Other Initiatives

Actually there are a couple of initiatives that I think would be of interest either for the existing PORT project and/or for an expanded one.

It is not public, yet, but some friends at the University of Kentucky are about to release an Eclipse plugin that allows the linking of an image of a manuscript to a transcription of the same (think image map from the early days of the WWW) and allows scholars to "encode" the text by selecting either in the image or transcription window, with menu lists of what they wish to say about the portion of text in question. No markup ever displayed to the user, simply the manuscript and its transcription.

At present it has to be installed on your local workstation and I am not sure how well it would work with large images/files over the WWW, nor if they have dealt with the attendant security issues. Hmmm, "projects," a term meaning the images, transcriptions, DTDs, etc., could be stored remotely and I assume some login process to control access would not be all that difficult to arrange.

When I first saw the software, it was using a database to store overlapping markup in separate streams. Actually I did a lecture for the CS department on overlap and they have subsequently implemented Sperberg-McQueen/Huitfelt's GODDAG structure, although without validation. See: http://dblab.csr.uky.edu/~eiaco0/docs/expath/ (I was hopeful they would implement JITTs, but I must admit they did a good job with GODDAG.)

Note that this is a close collaboration between CS and Humanities departments, quite unusual. I seem to recall Kevin Kiernan saying that they had gotten NSF money to fund part of the work on the Electronic Beowulf and Electronic Boethius projects. I have corresponded with Kevin and know that he is interested in collaborating with other projects. I tried to get the SBL to follow up on that idea but they were more interested in "... tell[ing] the hour without error and make a modest noise in doing so" for those of you who know your Neitzsche.

Speaking of overlap a bit more, I have recently become interested in restating the grove paradigm from HyTime without the architectural form syntax and think there is potential for a data structure quite similar to the GODDAG from UKy, but with the ability to do validation, partial parsing, etc. Not to mention that it would work with any source of data and not simply markup.

I think most of the major components for a collaboration environment exist, albeit that some glue will be required to meld them together into an interface that will interest the average scholar.

Not to mention building relationships between various projects, which like most scholarly projects/societies, etc., all see themselves as being the center of creation, which leaves them very little to discuss with others. I suppose that is one of my strengths, I consider "being" to be an attribute that is only applicable to the Deity and "becoming" is the lot of all else. If one views projects, etc., as "becoming" then the door is open to wide ranging cooperation/collaboration to reach goals beyond any of them in isolation.

I think topic maps will play a major role in a collaborative environment. For those of you who have not seen it, the latest draft of the Topic Maps Reference Model (TMRM), can be found at: http://www.isotopicmaps.org/TMRM/TMRM-latest.pdf

I started to summarize the paradigm but the TMRM is only three pages and a paragraph long (sans all the boiler plate stuff) and is the result of some 3 years of labor and word smithing.

Looking forward to future developments!