A proposal for collaborating on data standards for photography related information from Luminous-Lint

In a recently published article in the EDUCAUSE Review (http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/RepatriationReconstr... ), Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, grapples with the complex issue of repatriation of cultural artifacts from museums and argues that the responsibilities of stewardship extend to capturing and distributing high quality digital surrogates that can ensure continuing scholarly access to artifacts of disputed ownership and morally ambivalent provenance.

We look forward to having Cliff at the 2008 Museums and the Web conference, where he has agreed to sum up the meeting and react to it in the closing plenary. His opinion and expertise in matters of higher education networking is internationally respected and over the years, Clifford has been an interested and sympathetic observer of the affairs of museums. Occasionally, as in the planning for the Art Museum Image Consortium, Clifford has become directly involved in museum matters. I am excited that we are going to re-engage him in thinking about strategies for museum networking at what I consider a crucial time.

In 1999, David Anderson launched Seti@home and with it a method of enlisting the underused cycles of PC's worldwide. While Seti still hasn't found any extra-terrestrial life, it did give birth to BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) which Anderson established in 2002. The Economist, December 6 edition, reports that BOINC based computing supports several hundred CPU intensive scientific investigations and has recently been augmented to use PC graphic cards and Playstations for some graphically demanding processing.

The article also identifies some social applications of BOINC of interest to museums. Galaxy Zoo has employed more than 100,000 volunteers to examine the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to classify galaxies and Stardust@home is using volunteers to spot stellar tracks. The Manchester Museum has had volunteers cataloguing 12,000 herbaria specimens from the 19th century. Africa@home from the University of Geneva is enlisting volunteers to extract cartographic data on the location of roads, villages, fields etc. from satellite images.

Projects like these have led Anderson to launch a new platform he calls BOSSA (Berkeley Open System for Skills Aggregation) which he hopes will be lower the barrier to entry for such web-based knowledge sharing and collaboration projects. Check it out at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BossaIntro

..

How can a web object have a defined meaning in the context of the objects discovered at the same site, a group of different objects with which it was sold at auction, and yet other objects displayed in the same museum exhibition years later, when each of the individual objects will have one or many URI’s and representations on the Web?

How, in other words, can the meanings of different aggregations of digital objects be retained over time?