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OMA

Herbert Meyer: The next system is here from Berlin. The life of the system starts 1995 or 1996. The name of the system is OMA. OMA it is the youngest OMA I know. She is only six years old and I hope that OMA is in 2090 96 years old. And we have here Frank Kunkel. He is from Berlin and he will give us a nice talk about 15 minutes: OMA: Open Meta Archive.

Frank Kunkel: I'm actually here to introduce you to the Open Meta Archive. But I think it would absolutely make sense to go a little bit back in history because there is like other projects that are originally important in the launching of the Open Meta Archive and that is the Open Radio Archive and the Open Video Archive. Another aspect of the histories: all these systems have been conceived and developed Thomax Kaulmann. We are working together on a level of free association on these projects and I'm on the co-ordinating part. So if you have like in depth technical questions it is a good idea maybe to save them and to ask them to Thomax. But in case you have anything I can answer I'll try to. One more thing on history, I met Thomax in 1992 when we did a project for Documenta X that was called Piazzeta Virtuale and this project kind of made me encounter internet then and ever since we work together. We were both co-founders of the International City Berlin and the International City Federation and from these days one of the projects that survived the end of International City is Radio International City.

That is now called Open Radio Archive. And I would like to show you real quickly this archive that is only thought to contain audio content. And we could have a look. So that is the interface. That was launched in 1995 and we can see here right now it is a contributing system which is also like a common base for all the systems. It works also as a distributing system. That means this the server. The image you see here that is the Radio Internationale Stadt server in Berlin but there is also a server in Riga and there is one in Lublijana and then there is one in London. And these notes are all connected with a SMTP protocol to exchange the text based database entries as while the rich media content, the audio files are distributed on the different servers. That means if you log on to the server in Riga you will get the same search results like you log on on this one. But then the audio files could be played from were the files actually are on the hard disk.

Contributor system: It is like for content producers here in the audio field quite easy to get an account in the system. Just write me an email and I would maybe ask what kind of content do you have and people publishing their audio content they sign responsible on the copyright level for the content they are publishing within the system. Now this has grown to an amount of audio files that is measureable in days here. We have 37 days, zero houres, 23 minutes and 30 seconds of audio content in this system and this has been streamed to the net audience all together 888 days. In 1997 people started up-loading video materials also on the server and we thought that is not a good idea because it has shown that people visiting the system they are either interested in audio or in video content.

So we set up another system that is called the Open Video Archive. Now this is the same concept, basically the same software but the contextualisation of the video pieces has of course different field names which is specific to this medium. So like for video you don't necessarily have a composer but for a piece of music you do. Maybe we can have a look also. It is a contributor driven system...The Open Video Archive like also let to the idea that we have different kind of media that we want to manage in form of an archive system, a content management system. And so like the regular information tool like for example you have a movie. You might have audio interviews with directors or actors. You need an audio system for archiving. You have maybe still photography that you want to show in the context of the movie. You have discriptive text or you also maybe have a trailer or like the entire moving image piece in a sort of a preview what the band would allow you to do. And so the logical consequence of this need for different media to describe a certain context led to the idea of the Open Meta Archive.

And now I show you one of the implementations. Ee have one in Prague at the Centre of Contemporary Art running and in the Hyperwerk in Basel, Switzerland there is another implementation and there is our server oma.orang.org. So, lets get around to the Open Meta Archive. Here is the listing of the main components. I just read it for you. The main components of the Open Meta Archives are : You have descriptive database entries for the media files according to the specific attributes. You have a category system based on a definable tree structure, defining a location for the meta gathered media information in the tree structure. Then the meta items can be copied, moved or linked within the tree. That means like if you have an event oriented tree structure there would say O.k. like we have a branch of workshops and there is the same person showing up in this workshop, in this workshop you could like just put the information in one location in the tree. But you can also link from other parts of the tree directly to this information. So you don't have to upload the media data twice. Media upload and descriptive database entries to the web browser. Access is relative to the user or the editors. But we do only have like two possible accesses which is the administrational access that would allow also to design which makes changes in the templates and it would allow set up new user accounts. But for all the other people who have access as editors in the Meta Archive it is like one level. There is no whatsoever further distinction within these accounts. O.k. automatics database entries through XML input. Structured document output with XML html templates. Full text and keyword rich reveal as well as hierarchic navigation and distribution of data to joined but independently administrated OMA systems.

This is a short description of the main features and I like to show you now the system requirements if you want to download open Meta archive software here you can see what is required. That is PERL, as much Unicode as possible. You need an Apache server which is free. You need a mod-Perl . This is a perl interpreter for Apache. DBE DVD Perl interface to your favourite database. It could be any SQL database. You need an Apache DVE. Then the database has to be supporting SQL and needs an DVE-DVD interface. And libeg pads for event driven XML (parcing). Then an XML parser and mind based 1614 for distribution. That is what you need to install the whole system. Now that is the homepage on our Open Meta Archive server. The output that the users would see like we have here is determined through editing templates for the different media for search results and so on. If I have the time I get into this a little bit further.

So that is the user output on our Open Meta Archives server and I show you an alternative which is the output of the system that is installed in Switzerland. That is like this. So you see this is pretty much freely definable on XML templates. So, that is the way the people from Hyperwork have designed the user output in Switzerland. O.K. this is just to give an example we have like a documentation...What we see that is the editorial interface to publish and to describe entries of the different media and contextulisation them on this meta level. And one key element is this tree structure here. And that is of course the crucial point. Because Open Meta Archive also can work in a distributed system. So if you connect your Open Meta Archive server to other servers you have to make arrangement with the other associated notes. So you have the same tree structure that you all work with. If you have like your own server and you are not connected to any of the other systems like this you will not have to discuss it except for the people you are working with. And the definition of how to set up this tree structure is very crucial for what later then the user output is going to be like and how to navigate in your system. So I close this tree. So like here you see the top level for the system that we are running right now. We have the features for film, audio, images and text. I'll just take an example. If you chose an audio file you want to publish this. You have an upload feature here. You have to log in. O.k. You get a very easy upload tool to put this up on the server your audio file and once it is up there... now I have to log on. If you have an uploaded file you would have this here. You would mark it and then also make a decision where to put it in the tree structure. And...

Herbert Meyer: Frank, I think every system is very complicated to use and we have a time problem....

Frank Kunkel: So, anybody interested in further information on how to operate this system I would be very happy to meet you on Saturday on this slot.

[transcript: Katja Pratschke


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