Musica migrans - Topic Maps portal about the migration paths of Eastern European musicians in the...

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Musica migrans

Topic Maps portal about the migration paths of Eastern European musicians in the 19th century

TMUC 2008 Oslo, April 2008

Lutz Maicher, University of [email protected]

2TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])


www.Musicamigrans.de AutomatischeSprachverarbeitung

How it all began …

During a concert break we discussed with Prof. H. Loos,

who is one of the leading German historians about the Eastern European music history

that he dreams of a system which allows him to collectand analyse

biographical data about little-known Eastern Europeanmusicians in the 19th century.

He was interested in making usable all the relationships in the data!

This sounded like a case forTopic Maps, so we asked

Mr. Loos to sketch his domain…




… and he started to sketch the domain!

Personhas names

with a lot of different spellings

primary nationality of a person

Nationalitysecondary nationality of a personDate

birthday of a person

day of death of a person

Placebirthplace of a person

place of death of a person

Confessionconfessions of a person

Professionmain profession of a person

secondary profession of a person

Referencearchive encyclopaedia

further literature

has educational development

start and end of educational phase

place of educational phase

goal of educational phase

has professional development

start and end of a job

place of a job

profession in a job

has concerts

date of a concert

place of a concert




Are Topic Maps well suited for such a project?

• Roy Lachica published the "Checklist for deciding implementing Topic Maps" in his blog

(http://fuzzzyblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/checklist-for-deciding-implementing.html)

We will follow this checklist to get our points …




Do we need a flexible data model?

Do we have information consisting of diverse concepts and need to make distinctions between their relations and the roles the associations play among each other?

Are we not sure if this conceptualisation will change in the future?

3 points

total: 3/3




Do we need a high degree of semantic interoperability?

Do we need a strong and accurate identification of subjects?

2 points

total: 5/5




Do we need to merge semantic information from diverse sources?

Do we want to share our information with other systems?

2 points

total: 7/7




Do we develop a knowledge centric application?

Is there a need for a paradigm that can collate everything known about any given set of subjects?

1 point

total: 8/8




Do we access information using different navigation paths?

Do we need a technology that is tailored for displaying multiple views in networked information structures?

Do we need faceted navigation or search?

1 point

total: 9/9

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TMUC 2008, Oslo, Lutz Maicher ([email protected])



Do we need a strong separation between metadata and resources?

Do we have authors that work with metadata and others that add or edit resources?

0 point

total: 10/11

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Do we have the goal to be the first to adopt new technologies?

1 point

total: 11/12

Yes.

12




Conclusion

our result: 11/12

"If you got a sum of 3 or more points you might have a good reason for embarking on a Topic Map development project."

it seems that we might have a good reason to use Topic Maps (-;

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The perfect match …

• Prof. H. Loos provides a very interesting use case for us• we provide an interesting technology for Prof. H. Loos

• together we convinced the German federal gonvernment to spend funding for setting-up Musica migrans(Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Angelegenheiten der Kultur und der Medien)

– from October 2007 until June 2008

– funding for implementing the portal

– funding to pay 25 historians from Eastern Europe to collect all information of the life courses of 50 musicians each= 1250 biographies

Now we could start to implement the portal …

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Our approach for implementing Topic Maps portals …

source: http://www.jjg.net/elements/

Jesse J. Garrett:The Elements of User Experience

http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements_simpleplanes.pdf

portal as software interface

portal as hypertext system

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Technical Issues

• Prolog: – it's hard to win funding from German government for salaries– it's very hard to get funding from German government for licence fees

(and if you have to pay a yearly maintainance fee to the software vendor, the sustainability plan of your funding proposal will completely collapse)

• Conclusion– we needed an open source solution for building a Topic Maps web application

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RTM – the first best solution

• Ruby based Topic Maps Engine currently developed in Leipzig(see Benjamin Bock's tutorial on Wednesday)

– lot of nice features for fast development of Topic Maps portals– built in model driven approach

• http://rtm.rubyforge.org/

• but not available for productive purposes when we started in October 2007

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QuaaxTM – we used the second best solution

• PHP based Topic Maps Engine which uses open source database server for persistence

• http://quaaxtm.sourceforge.net/

• used for Musica migrans, but needed some customisation for productive purposes– hand-made model driven approach

• about scalability: we don't know, but have a look at Musica migrans in summer 2008 when we will have more than thousend musicians in the system

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Status of Musica migrans

• Productive version was released mid March 2008– development time: appr. 500 working hours

• filling in the data into the system starts slowly …

• we have money for a further half year and we are full of ideas …

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What's next in Musica migrans?

• Google Maps + Musica migrans – visualisation of the migration paths

• Statistics for analysing the data in the Topic Map– i.e. detection of persons with similar relationships

• XTM 2.0 Backup (not part of QuaaxTM)• Full-text search in the Topic Map (not part of QuaaxTM)• Content negotation: get all information about a person as

– HTML – the portal we have– XTM – for interoperability with other systems– PDF – as dossier for print and email

• Logging (and undo) of change operations• Merging of Topics (via the user interface)• Optimization of layout and handling of the user interface

– filter and sorting – faceted navigation, but we don't have a query language in the engine

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What's next after Musica migrans? Musica migrans II, we hope …

During a coffee break in a Musica migrans meeting we discussed with Prof. H. Loos,

who is one of the leading German historians about the Eastern European music history, as you know,

that he dreams of a system which allows him to collectand analyse

data about the changeful history of Eastern Europeanmusic institutions in the 19th century.

He was interested in making usable all the relationships in the data!

And if all this data would be wired with Musica migrans!

This sounded like a case forTopic Maps, so we asked

Mr. Loos to sketch his domain…

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Questions? Questions!

www.musicamigrans.deLutz Maicher ([email protected])

… we are very interested in projects using Topic Mapsin the humanities! Contact us, if you have an idea!

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