Comments for Musings

Comment on Fedora and Microservices by Alexander O'Neill

Alexander O'Neill — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:08:40 +0000

The first thing I thought of when starting to experiment with JMS was “Oh man two-way messaging would be so sweet.” On the other hand Evergreen relies really heavily on messaging and some of that workflow can be really tricky to debug.

Comment on Digital Asset Management for Public Broadcasting: Solr (Part 2 of ??) by Mark

Mark — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:07:13 +0000

Digital Asset Management for Public Broadcasting: Solr (Part 2 of ??) – Authoritative Opinion abner@comemail.net

Comment on Force Directed Positioning with PHP, SVG, and HTML by Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:06:44 +0000

Hi Gajus — No, I’ve stopped working on it and switched to a client-side javascript library called javascript information visualization toolkit (http://thejit.org)

Comment on Force Directed Positioning with PHP, SVG, and HTML by Gajus

Gajus — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:16:40 +0000

Hello,
was this project ever continued to develop? if so, I would like to see were it go. Please contact me. I am trying to make something like visual thesaurus & would be interested to see in your code logic. Danke schon. : )

Comment on Digital Asset Management for Public Broadcasting (Part 0 of ?) by chris

chris — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:39:12 +0000

Thanks Jack — I’m hoping one of the results of this series is to demonstrate that digital asset management is more than just storing files, but an active process of providing services and value on top of the content (which is where vendor-solutions seem to fail, and for which an open source approach could demonstrate real value).

I’m very interested to see how public media addresses the culture problem, and I can only hope it is addressed beyond technology and beyond additional work so it can become ingrained in what public media actually is. We’ll see, I guess.

Comment on Digital Asset Management for Public Broadcasting (Part 0 of ?) by Jack Brighton

Jack Brighton — Sun, 09 May 2010 14:43:18 +0000

Chris, thank you for identifying the issues and articulating them so well. I especially appreciate your point about the inadequacy of vendor-driven systems, and I agree that open source and standards-based solutions could be within reach. It’s frustrating to see top management continuing to spend big money on proprietary systems that fail to meet the range of our real DAM and archival requirements, while dismissing open source approaches as hippy culture or something. While it is understandable that top managers may not know a great deal about the technologies and practices involved, I think they should have more confidence in their own staff and the knowledge we have throughout the public media and moving image archival community. They should definitely listen to Chris Beer.

The lack of a collaborative culture is something we’ve been trying to address, and we need to bear down on it. I think we have a great opportunity to get serious stuff done over the next year or two. Many pieces seem to be moving into place, so let’s see if we can fit them together.

Keep up the great work,
Jack

Comment on Digital Asset Management for Public Broadcasting: Solr (Part 2 of ??) by John Mettraux

John Mettraux — Sun, 09 May 2010 08:33:58 +0000

Got it, many thanks for the detailed answer !

Comment on Digital Asset Management for Public Broadcasting: Solr (Part 2 of ??) by chris

chris — Sat, 08 May 2010 22:02:40 +0000

Hi John — I think ruote and Camel are both very viable and nearly interchangeable here (and the demonstrator in github makes ruote a very attractive option). The two “advantages” Camel has here (that aren’t technical, even) are very slight: (1) I learned a couple months ago of other institutions doing ESB-based workflows with institutional repositories so there’s probably an emerging community of practice with some interesting components to share, and (2) it was easier to get working under Tomcat. I’m also intrigued by the variety of components/participants Camel offers, and am slightly curious how much effort it’d take to convert a JCR to the Fedora API.

The biggest advantage ruote has is dynamic process definitions (and, for integrating with some of the architecture in Fedora, dynamic process definitions described by XML), which I’m still trying to replicate under Camel. Finally, in my tinkering with ruote, I’m a little concerned I haven’t been doing “it” right, so working with something that strictly enforces “Enterprise Integration Patterns” might be a valuable perspective.

Comment on Digital Asset Management for Public Broadcasting: Solr (Part 2 of ??) by John Mettraux

John Mettraux — Sat, 08 May 2010 15:59:50 +0000

Hello Chris,

“Because DAM likely involves many different workflows, I lean towards the more generic solutions”

A workflow engine like ruote is made for “many different workflows”, could you explain the “leaning” towards an ESB ?

Best regards,

John

Comment on Teaching PBCore, Questions and Notes by chris

chris — Tue, 04 May 2010 02:03:05 +0000

I posted some of my thoughts about public broadcasting and linked data in a new post , but to PBCore:

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about how to bring together PBCore and the semantic web. It seems like a pretty hard sell to start thinking about PBCore as a standard with a number of serializations (XML, RDF, etc), but my compromise position has been to just get some linked data attributes on everything (see ).

I also had a brief chat with some like-minded folk, which Jack Brighton wrote up at