Angela Piccini University of Bristol

1. Semantic Tools for Arts Research:A Case Study in ICTs and the Research Process in the Creative and Performing Arts Angela Piccini University of Bristol

2. PARIP Explorer background • Identify the range of mixed-mode research practices in UK and selected international higher education institutions and produce a database of these materials for use by the communities.

3. The stand-alone database projects:

10. The user problem in 2001: • Difficult to use • Blunt searching • Lack of connection • Centralised classification systems

11. 2001 vision -The need to visualise relationships rather than reproduce activities as stand-alone initiatives • Detailed information about people, practices and places • Multiple windows for multimedia streaming • User-generated content to allow upload and annotation • Aesthetic drive • Users wanted a service to make others’ practices available to them

12. Institute for Learning and Research Technology • Sarah Agarwal, Ben Joyner, Libby Miller, Simon Price

13. Home pages typically said things such as: • My name is... • I work for... • I'm interested in... • I live near... • My blog is... • I write in this weblog... • You can see me in this picture...

14. FOAFhttp://rdfweb.org/foaf/ • Semantic Web http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ • RDF/XMLhttp://esw.w3.org/topic/RdfXmlSyntax

15. Semantic web technologies could be used in many ways to transform the functionality of the web: • rich metadata for media and content to improve search and management; • rich descriptions of web services to improve discovery and composition; • common access wrappers for information systems to simplify integration of disparate systems; • common lingua franca for exchange of semantically rich information between active software agents;

16. <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ xmlns:foaf=http://xmlns.com/0.1/foaf/ > <rdf:Description rdf:about=> <dc:creator rdf:parseType=Resource> <foaf:name>Sean B. Palmer</foaf:name> </dc:creator> <dc:title>The Semantic Web: An Introduction</dc:title> </rdf:Description> </rdf:RDF>

17. Person Institution Web presence Company Biographies Practice/discipline Project info Documentation RAE submissions Teaching PhD supervision Venues Dates Collaborators Research themes Research outcomes Process/devising Equipment Grants Publications 2004 user-engagement

18. Technical Details • Implemented in SWI Prolog • Database exposed through web service running as multi-threaded SWI Prolog server and runs under Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS-X • As webservice accepting SeRQL queries and returning RDF, it exists as freestanding resource • Graphical client interface was Flash, as the open source alternative (SVG) does not support word-wrapped text.

19. PARIP Explorerhttp://parip.ilrt.org/ • Rich data • Excessive, dense material • Problematizing taxonomy • Facilitating collaboration and networking • Making infrastructures visible and available • Polyphony, translation, fields of practice

20. locating grid technologies: performativity, place, space The ‘Locating Grid Technologies’ workshops (June-October 2006) explored fragmentations of space-time in networked environments by: using the communications grid as a telematic performance environment and as a dissemination tool for other performance forms; using a range of software interfaces within communications grid events to record, annotate and retrieve ‘meetings’; using Semantic Web tools to query that audio-visual archive in such a way as to facilitate its creative re-use on the fly in performance, in programmed installation environments and in virtual working environments.

21. Workshop 2 - Connection: PARIP Explorer, Semantic Web and Data Grids for the creative and performing arts and media • Participants introduced to Semantic Web, file sharing and intellectual property issues. Emphasis not on the analysis of video data, but rather on how users might annotate archives for creative reuse. • RDF workshop: PARIP Explorer + Memetic • Issues: important but challenging to connect tools and technologies for diverse users.

23. AHRC e-Science • Lifecycle of digital media object: create, annotate, re-use • Leeds/Bedford/Manchester/OU • Thrive: Watershed Media Centre, Arnolfini, Spike Island, Picture This, Architecture Centre • JISC

24. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/whatwedo/projectsaz/project?search=STARShttp://stars.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/blog/http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/whatwedo/projectsaz/project?search=STARShttp://stars.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/blog/

25. Aim: to create a tool to facilitate querying of distributed online resources for use in real-time, on-the-fly, in practice-as-research, professional and community-generated arts practices — in both static and mobile contexts.

26. user-created folksonomies as well as pre-defined static ontologies; • location-aware GUI; • annotating media to enable time-based searching within av, according to user-generated concepts in addition to screen media conventions • annotated relationships among text, people, institutions, media to add meaning to those links • editable pro-forma questions to spark high-level queries • facetted browsing • Collaboration with dShed – Bristol Stories, Electric December

27. From PARIP Explorer technology: • Migrated from SWI Prolog to Java - better environment for development and sustainability. • SPARQL now the standards-based RDF query language. Moved to using this from SeRQL. • Removed Flash, and now using modern frameworks (Google Web Toolkit) to provide high levels of user interactivity using HTML and Javascript. • Providing REST-based web services (representational state transfer) to allow publishing interfaces that other third-party applications could use to utilise our data. • Planning for Google Maps type widget to allow visual co-location and user augmentation of resources • Next stages: automated metadata generation; interface to mobile devices

33. Next steps • Your involvement? • December workshop • Spring engagement exercises – online and face-to-face