ALEG

What I've done

• Reviews were linked to works and stylesheets changed to render reviews and works reviewed.

• Most of the updates to works made since September have been applied, although changes made to publication details and sources have not been applied, but have just been 'identified', as they can't be automatically applied without undoing the changes made manually to ALEG since September. So, there will be a manual task to identify which source/publication changes should be applied (maybe 1-2 days work?).

• The "easy" to apply fixes to sources identified by Ben from the first load in September have been applied. The rest (400+) are too hard to apply automatically because of the variety of processing required and content parsing, and again will require manual processing. Hmm... lots of material with which to test the new user interface!

  The system currently has 361,360 source references. Of these, 355,238 are "resolved", that is, pointing to a work recorded on Austlit, and 6,392 remain "unresolved". Most of these 6,392 are probably bogus (maybe around 4,000), caused by an earlier problem when reviews where mistakenly included in a load, and almost deleted (but not quite - I think a few ended up being "linked" to sources as well, which I must fix). Of the remaining 2,200 (?) unresolved source links, there are about 650 separate sources (source titles, not accounting for separate source works), the top 4 of which comprise approx 300 references just on their own ("Earth Wings: Outrider 91 Almanach" "Feel: An Anthology", "Despatches" and "Contemporary Poets of the English Language").

• Some more email discussions regarding formatting, sorting and diacritic support.

• Started implementing the work/expression/manifestation maintenance interface.

• Document how ALEG will handle some tricky cases - The "Poets of the Month" works from the mid 1970's and "Down the Lake with Half a Chook". These are amongst the most "difficult" cases Tessa and Kathy can come up with, so if we think the proposed data model can handle these, we'll be happy!

• Continue implementation of the work/expression/manifestation maintenance interface.

• I'd forgotten what fun it was trying to match the Austlit sources. Although most of them "match" or can be forced to "match", there is a worrying array of almost-but-not-quite-the-same names for publications, inconsistent use of "The" in periodical title (sometimes absent, sometimes handled as a non-sorting prefix, sometimes not) and a general vagueness that maybe just represents the fuzziness and complexitity of the real world but disturbs the drill-sergeant within.

• Thanks to everyone for a very challenging and enjoyable 34 weeks. Working with Annette, Kerry and Tessa has been a great pleasure, and Marie-Louise's leadership is inspirational. The whole team has a deep dedication and expertise which I've rarely come across; it is a great privilege to be working on this project.

Links of the week - The Semantic Web, Ontology, Topic Maps, RDF: