopt and extend could reverse those proportions.

Project Bamboo planning ● 2008 - 2010 ● Many institutions involved ● “approximately 600 faculty, librarians, and technologists from 115 institutions” ● Mostly North American – UK participants included Cambridge, Edinburgh and OU

Project Bamboo planning ● A series of workshops ● Scholarly Practices ● Scholarly Narratives – how scholars perceive technology for their work ● 10 demonstrators – small scale prototype projects

Bamboo Technology Project ● Australian National University ● Indiana University ● Northwestern University ● Tufts University ● University of California, Berkeley ● University of Chicago ● University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign ● University of Maryland ● University of Oxford ● University of Wisconsin, Madison

Bamboo Technology Project ● Funded by Mellon ● Not as generous as planning project! ● At least half effort from institutional contributions ● Fell fund have assisted with Oxford share ● Three year project in two phases ● Phase 1: Oct 2010 – Mar 2012 ● Eventually to be sustained by consortium ● Model similar to Sakai, Kuali

Bamboo Technology Project ● All technology free to use in HE ● That developed by Bamboo available as Open Source ● May sell SaaS access to Bamboo for institutions who don't want to manage infrastructure themselves ● Bamboo's plan covers a broad area ● Split into several areas

Bamboo Services Platform ● Basic Platform Services ● ID/Person profile ● Authentication ● Groups ● Scholarly Services ● Web services offering specific functionality ● Examples only in 1 st phase: – Places in texts – Morphological Analysis

Collections Interoperability ● Provide consistent web services access ● Crucial for Bamboo ● Tool developers work to one standard ● Persuade Collections to build to one interface ● Or build adaptors on top of existing interface ● Standard being developed based on CMIS ● C ontent M anagement I nteroperability S tandard

Collections Interoperability ● Initial Candidate collections ● HathiTrust digital library – Mostly content from Google digitisation ● EEBO – TCP – Early English Books Online ● The Perseus Digital Library project – Classical material ● JSTOR – Journals ● ...

Workspaces ● Store and organize sets of digital content ● Annotate and analyse content ● Collaboration with other scholars

Workspaces ● Recognition that there won't be one single interface ● Institutions will want to fit in with local infrastructure ● Phase one building several workspace implementations ● Berkeley – Platform based on Alfresco ● Platform based on HubZero – Platform for scientific collaboration – Initially Nano-technology – Based on Joomla CMS ● OpenSocial – Investigate portable components

Tools & Services Registry ● Associated with Workspaces ● Aggregate descriptions of technology and content ● Comments, ratings, and reviews

Corpora Space ● A more full featured set of tools for one community as demonstration ● In phase one, a design and exploration exercise ● CorporaCamps ● Woodchipper ● visualization tool

Oxford Bamboo Activities ● Port VRE-SDM tools to OpenSocial ● Partly done as part of VRE2 project ● Deploy locally in OpenSocial container ● Working with SURFnet to use container from COIN project ● Service available for Oxford users ● Also for use in external environments ● Work with Bamboo partners to get OpenSocial working in their workspaces ● More tools, including to demo Bamboo Platform services