Notes from NITLE presentation:

1. used a combination of the O'Reilly ETC and the CSG-Berkeley slides to introduce the group to OSAF and Chandler.
2. talked about our work with CSG and the concluding requirements for Westwood
3. did Chandler demo, was able to see Morgen3 on roster, but not reliably see his public calendar or contact info.
4. questions from the group after the presentation included:
   • if we use jabber to share data what's to keep students from sharing MP3s
   • one campus uses techniques for bandwidth throttling, would that impede Chandler
   • could you use Chandler to create and publish schedules (she wasn't listening to that part of my preso I guess)
   • will Chandler have resource scheduling, e.g. classroom, AV equipment, etc.
   • could Chandler interact with courseware applications to view data in the courseware database
   • can Chandler be deployed without a team of programmers
5. the presentation following mine was someone from Middlebury College showing his project on a "semantic indexing"
   • open source
   • uses statistical analysis of words to derive metadata
   • search engine finds latent patterns in unstructured data, expanded recall, relevance feedback
   • creates clusters of items based on statistical analysis of content (with or without metadata) NOT just keywords, kind of like find other documents like this one
   • could be interesting addition to Chandler providing a means to find items in repositories that are related that do not have specific attributes in common or that are know a priori like keywords.
   • This is particularly useful for large and/or unfamiliar data sets, eg. Blogs, example searched RSS feeds for query to retrieve ranked relevance items that might not contain ANY or the search terms in the query
   • It is language agnostic
   • Project seems to be run out of Middlebury, I'll find out more. More info at http://www.nitle.org/semantic_search.php
   • Maybe they want to write a parcel?
6. next steps
   • prepare email survey draft
   • include Exec Summary from CSG doc.
   • Provide background reading link to full CSG doc
   • Set expectations we are trying to determine how NITLE institutions' requirements differ from Canoga and Westwood
   • In particular focus on interoperability/migration needs vis a vis Exchange/Outlook (evidentially a number of institutions are using Exchange servers to Eudora clients, unclear if they're talking IMAP or MAPI)
   • Try to field ASAP. We may have difficulty getting responses because of running into an end of semester/gone for the summer problem
   • send to Carla for comments
   • Carla will email to NITLE members (CIOs to delegate) with cover from her, responses will be emailed to Pieter to tabulate and draw conclusions

-- PieterHartsook - 07 May 2003