Metamodeling

FactMiners: Piercing the Veil and Moving the Bar

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

WORK IN PROCESS - NOT YET PUBLISHED

In this third part of the "FactMiners and the Participatory History Commons" we identify two significant ways that the FactMiners platform will explicitly support and amplify the quality and quantity of Citizen Scientist and Citizen Historian contributions to the Participatory History Commons.

What's in a Word? MetaDATA vis-à-vis MetaMODEL

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

To distinguish FactMiners agenda from that of others, let's clearly distinguish these two these terms; metadata and metamodel. Wikipedia interestingly, and I think appropriately, redirects the term 'metamodel' to the page/term 'Metamodeling' which subtly suggests the active and transitional nature of metamodeling as a preparatory step in service to a further goal. That is, we metamodel as a way to gain leverage in subsequent modeling and development activity.

Is FactMiners Like Metadatagam.es or Tiltfactor's Metadatagames.org?

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

Pressed for time? The short answer is, "Yes, in all the most general and important ways, and 'No' in the specific way that we are designing our #LODLAM social-gaming platform around an "embedded metamodel subgraph" design pattern within an Open Source stack based on the Neo4j graph database and Structr, the Neo4j-based next-gen CMS and web services framework.

Karma to Take a LOD off FactMiners

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

Collage of photos of Karma is an amazing Open Source "multilingual" ontology-aware cross-model smart-mapper

Karma is an amazing Open Source "multilingual" ontology-aware cross-model smart-mapper providing "Rosetta Stone"-like powers to users coping with the ever-shifting publication of Linked Open Data (LOD). Karma is the evolving brilliant work from the incredible minds of the researcher-makers of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. Karma will likely handle this critical component of the technology stack that implements the FactMiners social-game ecosystem.

FactMiners.org Proposals ACCEPTED for #MCN2014

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

We are EXTREMELY pleased to report that BOTH our proposals have been accepted for presentation at #MCN2014! In this post you will find copies of our two proposals for presentations at this year's Museum Computer Network conference to be held in Dallas in November. These proposals are being submitted as companion presentations which, together, will give a good overview of the Big Ideas (the people and organizations comprising our social game ecosystem) as well as the Nitty Gritty (the embedded metamodel subgraph design pattern) tech details about FactMiners.

Wishlist: A Metamodel Partition in Neo4j Graph Database

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

There are many reasons I had to explore the embedded metamodel subgraph design pattern for Neo4j databases in the first series of FactMiners ecosystem design documents.

My interest is grounded in my experience in the 1990's developing a pair of complementary Distributed Smalltalk frameworks to do what we called "executable business models." The basic idea was that if we came up with a super-elegant metamodel about how to do business processes AND STUCK TO IT no matter what on the server/executing-model side of things then the Desktop Visualization framework could dynamically generate what customer/users mistook for "applications." We found INCREDIBLE leverage in design-to-implementation and stakeholder buy-in (as what we built made sense to them... it was their mental model embodied in software).

We can bring this kind of leverage to graph databases, and I hope Neo4j will be the pioneer leader in this, by coming up with a community standard for an embedded metamodel subgraph feature.

FactMiners - ICOM CIDOC-CRM into Neo4j via Py2Neo at GitHub

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

The FactMiners social-game developers' community will use the ISO-standard Conceptual Reference Model of the international museum community for managing the underlying relationship between digital cultural heritage collection management and hosting a FactMiners Fact Cloud. The best way to make it easy for museums and archives to participate in the FactMiners community, is to provide a state-of-the-art flexible, extensible digital cultural heritage collection management platform.

FactMiners Fact Clouds to be CIDOC-CRM Compliant

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

FactMiners.org is pleased to announce adoption of the Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) of the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The CIDOC-CRM is an 'ontology' for cultural heritage information, in other words it describes in a formal language the concepts and relations relevant to the documentation of cultural heritage. This ISO standard will be used as the reference model for the development of the FactMiners Fact Cloud metamodel that will logically organize the 'facts' to be 'mined' out of our initial project — the digital archive of Softalk magazine — respecting both the elements of its editorial content and the complex document structure of a magazine.

Neo4j GraphGist Design Docs On-line

Submitted by Jim Salmons on

UPDATE: I'm very pleased to note that this 2-part GraphGist won First Place in the Other category of the Neo4j GraphGist Winter Domain Modeling Challenge! :-)

I have been very quiet during the year-end holiday and throughout January. I have been busy in the 'deep weeds' of moving the FactMiners social-game ecosystem forward. Quick summary... The FactMiners game is the means we will use to create an incredible 'Fact Cloud' of all the information in all 48 issues of Softalk magazine. It is an ambitious mission, but one that is guaranteed to be "serious fun"– especially when we create a crowdsource game technology and community (that's the ecosystem scope of this).

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