ALEG

What I've done

• User interface for merging works, expressions and manifestations is now available

• Investigated some more database anomolies. These all seem to be related to bogus duplicate realisation or embodiment events, whereby one would be deleted (deleting "both"), or one would be updated and another deleted (causing bedlam).

  I think the root cause was a bug in the event caching code which tries to keep the in-memory representation of a topic consistent with the version stored in the database - the in-memory cache is vital for performance reasons, but greatly complicates the system!.

  The database is now "consistent", and an automatic script is run each evening which checks and reports on inconstitencies which will cause me to panic if any are reported.

• Presentation to NLA staff on the technical aspects of the project - a copy is available here.

• Various stats for Marie-Louise including number of works without subjects by work type/form

• Many more minor changes to formatting, templates, edit checks, bug fixes. Specific fixes from the various to-do lists include:
  • render multiple publishers correctly
  • add all forms of a name to popup agent search and designate type of name in results
  • widen popup search results window; show complete search result in the status line at the bottom of the dialog if single-clicked
  • render external references, influenced by/influence on relationships
  • selectively show "p." or "pp." on extent and source page

• Load AMLC and Lu-Rees data, or die in the attempt...

• To Do list. Work through the (mostly) minor issues on the to-do list provided by Annette/Kerry/Marie-Louise.

• First known dates. Our strategy of calculating first-known-date (fkd) at the work level has proven inadequate. For a simple example of its failure, consider an anthology which is revised into another expression and includes a new work: currently the fkd of that new work is calculated based on the fkd of the anthology, not the new expression, so the new work *may* have a fkd of before the birth date of the author! I think we have to record fkd of expressions as well as works.

• The new thesaurus is expected to be available for loading soon.

Links of the week

• Don't Make Me Think

  Another web usability book that advocates designing web pages like good billboards (intended to be read at 100kph) as they best way to get your message across. Reviewed here.

• Interview with Cory Doctorow, spokesperson for OpenCola

  'The idea is that you have a folder on your desktop, you put some things in it you like, and it will fill up with things that you'll probably like. It figures out what you'll probably like by finding peers in the network who have taste similar to you and telling you what they think is good. The software fetches documents from peers and from various Internet servers (Web servers, databases), puts them under the noses of people that it thinks will like them, then watches what the peers do when they get them: Do they attend to them as though they like them, or do they throw them away? These implicit, observed decisions are aggregated and the result is a "relevance-switched" network where documents automatically migrate to the attention of people who'll probably like them, based on human decisions. '