A staff member of
Information Services and Technology (IST) at the
University of California, Berkeley
Since July 2006, I have been working for IST in the Collaboration, Presentation, and Analysis-Collaboration Services (CPA-CS) unit of the Data Services department.
Current and recent work in which I've been involved includes:
Contributing to CollectionSpace: Participating in requirements gathering, design and development work on CollectionSpace, an open-source, web-based collections management system, to describe, manage and disseminate information about the collections held by museums and other cultural heritage institutions.
CollectionSpace is being built by a consortium of participating institutions, with distributed teams at several locations around the world, including UC Berkeley, the University of Toronto, Cambridge University, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. UC Berkeley's contribution includes building the underlying services layer as a foundation for application and user interaction layers. The project is funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Drafting a campus collaboration tools strategy: Serving on a small team of key participants in team interviewing and other data gathering for - and in drafting and writing - a Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy document for UC Berkeley, as described on this website.
This makes UC Berkeley one of the first higher education institutions worldwide to develop a formal strategy for supporting collaborative activities through information technology. The strategy was endorsed in January 2009 as part of the campus IT strategy by UC Berkeley's Information Technology Architecture Committee (ITAC) and in March 2009 by the Campus Technology Council (CTC). The strategy will now be used to help guide campus IT priorities and resource allocation.
Our team is also working on proposals for a set of follow-on initiatives to advance this strategy, most prominently including a system for crowdsourcing the tasks of registering and building communities around tools and services, such as collaborative tools, web services, and tools of use to humanities scholars.
Documenting the Delphi Project: Assisting Patrick Schmitz in documenting the deployment artifacts and back-end workflows of the Delphi project, and with other tasks related to that project.
Delphi is an open source software system that helps open up access via the Web to collections of artifacts held by museums, historical societies, archeological repositories and similar heritage institutions. It uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to make it more effective and enjoyable to find individual artifacts in collections, and to uncover relationships between artifacts, than is possible through traditional searching and browsing.
You can try out Delphi's collections browser, searching and browsing
artifacts under facets such as culture, materials used, and color - and a myriad
of concepts that fall under each facet - on the website of the
Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of
Anthropology. (You might start with a search on the term
wings and explore from there.)
Helping build iCalendar proofing tools: Improving the quality of calendar events data exchanged over the Internet, by making it easier for iCalendar generators and consumers to validate or "proof" their data. This work involves creating sets of iCalendar test data and building proofing tools, including RESTful web services and front-end web interfaces.
This work is being carried out within two arenas: on behalf of the IOPTEST Technical Committee of the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect), and as a participant in a community effort coordinated via the iCalendar Validation wiki.
Projects currently on hold, on which considerable work has already been done:
Calendar event data web services: catalyzing, designing, and developing a RESTful service (with a working name of "CalEx", for "Calendar Exchange") to provide a simple, common interface for reading and writing calendar events, across multiple calendar services.
Currently this proof of concept service provides read/write access to calendar events in CalAgenda (a UC Berkeley service based on Oracle Calendar) and Google Calendar. It also provides read-only access to UC Berkeley's Events Calendar, Schedule of Classes, and Academic Calendar.
Video data: participating in cross-departmental work to help make video a ubiquitous, inexpensive data type for collaboration, beginning with an exploration of "deep linking" of video and audio segments.
My colleague, Rick Jaffe, has already done considerable work on service- and platform-agnostic deep linking to specific portions of video and audio content, via an extensible JavaScript interface to web browser plug-ins for various video formats (e.g. Flash/YouTube, Apple QuickTime, Windows Media, RealMedia ).
Past projects
Some recent topics of exploration:
In July 2006, UC Berkeley's central IT organization, IST, underwent a major reorganization. At that time, I completed 17 years of work in IST's former Workstation Support Services department, last as a member of or volunteer participant in the following project and service teams:
This page's URL is http://purl.org/net/aron
This page was last updated on 2011-12-18
(More about this International date and time format, ISO 8601 ...)