Code4lib 2009

I'm really looking forward to next week's code4lib conference in Providence, despite my utter failure to complete or implement the project on which I am presenting. In particular, I'm really looking forward to the linked data preconference. Like some of my other fellow attendees, I've hammered out a FOAF file for the preconference already so that Ed Summers' combo FOAF crawler and attendee info web app.

This is what the sample output looks using my FOAF data. It's good to see we're well on our way to have an easily creatable sample type of RDF data for people to play with. At a bare minimum, you can create your FOAF data using FOAF-A-Matic and then edit it to add the assertions you need to get it to play nice with Ed's application. See you in Providence, but go FOAF yourself first.

I've had my hands full lately. Two weeks ago I was at the MCN conference (wherein, among other things, I have continued my dominion as Archduke of Archival Description by taking over the MCN Standards SIG chair position from The Bancroft Library's Mary Elings), and next week I'm off to Philadelphia for the PACSCL Something New for Something Old conference. I hammered out the coherent, written version of my paper I gave at EAD@10. I prepared a proposal for next February's code4lib conference in Providence (ahem, vote for mine, if you're so inclined):

Building on Galen Charlton's investigations into distributed version control systems for metadata management, I offer a prototype system for managing archival finding aids in EAD (Encoded Archival Description). My prototype relies on distributed version control to help archivists maintain transparency in their work and uses post-commit hooks to initiate indexing and publishing processes. In addition, this prototype can be generalized for any XML-based metadata schema.