Several people asked for a copy of my presentation, so here is a pdf of it.
Thanks for the attending/participating!

Conference delegates attending Gail Durbin's workshop were given two minutes to complete the first part of a task and the roar of creative ideas being born was almost deafening

Semantic Webs - and The Rest of the World

While Ross Parry is facilitating our SW workshop (Friday,
12.30 till 1.30) at MW 2008, the digital museum community in the UK is carrying
on the debate Ross opened up for comment in the session.

I am developing a workshop on how we as professionals are using Web 2.0 "to expand a museum’s role by promoting new methods of collaboration within itself and with other museums and institutions" and am looking for examples that I can use in the dialogue. I created a wiki for this discussion at http://redberry.pbwiki.com/ (password is "share").

Please join the discussion!

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

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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?