2023-06-01 Thoughts
So what am I thinking after the day on Wednesday?
Well, seeing how eMU works revealed no surprises but was interesting. Clearly, there is a comprehensive coverage of the things that might be of interest and use and there is value in the ‘narrative’ area, for sure.
I am interested in how the narratives work - I suspect that they are thought of as descriptive of the objects but hopefully not in the same way as, for example, the height or length of an object.
Working with Sophie Lissonnet, we had a great opportunity to think about all this and we wrote several papers - the following might be of interest. It seems to attract a reasonable amount of interest even today. (The references to Dublin Core (DC) stuff are still fairly OK although a bit outdated.)
2006 with Lissonnet, S. “Dublin Core and museum information: metadata as cultural heritage data” in Int. J. of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (IJMSO) ISSN Vol 1 No 3. (Online): 1744-263X ISSN (Print): 1744-2621 Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220094822_Dublin_Core_and_museum_information_Metadata_as_cultural_heritage_data#fullTextFileContent
So, the breadth of use of metadata has grown incredibly and we have just finished a very clever definition of the metadata standard for ISO - well, it is conformant to established metadata but really suited to being adapted to a specific purpose and amazingly interoperable. It is called Metadata for Learning Resources (ISO/IEC 19788-1) and provides a framework for metadata (latest version is not published yet but, of course, as an editor I have it if we need it.) I think the use of this new standard will help us get better results than were possible in the past.
What we have committed to give the Telematics Trust is a metadata profile, that is, a way of describing something expressed in an interoperable form so both people and machines can make sense of it. So, behind the scenes we need to have a good way of expressing whatever descriptions we come up with, but at the face we want to nominate what we think is important related to the object.
So here I get a bit stuck.
Just as I think of it, you can think of the narratives as the sort of thing chatGPT will be pumping out - sort of prose presenting some information and opinions. What I am proposing is a third way of sharing the ideas - in a form that will help something like a human or a chatGPT bot discover, identify, publish, retrieve,,,,, something.
MV describes an object in its records as, let’s say, a Tandy 345 with tape drive. Whatever! I think/know that is very interesting to a person who is thinking about, looking for,…computer hardware made by Tandy.
But computers, unlike the things of the past, are not well served with only a physical description. The Tandy running a spreadsheet is not the same thing as a Tandy running Mario brothers. I would say those are two very different environments and they redefine the object, in an important way. But is the Tandy running a spreadsheet the same sort of thing as a Mac running a spreadsheet? Not sure....
Then, at the next level, we can see what someone does with their software - given the spreadsheet I can tell you that a lot of people use it to add up stuff like doing accounting or to organise stuff in neat rows and columns, but some people make an interactive game of snakes and ladders using a spreadsheet. (Incidentally, you should try it - it’s great fun.) And some people find a 2-dimensional spreadsheet very constraining and believe they need a multi-dimensional organising system.
So I am led to think that if we started afresh, we would have a system that would allow us to identify the Tandy as an object of the kind computer but that would immediately trigger something to also describe it by its environment and after that, its use. I think this is what really matters and it is something I think we can say we learnt big time in the Museum school but everywhere, in fact. Well, actually I think we learnt it but I suspect still a lot of people have not. It is about the belief that we should ask “What does a computer do in the classroom” when we learnt the better question is “What can we do with a computer in the classroom”.
I think where we operate for the TT we should be thinking perhaps, this way. Use before thing? I am still thinking about how I would do this.... I think it will help us to make better narratives if we work a bit on what I am worrying about here.
I know having the narratives is nice and they can be very comprehensive etc but, as a believer in metadata, right now I find it hard to believe they should not themselves be the object of metadata and there is a continuing gap in what we say about things as proposed in the previous paragraph.