Friday with DRC-Dev

Last Friday (July 29) the development team missed a conference call as Peter Murray, our leader at OhioLINK, was sick with walking pneumonia. However we resumed today with use of Gizmo software for conferencing. See www.gizmo.com. Gizmo works fine for 2-3 people, but with an entire group on the line, it was difficult to hear and people got dropped. Perhaps we will return to using Elluminator.

New terms arose today, as seems always to be the case with me! Terms such as
FOXML
RDF - Resource Description Framework
XACML - has to do with access control
semantic web
kowali triples - RDF is structured as a triple or triples. Triples include three pieces of info about an object: the subject, its attributes, and its value.
CBS trees - Complete Binary Search tree

I discovered a great Scientific American article (May 2001) on the semantic web by Tim Berners-Lee et al. Scientific American: The Semantic Web
A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities

This helps to explain some of the concepts we discussed today. The goal is to create an institutional repository that will be flexible in describing objects and creating relationships among them, even when they are dissimilar object types or in different "collections."

Strauss' UC career

Today I went to the UC Archives and perused the UC Catalogues for the years that Strauss was at UC. He started as a freshman in 1888 and graduated in Civil Engineering in 1892. Back then there were only about 125 students in the entire Academic Department of the University, with about 16 of them in Civil Engineering. One professor, Henry Turner Eddy, taught the entire Civil Engineering curriculum back then, and also served as dean of the Academic Department (as distinct from the medical, dental, and pharmaceutical departments of the university). In fact back in 1884-1885 Eddy taught Civil Engineering, Math and Astronomy!

The year after graduation Strauss was listed as a graduate candidate for the Master of Letters, and also living in Trenton NJ as a draftsman at the Steel and Iron Company. In 1893-1894 he was again listed as a masters student, though not a candidate for a degree. His address was back in Cincinnati at 290 West 7th Street (rather than his family home at 360 West 9th Street). In 1894-1895 was an instructor in the Civil Engineering program, teaching alongside Professor Ward Baldwin, who served also as registrar for the Academic Department. By this time the Academic Department had grown to 247 students.

Back then the catalogues listed all the graduates for each year, their credentials, and what they were doing. Strauss was listed in the 1895-1896 catalogue as a draftsman at Elmira Bridge Company in Elmira NY 1895-. In 1910 the university couldn't keep up with the graduate listings, but created a directory of graduates. Strauss was listed in the 1926 directory as living in Chicago at 3100 Sheridan Road. His bridge company was in Chicago, but by 1926 he was also spending much time in San Francisco selling the idea of the Golden Gate Bridge.