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Just back from a refreshing two days in Brighton, where work sent me to a couple of workshops run by clearleft. Excellent, and inspiring, stuff from Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith.
Now for some rest before heading off to Devon on Monday…
6 xl eggs
1 largish onion, diced
about 1/3 kilo potatoes, sliced very small
1 bell pepper, diced
Salt the pieces of potato in a bowl. Mix in the chopped onion. Heat about 100 ml of oil in a large frying pan. Turn the heat down to its lowest setting. Gently stew the potato and onion mixture in the oil for around 15 minutes. Stir in the chopped pepper and leave to cook for another 15 mnutes or so. The secret here is to cook slowly over a very low heat and wait patiently. Stir occasionally to make sure it doesn't stick to the pan.
Meanwhile, beat the eggs very lightly in a large bowl. Just beat them enough to break up the yolks and mix with the whites. Drain the oil from the cooked potatoes and stir them into the eggs. Heat some butter and a little oil in the frying pan, then turn the heat back down to low again. Pour the omelette mixture into the pan and leave to cook slowly.
After about 15 minutes, there should be very little uncooked egg left on the top of the mixture. Take the pan off the heat, cover with a large dinner plate and deftly flick it over to drop the tortilla onto the plate. Put the pan back on the heat and slide the tortilla off the plate back into the pan. Leave for another 5 - 10 minutes or so, still at low heat, at which point it should be cooked through. Flip it onto a plate again and serve!
Several years ago, we digitised some papers relating to the explorer Matthew Flinders and put them online as the Flinders archive. I've been looking at that site with an eye to redeveloping it. Firstly, the markup needs overhauling to bring it up to the same standard as sites like the prints and drawings catalogue. Secondly, it'd be nice to come up with a good model for publishing written papers online. Most of the two million or so objects in the Maritime Museum's collections are bits of paper; log books, letters, diaries, crew lists and who knows what else. There's a copy of the Declaration of Independence, letters from Napoleon and Nelson's last letter to his daughter. You can see photos of these documents online, but the original text isn't available.
HTML isn't well-suited to marking up written papers. It doesn't have the tags to describe, semantically, the structure and contents of a written letter, for example. So the papers on the Flinders site were digitised by transcribing the text in TEI-Lite. TEI is an XML markup language designed specifically to represent the written word - poetry, plays, novels, letters etc. Consequently, we have fairly rich semantic versions of the Flinders papers stored on our database server, but that semantic information is lost in the HTML versions of the papers. I'm interested in coming up with HTML templates for the papers which preserve, as far as possible, the information stored in the TEI documents.
Microformats and tagging could help here. TEI has the <rs> tag to mark up references to things (people, places, ships, books, constellations, anything really) in a text. The Flinders papers use <rs> extensively to markup the people, places, vessels and miscellaneous glossary terms referred to in the correspondence. For instance, a reference to a person might read <rs type="person" key="25">my dear wife</rs> or a reference to a ship might read <rs type="vessel" key="27">this sturdy vessel</rs>. The type attribute indicates what type of thing we're referring to. The key attribute identifies which specific thing we're referring too. In this case, it might be person number 25, or ship number 27, in our database.
My first idea for opening up the archive is to replace the numerical keys with wikipedia-style tags eg. <rs type="person" key="Ann_Chappelle">my dear wife</rs> or <rs type="vessel" key="Investigator">this sturdy vessel</rs>. I think human-readable tags make it easier to understand the references, rather than having to go look up which ship is vessel number 27. Tagging like this will also allow us to take advantage of the rel-tag microformat in our HTML, because we can transform our TEI <rs> tags into HTML link anchors: <a rel="tag" href="/tags/Ann_Chappelle">my dear wife</a>. Even better, we can take the TEI type attribute and put that in the tag URL to indicate what type of tag this is: <a rel="tag" href="/tags/person/Ann_Chappelle">my dear wife</a>. This is pretty cool, I think – we're now indicating, in our HTML, that this letter refers to a person, and that person is called Ann Chappelle. I can use the tag to link together everything that refers to Ann, whether she's referred to indirectly as ‘my dear wife’, directly as ‘Ann Flinders’ or by her maiden name ‘Ann Chappelle’. Additionally, I've opened up the data to be used by any tool that understands the rel-tag microformat. Finally, the tagging scheme is simple and looks like it will extend to other archives. For example, we may want to digitise papers from the Royal Observatory archives, which refer to the names of planets, asteroids or constellations. Or we might have to tag references to books. We could do this by adding new types to our tag URLs eg. /books/De_Revolutionibus or /astronomy/Mars.
Perhaps this is what I should I talk about at SemanticCamp – opening up the semantic information stored in museum collections.
I was at work yesterday, so couldn't go to the demo outside the US Embassy. There's a nice set of photos posted in the Amnesty International UK photostream on flickr.
Tom Morris announced SemanticCamp this week. It's a two day thing (Sat 16th – Sun 17th Feb) centred around discussions of meaning and Kenneth Williams. No wait, it's a two day thing centred around discussions of a practical semantic web. Something that I'm very interested in, so I signed up.
Then I read the rules:
Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer / contribute in some way to support the event. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall. The people present at the event will select the demos or presentations they want to see.
Ok, the last time I gave a presentation was an Open Museum lecture at the Maritime Museum in 2003. It was an overview of our Solar System, as an introduction to two days of talks about current Solar System research in the UK. Prior to that, I've also given lectures to the Flamsteed Astronomy Society. About comets – what they are, how they might have formed, why the Stardust mission was so interesting, that sort of thing.
All fascinating stuff, and well worth talking about, but what on earth would I present at a semantic web workshop? Answers on a postcard please!
