OK – I have a first draft of the article! I shared it with my kind colleague who agreed to review it this weekend. I will be showing it to the Cliffster tonight. I previewed the conclusion for him this morning and found out my sentences are too verbose. This doesn’t surprise me – I’ve always had a hard time writing out my thoughts initially. I’m much better at editing. That previous bit started off as one long sentence with parentheses and dashes. But there’s a complete article and it has a title! Wow.

It needs a lot of editing.

So much writing today! I ended up rediscovering a document I made months ago lining up two sides I am seeing in this work to move to RDF: one side is concerned with the standards that are currently in XML and how those standards can be used as RDF and the other side has metadata in those XML standards and needs to move it to RDF somehow to use that data in that way. It helped me write the “jazz hands” portion of the article discussing the use cases from those sides and how both sides can help each other move forward to improve what we’re doing in RDF and make it (and the Semantic Web) a little more real. That document also reminded me of more use cases I want to include, so the use case section expanded and was reorganized a little as well.

I still need some kind of conclusion and, well, a title (along with a ton of reviewing and editing, I know, but I think I am getting there!). My placeholder title for now is “Awesome title of article” but I’m pretty sure that isn’t final. I tend towards puns and quasi-silliness in my titles for talks but I am attempting to be a serious scholar so maybe this article should adhere to a more straightforward title without the “catchy main title: explanatory subtitle” that I often use. I still have a lot of work to do but it really is nice to recognize I’m at a place where I can think about all of this coming together. Contemplating titles and closing up shop for the day – high five!

The writing was a slog today (I totally rearranged some furniture) but I wrote things and I think they work. I added a discussion of the development of BIBFRAME as a move into RDF and I think it’s a good addition. I also think I finally verified for myself that triplestores can handle complex hierarchical RDF. In testing out a local Fuseki server install and executing SPARQL queries, I verified that this setup can take complex RDF involving blank nodes. I’m pretty sure this means any triplestore worth using will also be able to manage similarly complex RDF.

I’ve also lucked out and a very kind colleague agreed to review my draft as it stands at the end of this week. She is knowledgable about RDF and has experience transitioning XML data to RDF so I will really appreciate her opinion about what I’m saying and how it’s coming across. That has energized me a bit so I’m looking forward to taking on this last section of writing tomorrow and bringing the whole thing together – kind of the jazz hands of the article.

Jazz Hands! by Laser Burners

No gumption today (I’m just not a listserv question poster), but in looking through the listserv archives and considering the Fedora documentation some more I am pretty sure that the triplestore that can be set up with Fedora is not something that has to be there for Fedora 4 and Hydra to work together. The triplestore is another way to expose the data, just as a Solr index is a way to expose the data for searching, but Fedora doesn’t use the triplestore. Fedora stores RDF data and takes create, update, and delete commands for objects as SPARQL queries but the messenger piece I talked about yesterday (what’s becoming Apache Camel in this workflow) is what decides if an external triplestore also receives that info (just like it decides if a Solr index is updated based on that command). So the triplestore is just another place where metadata from Fedora can live. And you still have to decide how to handle any descriptive metadata you have in XML with Fedora 4. That’s part of what I am writing about in the article. This toolset has a definite set of choices and they make a difference. I’ll be interested to see if my use cases show these choices are more generalizable beyond the specific Fedora/Hydra software.

I’m not completely certain about the answer to my other question regarding triplestores being able to manage complex hierarchical triples but I don’t know if I actually need to figure that out for this article at this point.

I read more articles today considering the conceptual difference between XML and RDF and I think it helped but I have to stop reading now. I wrote just a little bit more this afternoon and I want to spend all day writing tomorrow. I’m to the point where I need to read what I have in my article from start to finish and compare what I’m trying to say with what it is I’m actually saying. I really want this article to be clear and digestible. It will make it much more useful to me and hopefully help others as well.

And I win for most boring blog post ever! Here is a winking kitten from Flickr:

20120710 Kitten Winking 005 by John

I don’t know who I was kidding thinking I was going to get sucked back into this research leave and article work while we had a house full of people – it did not happen and we had a crazy great time. I did spend just a little bit of the first weekend of vaca finding a few more articles that I’m going to read through tomorrow, but I gave myself a break on posting about it because it really was only an hour or so. Back at it in the new year!

Today I tried to understand more about Fedora, Hydra, and how they connect to triplestores (or more like how triplestores connect to Fedora). I worked through the Dive into Hydra and Dive into Hydra-Works tutorials as well as an older ActiveFedora 7 tutorial on working with RDF metadata in ActiveFedora directly. None of them actually showed me anything with external triplestores though. According to the Fedora 4.x wiki documentation, a triplestore can be set up to work with Fedora/Hydra but I still don’t know if I understand its purpose or how it helps to have all of this Fedora data in RDF now. What I’m understanding is the following:

External searches against Fedora 4 data can supposedly happen using triplestores but any external triplestore seems to only really be used to help with CRUD calls (create, read, update, delete) to and from Fedora via a Java Messaging Service (JMS) indexer and not for any end user search and discovery interfaces. The current way to connect between a triplestore and Fedora involves a messenger like fcrepo-message-consumer and that documentation explicitly has the caveat that Fedora doesn’t support blank nodes, which tells me that getting complex hierarchical RDF into a triplestore from Fedora isn’t going to work because Fedora can’t send it over that way. I had thoughts about using the external triplestore to manage the full metadata of an object and only putting RDF properties into Fedora if they were simple and indexable (useful to identify a Fedora object as unique) but Fedora is still the main place for all original source metadata and it isn’t handling RDF when it is complex and hierarchical.

All this to say that I still have questions. I don’t think I understand enough about triplestores (can they manage complex hierarchical triples?) and I don’t think I understand the purpose of the external triplestore on Fedora 4 (is it just a data endpoint or another way to index Fedora data or does it help to actually manage the RDF triples in Fedora?). This warrants further online investigating and possibly some actual conversation with real people who know things about Fedora 4 and Hydra. Asking questions on listservs always makes me feel slightly stupid and like I haven’t tried hard enough but I don’t have all the time in the world to explore this on my own. I need to write more and read those other articles I found tomorrow so maybe I’ll get up the gumption by the end of the day?

Connie on the Stairs by Darren Copley

Friday evenings are apparently not a good time for me to expect to produce a blog post. Noted.

I’m already at 2,500+ words. Feature articles for the journal where I’ll be submitting this article are generally 3,000-5,000 words. I’m not sure I’ve actually really said anything yet. It’s mostly been trying to explain concepts and document the use cases so I can then get into a discussion of the problems and how to address them. I think I have a lot of tightening and concisination to do – and I might need to use better words.

From Language Log post by Mark Liberman

The day also ended on a somewhat complicated note. For my last bit of writing this week I was attempting to document strategies and ideas that have been employed to move XML into RDF. I re-entered an article I apparently read over the summer which had some cool ideas about viewing simpleTypes and complexTypes in XML schema files and setting up RDF classes and properties based around those. Those are the notes I have but that was apparently only part of it. The article also formulates mathematical equations to determine the similarities between duplicate elements in the schema based on where they appear in the hierarchy of elements in the XSD. They also discuss other articles that have made attempts to strategize converting XML to RDF – articles I haven’t read yet. I bet that I was supposed to do that and forgot. And that was Friday afternoon – blergh.

And now it’s holiday time and I’m taking time off this week and next to take a solid break and be with my family. It sounds great but this unfinished business is going to be nagging at the back of my head. This is where downtime doesn’t always work so well for me. If I can’t get my head away from this I tend to drift back into reading and research and then break is over and I don’t feel like I took one.

If I work on anything during break time I will admit it and blog about it. I’d like to be honest with myself about how much time it takes me to research and write. And it is interesting to me but it is not my life. My life is preparing to invade my house for five days of awesome insanity and also sitting next to me right now playing Tales of Zestiria, perching above my head, and possibly trying to take out my holiday tree (or at least the ornaments on it).

It really is my favorite time of year and I need to stop and enjoy. The point here is that hopefully I won’t be back at it for a couple weeks.

Heron by Dan Bergstrom

I took a bike ride on the trail today and saw a heron hunting in the creek and a deer hanging out on the trail. These are not pictures of them.

Doe, a deer, a female deer by NatureNerd (probably outside)

Today was a day of all writing! It was tougher than I thought though. I have examples of different places transitioning from XML to RDF metadata for various reasons and I want to document each of those within the article for discussion. I was under the impression that documentation would not be complicated but each case was actually really tough to get my brain back into and remember what I read and what they were doing. I started formulating this idea of treating these articles and presentations as use cases after I had read or encountered some of them so my notes tended to be too high-level and I had to revisit the articles and presentations again. But today helped me shape some of my thinking and suspicions about triple stores and their relationship to Fedora. And it’s making me want to get into the Dive into Hydra-Works Tutorial, which I’m going to do but possibly not until I pick up the research leave again after the holidays. I doubt I can get through it in one day and I should continue writing tomorrow – that’s a stronger way to end this week, I think.

Today was finally a whole day dedicated to research leaving! Lots of reading and no writing, but lots of reading! At this point it feels like my article is going to be all about how complicated this topic is because everyone is talking about the same things in different ways and it’s hard to keep it all sorted. We seem to have a split in views between the Semantic Web world and the Library world on how to discuss things like URIs, for example. Semantic Web folks seem to think of them as links with meaning for a web of data where the Library world talks about them as authorized sources for common reference points. If they aren’t the same thing, they’re awfully close and we might just need to high five and move on to making this stuff work.

And I still made it to the gym! High five for me too!

I wrote a little in the morning and a little in the afternoon and did nothing towards my article the rest of the day. Fail, fail-y fail fail. I work worked today instead and I think I managed to finish some things that needed to be done but they took much longer than I thought they would. And I rode the bike into the office for a committee meeting. On the plus side, that was the daily workout, but the focus of the day was, unfortunately, work.

I also think that what I wrote today might end up in the trash but I’m continuing to analyze the thoughts of various authors on RDF and XML, the differences between them, and the things to think about when moving from XML to RDF.

Frustrating progress, but I’m turning on the out-of-office message tomorrow and leaving the email turned off. That has to help, right?

From Animalmemes

I’m going to try some diary-style posts to track my progress through research leave and see how it goes. I have 3 weeks total, split up around the holidays, to write this article I posted about back in August. Stuff has been percolating and I have been reading and thinking. I presented at DLF in October about it and now I just need to get it done.

So today – I managed to establish that my Introduction was already written (I was going to write that today, Past Me, but whatever, be more efficient than Present Me – it’s fine). I started on the Literature Review section instead, which might be turning more into an Unpacking of Concepts section. And I managed to make it to the gym! (It’s on my daily tracking spreadsheet of things I’d like to do so it makes me hopeful that I will do that regularly. So much to look forward to!)

But I also had to do some work work because that’s how things go when you make plans. I’m hoping tomorrow is the last day I’ll have to do that but it’s made my work day go late (not unusual for me but I am really over that bad habit) and dinner is growing cold next to me right now. We’ll try this again tomorrow and see if research work and work work can end at a normal time. So done for today!