Post on 01-Apr-2015
transcript
A Taste of Turing and other archives
Kirk Martinez, Jessie Hey, Gareth Hughes
IAM, Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton University
7.3.2000
Group Background
• Creating a hypermedia version of the Mountbatten archive began in 1988
• Microcosm Open Hypermedia System
• Wellington, Churchill, V&A Museum…
Intelligence Agents Multimedia
One of 50,000 photos in the Mountbatten Archive
The Mountbatten Archive
• 250,000 text documents
• 50,000 photographs
• Recorded speeches
• Large collection of film and video
• Spans entire lifetime (1900-1978)
How we started
• Mountbatten in India (1947-48)
• On-going catalogue work by Archives produced ASCII files of text (in STATUS)
• 200 photos put onto laser videodisc – catalogue in Superbase
• Links authored using first prototype of Microcosm
Alan Turing Archive
• One of the current projects
• King’s College Cambridge
• 3 way funded pilot. IEE, BCS, ECS Soton
• To scan 1/3 of items
• Design Web site about the archive for 3 types of users
• Technology to be re-used for other archives
Database Design Issues
• Create database fields from catalogue etc.
• Copyright clearance. Majority is cleared
• Pay experts such as Andrew Hodges and Jonathan Swinton to contribute analysis
• Multiple versions/formats of each image for different applications
• OCR images where possible
Scanning Facts and Figures
• A3 scanner purchased (Epson GT10000)
• 780 images scanned at 300dpi, 24bit colour
• Compressed Tiff format
• 13Gb files produced
• PC and scanner taken to Archive, King’s
• 6 days work
JREI Server Project
• Joint Research Equipment Initiative
• For storing and processing multimedia data for a variety of projects
• 2 Sun servers each with 4 processors and 2GB memory
• Approximately 200Gb disk space
Turing Web Site Software
• IBM DB2 to manage the multimedia data
• Apache Web server
• PHP (HTML embedded scripting language) for dynamic pages that query the database
• Cross-platform design with free Web tools
• Integrates with our Agent Framework
Browse database for Items
List of Folders in the Item (A.1)
List of Files in the Folder
High Quality Image Browser
• Research started in the Viseum and ACOHIR European projects
• Image capture, calibration, compression, serving and scanning
• Image server provides image tiles to a Web browser
• Quickly view very large images (up to 2Gb)
Sample Photo
K7.8
AMT running, inscribed on back, ‘National Physical Lab. 2nd in 3 miles’
26 Dec. 1946
Copyright: Photographer unknown (possibly a newspaper)
Image ViewerK.2Précis of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. [c. 1927]. AMS notes putting the argument of The Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein in simple form, taking the book chapter by chapter, with directions on how to read it.
Links
• Alan Turing www.turing.org.uk (Hodges)• IAM www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk• Image Browser
www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~km/projs/webimage/• Php uk.php.net• DB2
www.software.ibm.com/data/highered/• Contact Kirk Martinez km@ecs.soton.ac.uk