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

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

An example application: The Frisian Ox?

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
• Content Management Interoperability Standard

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