So not a quiet end to this leave! Feedback and edits today from a colleague who is a member of the target audience of this journal had me making changes and repeatedly asking for more feedback all day today. Her feedback is really helpful, though, and is getting me to the point where I can release this article as a submitted thing. It will receive feedback from the peer-review process so I feel like I should be more OK with just sending it out, but it’s so hard to let something like this go without doing the absolute most I can to make it clear and understandable.

And the article is submitted! Ack, it’s submitted! I mean, cool, it’s submitted. I’ll post updates when the next thing happens!

Dry by catd_mitchell

Also, I have been writing my research leave report. This is kind of nice because I can point to this set of blog posts in my report to show how my work progressed. I wish I’d had time to incorporate more pictures. Blog posts are always more entertaining with pictures. Anyway, this “diary of a research leave” was useful to me to keep me focused and figure out what to do next. And just like that, the research leave is over.

I worked on formatting the article to line up with the author guidelines for submission today. I thought citations were in the format they requested but it looks like I didn’t have it quite right. The librarian in me couldn’t let it go and I think I have the citations and the bibliography in the correct format now, but that took some investigating and Word wrangling. I also set up my account for submitting to the journal – this is starting to get really real!

No feedback yet but I’m going to read through the article myself again tomorrow. Fingers crossed I don’t totally hate it.

I finished editing based on my metadata colleague’s comments and suggestions today and actually sent out the article for general editing and review! I am hopeful that folks can read it and get back to me by the end of this week. I will be focusing next on the author guidelines for the journal where I want to submit to make sure I have citations and references formatted correctly and that sort of thing.

I also have to go through the difficult task of trying to read through the article again myself with a “rebooted” mindset so I can forget all of the details and issues I went through and read what is really there. I might try that tomorrow but I also might need to give that a day to let my mind get over some of those mini-dramas.

More progress!

Maybe it’s the effect of being home with no one to talk to but the Internet, but I was pretty blocked by the news of David Bowie’s death today. His death is in no way connected to what I am doing but his death and his knowledge of its imminence and the release of his album Blackstar and the videos that accompany the songs Lazarus and Darkstar are just a lot to contemplate. Making this final album must have been excruciating, cathartic, and depressing all at the same time. Everyone was trying to understand it all weekend and now, today, everyone is saying a collective “Oh.” Which is also happening at the same time as the collective “No, this sucks!” and that’s hard to take in as well.

How he was able to master his lifetime of work without the confidence struggles and uncertainties that sometimes make it hard for me to just get dressed in the morning and often stop me from saying what I think… that’s what I find incredible about David Bowie. Creating something even as mundane as a journal article for your job takes emotional investment and risk – putting your ideas out there and saying something that you hope matters to someone and isn’t lambasted or laughed at too much and will hopefully move you forward and not be a dead end – it’s a risky thing. He’s always seemed to be so completely confident in what he is saying and doing and how he looks that even if you aren’t sure you understand it, you still acknowledge David Bowie – how can you not? His graceful combination of art, music, and life is where we all want to be in our own way. This is a sad day but you know, he is someone I think of when I think of people who live life to its fullest.

I received incredibly helpful feedback this weekend from my colleague. It took a while to focus (see previous paragraphs) but I did some editing and re-worked the concepts section to be more understandable. I want to send it out for general editing and review tomorrow, if I can complete this round of edits.

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.