Data Unbound

On July 18, 2006, I officially took on a new role at UC Berkeley. As part of a reorganization, I became a data architect working for the Data Services Department of Information Services and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. Only the day before, I was the Technology Architect for the Interactive University Project. In some ways, there hasn’t been much change. I sit in the same cubicle (though staff might be physically moved around starting next year), report to the same direct supervisor, work with some of the same people, and grapple with some of the same challenges. In other ways, great changes are afoot. I obviously don’t know what all of them are, but that won’t stop me from reading the tea leaves to figure them out.

One change for me is to retire the IU Technology Architecture Lodge, a weblog that I have maintained more or less continuously from March 2, 2000. By retire, I don’t mean take the materials off the web. No, I’m actively working out a strategy for preserving the content and migrating the materials from my blog to another writing space. The IU Manila server will be eventually turned off, and we have offered to provide statically rendered versions of their sites to owners. If I come up with any better solutions (which I am currently developing on my own time), then I plan to share them with the public.

An obvious question for my readers is what is going to happen to the work of the Interactive University as a whole. I can speak only to the work which which I’ve been most directly involved, namely the Scholar’s Box and the IU/CDL Collaboration. (I suspect that there will be official announcements about the IU as a whole.) For a long time now, my colleagues and I have spoken about putting the Scholar’s Box out as an open source project. I’m pleased to say that we are finally making crucial progress on that front. I have now submitted the Scholar’s Box for approval by the Office of Technology Licensing. Perhaps within a couple of weeks, I will have the go-ahead with officially annoucing an open source project around the Scholar’s Box.

I hope to find some way to continue a collaboration with the California Digital Library. Given the mandate of Data Services (“Provides stewardship of both academic and administrative data, as well as tools for data presentation, visualization, analysis, and collaboration. Helps prepare the campus for the convergence of IST, Library, ETS, and appropriate external providers.”), it would make sense of doing more work together. I would like to write more about issues of data architecture and digital libraries.

So what will this weblog be about? I will write about issues related to the work I do as a data architect at UC Berkeley. I anticipate writing about such topic as:

• data architecture–what it is and how one does it
• the relationship between data architecture and other forms of information technology architecture
• research, teaching, and administrative data in higher education
• cyberinfrastructure
• service-oriented enterprise architectures
• what we are doing specifically at IST, UC Berkeley, and the UC system as a whole
• IT organizations
• IT staff development
• scholarly data
• scholarly workflow automation
• digital libraries
• educational technology
• collaboration, presentation, and analysis tools