All Events Related to: Allen H. Renear

E-Research Roundtable: IMLS DCC and the Europeana Data Model: Convergences and Next Steps
2011-11-09
 IMLS DCC is collaborating with Europeana, a massive international digital cultural heritage aggregation. This session will be a conversation about next steps toward meeting the challenges to interoperability between these two aggregations, particularly addressing the Europeana Data Model and its potential for accommodating IMLS DCC collections.
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E-Research Roundtable: Meditations on the Logical Form of a Metadata
2011-09-07
Open linked data and semantic technologies promise support for information integration and inferencing. But taking advantage of this support often requires that the information currently carried by ordinary "colloquial" metadata records be made explicit and available for computer processing.  Given the fairly simple structured nature of metadata records this looks easy to do. Turns out though that it is not at all easy to do. A number of very fundamental puzzles arise, some of them related to identifier elements, others are issues with knowledge representation in general.  Although related problems have been studied here at GSLIS for some time, the current systematic development is largely new -- its first exposure was just a few weeks ago as a "Late Breaking" report at "Baliage: The Markup Conference" (Montreal). It is also very much a work in progress (with suspected flaws) and so this is an invitation to participate in evolving this account of what metadata records really are, and how they do what they do.
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CIRSS Seminar: The Modifiability Puzzle
2010-09-24
We summarize presentations given at ASIS&T 2008 (Allen Renear, Karen Wickett, Dave Dubin) and Balisage 2009 and 2010 (Renear and Wickett) that analyze problems in our commonsense understanding of digital objects. The discussion of these problems began some years ago in the GSLIS Electronic Publishing Research Group and has more recently continued at times in the Conceptual Foundations Group. Related topics are now being actively pursued within the Data Concepts group (Dubin, Renear, Wickett, and Simone Sacchi) of the NSF funded Data Conservancy.

Abstract: The digital world seems to be a place of constant change. Documents are edited, databases updated, files modified, datasets reformatted, and so on. But apparently we are deluded. Standard theories of what digital objects are entail that those objects are immutable and cannot undergo any genuine modification at all. It gets worse. Arguments against modifiability do not apply only to digital objects and do not depend upon specialized definitions -- in a few simple steps ordinary beliefs lead to paradoxes about many things.

Embedded inconsistencies in our commonsense beliefs have long entertained philosophers, but our problem here is more than an idle Milesian amusement. While for the most part human beings manage quite well with inconsistent conceptual schemes, the emerging world of linked data and semantic technologies depends on precise definitions and straightforward logical reasoning, and carries out automatic inferencing, based on those definitions, often with few opportunities for human intervention and correction.

How can we reconcile our commonsense concepts of documents, databases, datasets, and the like with the unforgiving demands of semantic technologies? We believe this is a profound and urgent open question in information science and that the success of semantic technologies and linked data depends on its resolution. On Friday, we will not defend a specific answer but rather try to make the problem clear, and show that none of the known resolutions are without difficulties. We present you with the puzzle -- you tell us how to solve it.

Resources:

Renear, A. H., Dubin, D. and Wickett, K. M. (2008), When digital objects change — exactly what changes?. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 45:1-3. doi: 10.1002/meet.2008.14504503143

Renear, Allen H., and Karen M. Wickett. “Documents Cannot Be Edited.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009, Montréal, Canada, August 11-14, 2009. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 3 (2009). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol3.Renear01.

Renear, Allen H., and Karen M. Wickett. “There are No Documents.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010, Montréal, Canada, August 3-6, 2010. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 5 (2010). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol5.Renear01.
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E-Research Roundtable: NASA EOS Data Levels and Traditional Text Editing
2009-04-15
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