Intro to the Arches Platform Part 3 of 4 - Data Technology Concepts

welcome everyone to today's webinar before i begin i want to let you all know that this webinar intro to the arches platform part 3 data technology concepts is being recorded so don't worry about taking super detailed notes as i'll be going over a lot of information today my name is annabelle lee enriquez and i'm a member of the arches project team at the getty conservation institute and i'll be presenting today during the q and a session i'll be joined by my colleague at the gci david myers as well as dennis withridge ceo of fairlawn geographics the lead developers for the arches project if you have a question regarding anything i'm about to present or any other questions regarding arches please do enter your question in the q a panel in the zoom platform and we'll try to get to everyone's questions at the end this is a continuation of the webinar series we started in 2019 as an introduction to the arches platform the first two parts covered the basic capabilities of the arches platform and the data management tools that allow you to configure arches according to your project's requirements and today i'm going to talk a little bit more about the data technologies that make arches unique as a data management platform because this is an introductory webinar series we won't be getting overly technical and hopefully the information presented today will help you all in understanding the value that the platform can bring to your project and project data now if you haven't yet seen the first two parts of this series you can access those via the arches videos page and that includes not only the videos but the slide decks and transcripts of the q and a's of the q a sessions and as i mentioned we'll post today's webinar along with today's slide and q a transcript within a few days so also i wanted to note that the videos page includes other webinars and videos that might be helpful especially if you are new to arches here's today's webinar outline i'll essentially be talking about some key data management goals and how the arches software platform can help a project to meet these goals through the data modeling process my aim today is to make you aware of what data modeling is and why it's important for your arches project or really any data management project and because data modeling is an involved process i'll also be going over some documentation and resources that can help in any event the presentation portion should be about 30 to 35 minutes and then we'll have the live q a session immediately following as a quick refresher or introduction arches is an open source software platform for cultural heritage data management developed by the getty conservation institute in partnership with world monuments fund it was originally developed for belt cultural heritage inventories but the software has since become flexible enough for other use cases and applications such as conservation science data management museum and art providence data and project and asset management the software itself is free meaning that there are no licensing fees it is enterprise level software that is hosted and deployed independently by organizations via their own servers and or and or infrastructure and it is supported by the arches open source community which includes heritage conservation and technology professionals many of which have implemented or are in the process of implementing arches for their own projects and end users since the last webinar in this series we've released arches version 5.1 and we've updated this graphic to include more arches features and capabilities such as project and task management in the form of workflows as a reminder part one in this series covered the data discovery and visualization features and part two discussed the data management features broadly today we'll be talking about a very specific aspect of data management data modeling and in the diagram i've highlighted the functionality associated with data modeling which are housed in the arches designer and reference data manager tools in part two of the web series webinar series we did talk about the mechanics of the arches designer and reference data manager which are administrator tools to help set up arches for end users and today we'll talk a little bit more about how some of the concepts about some of the conceptual underpinnings of data modeling in arches but first of all what is data modeling in arches essentially it is the creation of resource models or in other words data models using arches designer to define your database structure the data entry interface that your users will see and the overall organization of information in your arches implementation so this is a really powerful ability to have in that an arches administrator has the ability to configure an arches implementation that meets their users needs without custom coding in most cases and this is why the use cases for arches have expanded beyond built heritage inventories once installed you can really design a data management system for whatever you wish and beyond that data modeling in arches enables so much more and to explore that a little bit let's answer this question why was it a priority that archers include advanced data modeling capabilities when we started the arches project we realized that one of the most important aspects of any data management software is not the software itself the most important thing is the actual data and one of the measures of success for arches or really any data management system is its ability to generate data that is complete high quality discoverable shareable and persistent and for each arch's implementation the extent to which the data meets these goals is defined by the resource models so having the right resource models is key for any arches implementation i'm going to talk a little more now about these data goals and show some examples of how the resource models enable them regards to modeling for complete data what this means is that your resource models will encompass all the data that you need to manage to fulfill your project requirements and priorities for example say you are trying to create an arches implementation that includes data on people and this table represents your data you have four columns one for id of the person name type description all of this seems pretty straightforward but when you look closer at the data you'll see that there are some considerations to factor in when modeling first of all in some of the entries under a name there are two names for the first entry you could record mark twain and samuel clemens as one block of tux in the way that it is written in that cell but by doing so you lose the opportunity to better structure the data which includes two different names and name types another consideration here is that all of these descriptions were taken from wikipedia a modeling question would be is having wikipedia as a source embedded in the description enough or do you want to be able to record the actual links to the wikipedia entries for these people so that users have access to additional data that you have chosen not to include in your system also too it might not be feasible to include all of the information in that wikipedia entry in your system so you would want to have some links to that to the data to that data yet another consideration is whether you want to model dates for birth and death of each person for your use case you would need to decide again if this information needs to be extracted from the description to better to create a better and more explicit structure for the data so that it can be more easily interpreted by machines and then used by you and perhaps other systems so these are these are some considerations you might have when creating a resource model in arches for this data and once you have made these kinds of decisions or even perhaps as you are making them you as an administrator would use the arches designer to create and encode the settings for your research model for person i've gone ahead and created a very simple resource model for person based on the data in the table and you can see the structure in the red box to inspect this model further on the left i've included a zoomed in screenshot of the model structure from arches designer on the right is a graphical representation of this model so on the left you'll see that there are nodes which is what we call fields for type name and name type identifier and identifier type description description type and description source and here's the model with the corresponding data from the table in red now the data in blue is data that was added in order to describe the name type identifier type and description type i could have added additional nodes to accommodate the data regarding lifespan if that was important to this project but i decided not to and these are the kinds of decisions that can be made when data modeling for your own data now because different projects have different requirements this means that the resource models can be very different from project to project you'll see the simple person resource model that we just discussed on the left and on the right is a more sophisticated resource model per person where the modeler attempted to include every possible point of data that one might want to collect for a person the point here is that you can tailor your arches resource models and hence your arches implementation to your unique project needs and priorities while resource models from project to project can vary sometimes there are reasons why they're very similar so for example often a project needs to conform to an established data content standard which defines what data you need to manage so if you are in england the midas heritage standards define everything you need to collect for a heritage inventory and in that case you would create resource models that include everything specified as required by that standard some other example data content standards for heritage inventories include the international core data standard for archaeological and architectural heritage or in the u.s state historic preservation office or shippo requirements for each state alternatively there are other data standards that are not specific to heritage or heritage inventories such as dublin core that you might want to model your data according to the implication here is that every project that adheres to a specific content standard will be able to use the same resource models with perhaps some minimum more superficial changes i'm going to talk a little bit more about this later in the presentation but definitely this is a very key thing to note related to having complete data having high quality data is also important so now you're using resource models to define the parameters of the data that you are managing for example you know that you're going to collect the name of a person but are you going to allow one name to be collected or allow multiple names for that person to be housed in your archer system what would be the data type for that name entry and are you going to restrict data to correspond to a controlled vocabulary or in other words a list of approved terminology these are all very important questions that relate to the quality of the data that you will be managing for an example let's look at data types here are some examples of data types that you can use and assign to the nodes or fields for your arches resource model if you work in data and have experience in this some of these might be very familiar familiar to you and some are more bespoke data types that were developed for arches for specific use cases to continue our discussion about how high quality data can be ensured by selecting the right data types let's talk about this data type or the edtf or extended date time format data type that helps to capture fuzzy dates so what are fuzzy dates fuzzy dates are essentially incomplete or approximate dates if you look at the table to the left say you have a data set where you've got a field that defines built date for monuments or just a regular date but in that field the formats vary wildly and all of the dates are fuzzy except for the last one oftentimes these are the kinds of dates you might find via historical research and they are important as a historical record alternatively you may have fuzzy dates because the date is too far in the past to be considered exact or accurate now in the past because you may have wanted because you want this data to be machine readable as a date in this one field you may have decided in the past to standardize the date format and in this example it's been standardized as just a four digit year obviously in doing this you lose the nuance and important information held in their original data such as the one exact date you actually had or that one date might be might be june 1753 also the bce date can't be represented using the for four digit your time format the library of congress in the u.s created a data format standard to address this called the extended date time format specification and in arches we have a data type that allows you to manage this kind of data and you'll see what the edtf entries would look like in the third table there is a format for that prehistoric date and for all the other dates that represent represent exactly what you see in the first table now to add this data type to a field or node in your resource model in arches you would specify this in the arches designer here we're going from this regular date format with um in with it's a year date format to the edtf date format or data type which then gives you the opportunity to create some parameters such as padding for how art is encodes and interprets this data and once the actual data is entered using the edtf data type arches will know how to interpret the data and you can search for these dates in features such as the artist time wheel so using arch brta's version 5 demo site search interface i'm going to search for the tomb of nefertari also known as qv66 and looking at this record i'm going to scroll down here i see that the edtf date that was entered is approximately 1279 bce to approximately 1212 bce now that's a little bit hard to read so i have it in a slide so the date was approximately 1279 bce to approximately 1212 bce and it was expressed using that notation the edtf specification now the beauty of using using this type of date and the data type is that arches does two things here automatically number one it accounts for all of the dates between 1279 bce and 1212 bce so that red line there on the timeline and two it also accounts for the uncertainty based on the parameters you set so um you might not have seen it when when we were looking at those settings but the padding for the uncertainty for the fuzziness was set to one year so how arches encodes the approximate date then is 1280 bce approximately so to 1280 bce to 1211 bce so if we were to search for tubes or just to run a search bill for tombs built between 1290 bce to 1280 bce the tomb of nefertari would still be returned because arches can account for the fuzziness or uncertainty of the date based on the parameters we've set let's run that search very quickly and see the result so let's use the time wheel to search for resources that have dates between 1290 and 1280 bce let's click on that and you see i have 17 results and um i don't see the qv66 yet but i will you see that it has been returned because arches can account for the fuzziness of the date and so because the data was of a higher quality and not just a loan four digit year artez was able to better interpret it moving on to modeling so that your data is discoverable or searchable we just looked at a one way to optimize the discoverability of your data but in addition to that example typically you can design resource models that optimize search by normalizing the data structure to reduce redundancy and improve data integrity so for example what i mean by this is that you would not repeat the same data in different nodes or fields or be inconsistent in how you design your resource models and then once you've done that you would want to employ controlled vocabularies to standardize the terminology i also mentioned control vocabularies when discussing data quality because they also inform uniform data entry but let's look at controlled vocabularies now more in how they relate to search here's the reference data manager which manages controlled vocabularies in arches we're looking here at the record for the concept of residential single family house and you'll see that it has several different labels ones for housed in different languages as well as synonyms for house so that you can search using any of these terms and return the same resources so i'm going to go to the search interface and check this out so let's first search for house and i'm going to go ahead and use the concept search and i have four returns on that four resources that have been categorized as house using that concept now let's um type in house the german for house same for resources and then residence all right so same for resources um let's say you neglected to add a term such as casa or house in spanish you see it's not here anywhere it's just represented as a string so let's add it let's add that as a label to house in the reference data manager i'm gonna search for that record for that concept so search for house and yeah so cost is not there so i'll add it here and it's the prefer the prep label for spanish okay so we just added that label in the rdm and now we don't have to go into every single record to make that change so now when i search for casa let me do that and type in casa and select concepts because it's running the concept search and we sell and we still return the same for resources so this is a very quick example of being able to easily increase the discoverability of the data in arches by adding a new label in the reference data manager on in regards to shareable and persistent data resource models enable data that is interoperable and help to ensure data longevity by encoding semantic metadata into the data so that the data is self-describing and portable now as a note because arches is not proprietary software and is open source we use non-proprietary data formats such as csv or jsonld to export the data out and it exports out with that metadata and typically you would want the semantic metadata to correspond to an established standard that is regularly maintained and widely adopted such as the cdoc crm or conceptual reference model which is maintained by the international council of museums committee for documentation so basically the goal here is to make sure that the data is encoded with metadata that describes what it is and that that metadata corresponds to a known standard here again is that graph representation of our simple resource model for person and here is the branch in that resource model which describes the name of a person now in other words you can read this branch as a person is identified by a name which has a type where the data is being collected for name and name type now here's that same branch with semantic metadata corresponding to the cdoc crm now the statement is more explicit about the nature of the data and more machine readable and why is this important it may seem clear that name is an appellation in this case but what if the label for that node was something else that was not as explicit for example handle what if it said handle instead of name in english sometimes people use the word handle instead of name particularly in the tech world now if you were managing an arches system in which you used handle instead of name then without the semantic metadata describing it as an appellation that a person is identified by it might not be clear to others who are using your data what the data under handle actually is because of the semantic metadata it doesn't matter what you call it in your system and ultimately what matters is the data here are examples of actual data that is being described by the semantic metadata so for this person mark twain is the pen name and samuel clemens is his birth name and upon export this data will include metadata that lets you know that mark twain is an appellation for this person and that that appellation has a type of pen name so in that way the data is portable and self-describing and can be more easily ingested by other systems that use the same standard so let's go into the artist designer to see how we can embed the semantic metadata person or an e21 according to the cdoc crm or in this case it's the link.art version of the c doc crm it's probably a good time to note that arches comes with the cdoc crm loaded but you can load other ontologies if that better fits your use case so we're going to add that name branch to this new person model so first we'll add name and let's let's not start with property let's start with the ontology class which is a as we saw e41 appellation and then that restricts the properties that we can select and to the ones that are defined by the cdxrm and so now we have e21 person is identified by e41 appellation so let's add now name type to name that would be an e55 type and p2 has type so now this reads e41 appellation has type or p2 has type name type which is an e55 type so i'm going to save that and so now all of that semantic metadata is encoded in the resource model let's go ahead and change that to handle you'll see there it doesn't change the semantic metadata that gets associated with these nodes so that regardless uh this data will be the data will be defined as an appellation with it with a name type or with the type as defined by the cdoc crm i'll also note here that the complexity of the cdoc crm is hidden from your end users so they will be entering data in a data entry form and will have no idea that they are producing the ma they're that they are creating semantically rich data now i've given you a lot of information about resource models in arches and here's what we've learned resource models are sophisticated data models that you can create without coding using the arches designer they define the data structure and overall organization of information in your arches implementation and as you are going through this process they also generate the data entry forms for your end users also arches resource models enable data that is complete high quality discoverable shareable and persistent so that once you're done with the modeling process you'll have a data management platform that is tailored to your own use case and then users and at this line i'll also note here that unless you are constantly changing the nature of your artist implementation you typically only go through the modeling process once in the beginning of your project but still given everything that data modeling determines in arches or really any data management system there's a lot of responsibility on the part of the administrators who are setting up an artist implementation initially it requires a lot of time and consideration and two of the things that i think are essential here are number one and in-depth knowledge of your own data and use case so you would definitely need that to start modeling and then as well as some experience or training in knowledge organization and not just knowledge organization but knowledge organization within arches now we can't help you with that first thing but we've been working on some documentation and resources to help you with data modeling and arches and when i say we i'm referring to the arches resource model working group or rmwg which began with the aim of facilitating the sharing of cdoc crm-based modeling patterns amongst different arches implementations the arches designer was built to enable modeling without coding and the rmwg was founded so that modeling could be made easier for organizations that wanted to implement archers but had no background in knowledge organization so to make things easier the working group had the following goals number one create a package library that includes resource models and branches that could be shared and used by different organizations number two create documentation for data modeling with our suggested methodology for arches resource models and three facilitate modeling discussion within the arches community now the first of these goals is the arctis package library a package in arches is a configuration bundle that can be loaded into an arches installation and and it includes resource models branches vocabularies ontologies and sometimes actual sample data along with other configuration settings so then the library would be composed of links to add information about submitted packages that can be used and adapted by anyone in the arches open source community so if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the information on modeling that i just gave you just know that if your use case is similar to another arches implementation you might be able to use the same resource models with some slight modifications and here's the beginnings of that package library all of the web resources that i'm showing you today are works in progress so while we have made these pages live we are still adding more documentation and more information currently there are three packages that are available to be loaded into an arches installation in this library and one of these package is the one that is currently being used for the arches version 5 demo site and you'll see here that we've included information on what resource models are included in this package now in any event we hope to add more packages in the future including ones based on historic england's arches resource models which align with the midas heritage standard as well as a package for artists for science which will include resource models and workflows for managing conservation science data such as object image annotations using triple i f and instrumentation or measurement data now the documentation on arches modeling includes foundational information on structured data and data modeling for those who have no background in these topics suggested arches modeling methodology and additional modeling resources for more information again this work is still in progress but we've organized the information in the following categories basic concepts methodology which is coming soon benefits of modeling data according to these principles glossary and additional links with more information we definitely invite comments or contributions from anyone to help add to and enhance this documentation in fact we're inviting anyone who is interested to become involved in the activities of the working group as we're looking to increase discussion around resource models in arches amongst people who are looking to implement arches or those who are interested in data modeling in general also we we'd love to expand the package library and include more packages that represent more varied use cases and as i just mentioned any help in enhancing the documentation around modeling would be very very welcome so again that was a lot of information but in a few days to a week we'll be posting the recording slide deck and transcripts coming next in the intro to the arches platform series is part 4 on arches information architecture we don't have a date for that one yet but be sure to follow us on social media or sign up for the arches mailing list to be notified of a date for that webinar and that concludes the presentation portion of the webinar so i'm going to ask david and dennis to mute themselves and join me for the q a great thank you annabelle that was great yeah excellent i'm i'm uh this is david i'm going to be moderating the q a so um thank you annabelle and great to have everyone who's joined uh from different parts of the world [Music] and um for those of you who uh um you can as annabelle mentioned you can submit a question through the q a panel and also see other uh attendees questions there um and one other thing you can do if you see someone else's question that you'd like you can click on the thumbs up icon at the bottom of the question to bump it up in the list um in terms of answering it so we'll try to get to everyone's questions and um i see one uh already submitted um which is this is a general question not necessarily specific to data modeling could you please elaborate on how arches has so far been used in the unesco historic urban landscape undertakings which cities or organizations have used arches and what challenges you at getty's arches project i think have heard of or observed the challenges encountered i'll i'll take a first stab at this question and um others can jump in um i'm i'm not aware of uh specifically uh implementations that are focused on the uh unesco historical urban landscape uh approach or methodology um but to the second part of your question there are a number of cities that have implemented arches or are in the process of implementing including city of los angeles in the u.s city of lincoln in the uk greater london is in the process of implementing through historic england and city of philadelphia is in the process and also city of san francisco um challenges that we've heard um [Music] i'm not aware of challenges specific to cities um i think that that's actually been a um kind of a geographic scale that there there's been a good deal of uptake with arches and um from what i understand um cities like los angeles and uh lincoln have been quite pleased with what they've been been able to accomplish with arches you have anything to add dentist or animal no i think that covers it pretty nicely again yeah i don't have anything to add to what you mentioned david okay uh all right the second question um does arches support open research data if not not are you planning to do something in this respect um okay uh so uh in regards to this question um so nevin if you could elaborate on what what you mean by support open research data one thing i want to note here is that when you install arches it's pretty much up to you to how you want to model your data and so if you're talking about supporting a framework or that corresponds to open research data then that's something that any anyone in the community can do can implement but in regards to any specific implementations that we are aware of that support um open research data and i'm not exactly sure in which in what way uh you're referring to that so um feel free to elaborate in on the q a panel if you'd like and dennis if you or david if any of you have anything to add to that that would be great i think yeah i mean i'm not familiar with a specific open research data framework if that's what nevin is referring to but i think you're you're spot on annabelle like part of the data modeling effort in arches is to think about how you want to build in integration points with other systems yeah okay so um let's we're not going to mark that as answered yet so if you want to elaborate another feel free to do so okay all right and in the meantime we do have another question um thanks a lot for an amazing presentation for those who are familiar with arcgis or qgis but want to start using arches would you have some suggestions i mean would that familiarity help or do they operate with different logics i can take that on david if you like sure so this is a pretty common a pretty common question um and it really i think boils down to arches and how arches can work in tandem with a traditional gis platform like arcgis or qgis and is there is there some synergy between the two systems and i think the the quick answer is arches i think works really well and is a good neighbor with a traditional gis system there are some so what does that mean it means that you can import and export data from arches into a gis system with minimal effort maybe more interestingly we're working on a project right now where we're supporting really real-time direct integration of arches data inside of esri's arcgis arcgis pro product and what do i mean by that i mean that you we've developed an add-in or we're developing an atom just about to finish it actually that allows you to access arches data as native esri feature services within arcgis pro uh make edits to a geometry and upload that geometry back into arches and then directly within the esri software access arches data entry forms so it's quite a i think quite a intimate relationship between the two systems and we have similar plans for qgis integration as well so that's and it's one way to look at it like there's there's a really good there's a really good working relationship between arches software and traditional gis software the second half of this question though i think is really is really interesting which is does knowledge of familiarity of those two platforms help with arches and i'd say that in general it does because you'd be approaching your modeling effort from the perspective of thinking about the geospatial relationships between things but there's a really big difference between how arches models data and how esri and qgis both model data and we could have a whole webinar about this but i'll just maybe cut to the chase and say that traditional gis software systems really have some quite significant constraints on how they manage data a traditional gis person would think about defining or modeling information as a feature class that is to say a table with prescribed attributes and a specific geometry type so a point or a line or a polygon and arches does not require you to make the same constrained constraints in your data model arches will allow you to create models that are less planar less linear sorry less like layers and more like objects and your models can can support uh all the geometry primitives so you can have a model for historic monuments or historic buildings say and there's no need to define one for a point feature a line feature or a polygonal feature so there's a lot of additional things that you can do in the arches modeling world that free up some of the ways you manage data when compared to a traditional gis yeah and um to add to that um dennis so that's from like if you are used to working with data in a traditional gis and what one thing that i will add here is that one of the one of the ways in which we did one of the ways in which we developed arches was so that people who didn't have experience in these traditional gis software platforms that so that those people could actually use the system and they could create geospatial data without without understanding how to use arcgis or qgis or even knowing anything about anything about gis's so for end users creating geospatial data working with geospatial data is i think relatively easier using arches all right hope yeah hopefully that answers your question let us know if it didn't and you can add another question in the suit i'm going to move now to nevin sent some clarification of his question about does arches support open research data he added what i mean is when we define a digital object some other repository can take it okay yeah so i think this is um at least the way i understand this is in the way that we think about uh link open data or just uh linked data in that um in arches you can model your data so that it be so that it is portable and so self-describing so that it can be it can be ingested by another system whether that's through just an export process or through some sort of um synchro in a synchronous way using using an api that as long as long as um the two systems the um receiving system and the um publishing system are um using relatively same standards the same standards dennis do you have anything to add to that yeah i would just add that this to me this question hints at data interoperability and yep the key i think the key point here to make is that if if you're diligent about how you model your information in particular thinking through the way that you build semantics into your models you can do that in a way that is consistent with linked open data and arches supports import and export of all its information as linked open data and specifically as json ld so json representation of linked open data and that data should be ingestible by by other systems that know how to process linked open data so that i think is one of the key reasons it kind of goes back to what annabelle was saying in her presentation the key reason in thinking through and putting the effort into thinking about how you build your models is to support these kinds of data interoperability capabilities semantics are necessary to build linked open data models but they're not necessarily sufficient you do have to think about the structure of the patterns that you use in structuring your models and if you do that properly you can build models that support valid linked open data and that means that any system that can process linked open data can take arches information either as an export or via the arches api and interact with it all right thank you um here we have a question um are there users who are using arches to document damage to historic monuments during earthquakes uh well i'll jump in and say that i'm not aware of anyone who's thinking about it and specifically as earthquakes but i do know that there are several arches projects arches implementations explicitly concerned about managing the and tracking the condition of cultural heritage objects and their risk and their uh and their status so that in the event of an earthquake they'd be able to quickly uh look at their inventory of significant heritage objects and quickly and use arches to [Music] update the the condition of those objects by doing a field investigation and we we didn't explicitly mention this but one way to one way arches supports that is through the use of uh arches collector which is a it's an application that you can that you can load on a on a mobile phone either an ios or android phone and that has uh the ability to to log on in a secure way to your arch's implementation and access your arches data i'll just add that there is an arches implementation focused on nepal that was really um implemented in in the aftermath of the uh the earthquake there a few years ago and um i believe it it includes information on damages to uh structures there from the earthquake [Music] which is called the it's called denim the um it's through the nepal heritage documentation project um also both the cities of los angeles and city of san francisco i know there are of course in earthquake zones and i know that certainly in in los angeles which i'm more familiar with that implementation i know they're they're certainly concerned about being prepared for the next earthquake and having information in in arches already on the significance of different structures another implementation that it's not earthquake damage but kind of following on what dennis said about tracking conditions the florida public archaeology network they're um through their heritage monitoring scouts program they're tracking conditions of archaeological sites across florida including looking specifically at impacts of sea level rise there and i'm just going to chime in here and let you all know that david's been mentioning some implementations of arches and you can find links to some of these implementations some of them are not live but um a lot there are others that you might want to check out on the arches website at archesproject.org and you can look

for the implementations of arches that have some examples of um projects that are using arches um all right another question here from celine um saying annabelle you have invited the audience to connect or collaborate with arches project could you elaborate on the ways to further the collaboration for example could individual heritage researchers or practitioners have defined and sustained relationship with arches for a specific research project or arch's application to an urban area okay well that one was directed towards me so i'll take it um so um just to clarify the ways in which i was referring to to collaborate was um in regards to modeling but in general um if you are working on an art so first of all arches is an open source project and and it's open source software and we're not involved directly so meaning the arches project team at the getty conservation institute is not involved directly in every single arches implementation or arches powered project but um what but we invite collaboration within the arches open source community on several different things in regard and in for this case we're talking about modeling if you want to collaborate with us to talk about how to how to model for your particular use case and share and share the results of that with the rest of the community that's one way that you can collaborate within the community other ways so for example right now we have a documentation effort that is actually entirely uh pretty much entirely powered by the community it's community-led and so we're not necessarily directly involved in that effort and it's an effort to improve all of the documentation for the arches um for the arches platform so so that is a those are some examples now in regards to um you know for your you noted an example could individual heritage researchers or practitioners have a sustained relationship with arches for a specific research project or arches application to an urban area um in that case if you wanted to let people know in the community what you're doing and collaborate with others in the community that and especially if you have um especially in regards to your application to an urban area that would be very helpful to others who might want to do similar things using arches so those are some examples again this is really about interacting being part of the arches community to help improve the community and to help others in the community to to help them with their arches implementations can i experiment annabelle yeah absolutely i'd like to i mean to me the answer to this question is a pretty unequivocal yes that you can choose to to collaborate really on multiple levels i mean annabelle gave some really good examples but really and i think the key point here is arches we want you should look at arches as much as a community as a software project which means that you can work with arches on multiple levels you can you certainly can just be a user of arches but you can increase your level of collaboration by engaging with the community on kind of multiple levels one level is through documentation like annabelle just suggested jumping in and and helping with improving or extending the documentation is a form of collaboration but you could just as easily take advantage of the arches uh discussion forum so there's an arches group for arches users and there's an arches group specifically for arches developers both of those are avenues through which you can uh ask questions but also spearhead initiatives if you choose to and collaboration in that sense could include creating or extending code if you're a developer or generating discussions about modeling questions or approaches or research ideas if you're more of an arches user so to me the really the point is if you're interested in collaborating there's a way for you to do so that's one additional thing i'll add in the uk um there's been a self-organized um uk sort of regional user group um that i believe they had a couple of meetings and they're planning a third one this spring um but that's something that um different organizations and individuals out there in the community decided hey there's kind of a critical mass in that region so they've they've been um organizing and sharing experiences and um i think trying to help each other out so that's another possibility yeah all right to the next question um is there an arches app for mobile devices uh the short answer is yes there is an app there i should be really clear here there's an app for mobile devices called arches collector that allows you to log on to an arches project and [Music] access and create data in in the field and it's their native applications for ios and for android that allow you to do disconnected editing and syncing uh the the data that you've collected in the field within arches with an arches project it's secure you have to have an arches account for this to work and you have to log on to a specific arches application but the short answer is there is absolutely a mobile app that allows you to access and update arches data yes and and just to add to that that is um so that app is it's a free app that you can download for your ios or your android device there are no separate licenses so you can have as many people with the app and you can define projects within our data collection projects that you push to that app first for your users so if you have things like a crowdsourcing project or just survey projects you can do that through the mobile app okay all right let's push through we have a few last questions and i know we're we're running to the end of time um just one other comment really that saying that um attendee in the past found arches designer challenging to to get to know um but noted that the new resource modeling documentation makes it much easier to understand so i'm just noting that that seems to be a very useful resource uh next question annabelle did you want to say anything there no i'm just going to say thanks and i'll i'm typing that as well so that's fine uh next question um in the arches designer you use drop uh down a drop menu where you added casa in this drop menu for a short while i saw different languages including cyrillic based uh proposals like russian where can i see the list of these predefined languages and are they available for all fields in arches designer okay so i think um and dennis i'm gonna i'm gonna give this to you in a second um i think what what your question is kind of alluding to is internationalization or localization with languages but just to answer your specific question regarding the reference data manager those languages that were in that drop down i i defined those labels for those languages in the django interface for arches and so that those specific languages were available i could have added more languages but um but i didn't now um dennis i'm going to i'm going to kick this question over to you so you might want to talk about actually how arches deals with languages yeah so this is a good question and it hits at a much broader really much broader topic which we we would call internationalization of arches so what annabelle showed in the presentation today was the ability to support multiple labels for a concept and that those labels can be managed in multiple languages and in fact those languages can have multiple scripts so the scripts can include latin-based scripts but also cyrillic and and other scripts so arabic or chinese or japanese so arches is the code base is completely capable of supporting the various languages and right now currently as a version 5.1 the part of arches that supports multilingualism is the reference data manager so the part where you control what appears in the data entry form drop-downs we're just starting to think about extending the internationalization of arches the ability of arches the user interface so data entry forms and all the on-screen labels that you would use to interact with the software to support multiple languages as well that currently isn't in place in arches but we're beginning the effort to at least explore how to support that and while nothing has been promised i'm pretty optimistic that we'll be working on at least some support for uh alternate languages in the arches user interface and that'll probably be coming along in the next you know in the next year so sometime in 2021. all right um next question sticking with annabelle's person example from the presentation how would the data look when exported into csv format especially in terms of the multiple name types or multiple descriptions okay so um this might get a little bit technical especially since i have nothing to illustrate this um so when you x when there are multiple name types for a particular resource so that example for uh mark twain um usually what what will happen in the csv format is that you'll have two lines then the first line will have the data for samuel clemens and then there will be a second line that is that has the same resource id and as the primary key and then that will have the additional information so one line with samuel clemens and birth name and the other line with um mark twain and pen name so um definitely can go into that more but this is um probably during another webinar we'll talk a little bit more about data import and export but and that's what that is in a nutshell you basically have multiple lines for the uh different entries and then and david i'll just answer the second question from christina on can videos and or 3d models be stored and displayed in arches um number one yes they can be stored and vid and they and how they're displayed the videos or 3d models depends on what exactly you mean we have several arches implementations that have embedded video and 3d model viewers within the report templates so um that's an example of how they can be displayed but generally arches if you are you can upload most types of file formats into arches and the question is whether or not or whether or not and how it is displayed within arches and that can um it can it might entail some customization depending on what you're talking about dennis did you want to add to that yeah the i mean i think you're you're correct there's no issue in uploading digital data digital files and some digital files can be displayed natively so out of the box in arches some digital files are specific enough in nature that you need a particular uh bit of code to be able to actually display those file formats interactively and that's arches allows you to embed that code if necessary so i'll just say that we we support the display of uh a small set of 3d 3d file formats natively and if you are uploading data in those 3d file formats then that's not a problem if you're uploading data 3d data or video data in alternate formats formats that aren't natively supported by arches it's just a matter of including the decoders for those file formats and embedding that in your arches in your arches report formats that's a very it's typically a very straightforward thing to do we've seen that we've seen developers include the appropriate libraries when necessary with just a little bit of work so maybe that's a bit more detail than you were looking for but yeah the short answer is yes archers just let you do this okay great hopefully that answers your question christina and since we are over time i think i'm going to end um the webinar now thank you all for um let's see thank you all for attending the webinar and making it this far and you can share your feedback about this webinar at contact archesproject.org and um we had mentioned our arches forum and that's google here's the link there and then the webinar repository that artistproject.org videos again thank you all for attending and hope you have a great rest of your day thanks everyone thanks all

2021-01-31 01:07

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