Musica migrans - Topic Maps portal about the migration paths of Eastern European musicians in the 19th century

Musica migrans Topic Maps portal about the migration paths of Eastern European musicians in the 19th century TMUC 2008 Oslo, April 2008 Lutz Maicher, University of Leipzig [email_address]

How it all began … During a concert break we discussed with Prof. H. Loos, who is one of the leading German historians about the Eastern European music history that he dreams of a system which allows him to collect and analyse biographical data about little-known Eastern European musicians in the 19 th century. He was interested in making usable all the relationships in the data! This sounded like a case for Topic Maps, so we asked Mr. Loos to sketch his domain…

… and he started to sketch the domain! Person has names with a lot of different spellings secondary nationality of a person Date birthday of a person day of death of a person Place birthplace of a person place of death of a person Confession confessions of a person Profession main profession of a person secondary profession of a person Reference archive encyclopaedia further literature has educational development start and end of educational phase place of educational phase goal of educational phase has professional development start and end of a job place of a job profession in a job has concerts date of a concert place of a concert primary nationality of a person Nationality

Are Topic Maps well suited for such a project?

Roy Lachica published the " Checklist for deciding implementing Topic Maps " in his blog ( http:// fuzzzyblog . blogspot .com/2008/01/checklist-for-deciding-implementing.html )

We will follow this checklist to get our points …

Do we need a flexible data model?

Do we have information consisting of diverse concepts and need to make distinctions between their relations and the roles the associations play among each other?

Are we not sure if this conceptualisation will change in the future?

3 points total: 3/3

Do we need a high degree of semantic interoperability ?

Do we need a strong and accurate identification of subjects?

2 points total: 5/5

Do we need to merge semantic information from diverse sources?

Do we want to share our information with other systems?

2 points total: 7/7

Do we develop a knowledge centric application ?

Is there a need for a paradigm that can collate everything known about any given set of subjects?

1 point total: 8/8

Do we access information using different navigation paths?

Do we need a technology that is tailored for displaying multiple views in networked information structures?

Do we need faceted navigation or search?

1 point total: 9/9

Do we need a strong separation between metadata and resources?

Do we have authors that work with metadata and others that add or edit resources?

0 point total: 10/11

Do we have the goal to be the first to adopt new technologies? 1 point total: 11/12 Yes.

Conclusion our result: 11/12 " If you got a sum of 3 or more points you might have a good reason for embarking on a Topic Map development project. " it seems that we might have a good reason to use Topic Maps (-;

The perfect match …

Prof. H. Loos provides a very interesting use case for us

we provide an interesting technology for Prof. H. Loos

together we convinced the German f ederal g onvernment to spend funding for setting-up Musica migrans (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Angelegenheiten der Kultur und der Medien)

from October 2007 until June 2008

funding for implementing the portal

funding to pay 25 historians from Eastern Europe to collect all information of the life courses of 50 musicians each = 1250 biographies

Now we could start to implement the portal …

Our approach for implementing Topic Maps portals … source: http://www.jjg.net/elements/ Jesse J. Garrett: The Elements of User Experience http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements_simpleplanes.pdf portal as software interface portal as hypertext system

Technical Issues

Prolog:

it's hard to win funding from German government for salaries

it's very hard to get funding from German government for licence fees (and if you have to pay a yearly maintainance fee to the software vendor , the sustainability plan of your funding proposal will completely collapse)

Conclusion

we needed an open source solution for building a Topic Maps web application

RTM – the first best solution

Ruby based Topic Maps Engine currently developed in Leipzig (see Benjamin Bock's tutorial on Wednesday)

lot of nice features for fast development of Topic Maps portals

built in model driven approach

http://rtm.rubyforge.org/

but not available for productive purposes when we started in October 2007

QuaaxTM – we used the second best solution

PHP based Topic Maps Engine which uses open source database server for persistence

http://quaaxtm.sourceforge.net/

used for Musica migrans, but needed some customisation for productive purposes

hand-made model driven approach

about scalability: we don't know, but have a look at Musica migrans in summer 2008 when we will have more than thousend musicians in the system

Status of Musica migrans

Productive version was released mid March 2008

development time: appr. 500 working hours

filling in the data into the system starts slowly …

we have money for a further half year and we are full of ideas …

What's next in Musica migrans?

Google Maps + Musica migrans

visualisation of the migration paths

Statistics for analysing the data in the Topic Map

i.e. detection of persons with similar relationships

XTM 2.0 Backup (not part of QuaaxTM)

Full-text search in the Topic Map (not part of QuaaxTM)

Content negotation: get all information about a person as

HTML – the portal we have

XTM – for interoperability with other systems

PDF – as dossier for print and email

Logging (and undo) of change operations

Merging of Topics (via the user interface)

Optimization of layout and handling of the user interface

filter and sorting – faceted navigation , but we don't have a query language in the engine

What's next after Musica migrans? Musica migrans II, we hope … During a coffee break in a Musica migrans meeting we discussed with Prof. H. Loos, who is one of the leading German historians about the Eastern European music history, as you know, that he dreams of a system which allows him to collect and analyse data about the changeful history of Eastern European music institutions in the 19 th century. He was interested in making usable all the relationships in the data! And if all this data would be wired with Musica migrans! This sounded like a case for Topic Maps, so we asked Mr. Loos to sketch his domain…