Tomorrow begins Faculty Academy here at UMW. Far too much to get ready, but there's much to look forward to!

So the analogy here will be fleshed out later, but here's a tidbit about why I've come to think of the various projects I'm working on as all falling under an umbrella project called "Amiatinus"

Getting scrapers for UMWBlogs data into better shaper---to some degree, at least, I'm getting dcmitypes info. That's let me put a couple tests together, generating image and video galleries: Images, Videos.

The project to produce a 'directory' (whatever that means when working with these kinds of sources) of UMWBlogs took an interesting turn a few weeks ago when I thought that getting at the connections between posts might be a more interesting starting point, and that the most natural way to expose those would be through a sidebar.

At the beginning of this semester, I was contacted by a computer science student at Xavier named Lora Anneken about the university ontology project I'm working on, and about some of the Slice and Dice UMW pages I worked on.

A neat thing happened during my twittering about the plumbing joys last weekend. At some point, I think somewhere in day two, I stopped thinking of the tweets as individual items, and started thinking of them as a narrative. That struck me as important because it think it makes a good analogy to what we want students to do with a liberal arts education (or any education, for that matter).

Here's the tale...I've put the tweets back in chronological order, and edited out the ones that weren't relevant.

Epilogue

A 'directory' for UMWBlogs has been cooking conceptually for some time, and has now started cooking into code. The first thing I'm working on is grabbing data from feeds and turning into RDF. I have a test/demo of the first draft of the system here.

I recently gave a talk to a small regional conference about the semantic web and the university ontology I'm working on. I think it went well enough...hopefully a link to the audio will be coming soon.

Here at University of Mary Washington we've been maintaining an installation of WordPress MultiUser, called UMWBlogs for several months. We now have about 800 registered blogs from students and faculty for their teaching and learning.