[Patina] Intervention & study update + meeting call

[Enrico Costanza]

Dear All,

A quick update after the additional conversation Tom and I had with
Archaeology MA students and the meeting I had with Mike J regarding the
integration of intervention 3 with the back-end.

We met 2 more students, one from Osteoarchaeology and one from
Palaeolithic Archaeology. The main things we learned are:

    * Master projects seem not to directly follow the kind of process we
      expected and discussed. In particular none of the two we met are
      going to use the labs on the Avenue Campus for their projects: one
      student (palaeo-) will do experiments with primates to study
      communication mechanisms, the other student has two options,
      either classify bones on a site in Hungary, or work with human
      bones in Portsmouth (it is unlikely these will be taken to
      Southampton).
    * Students tend to keep notes from their UG and master projects for
      years. These are often not used, and just sit in a drawer. At
      least in one case the notes were added as an appendix to the
      submitted project report, however, this does not seem to be common
      practice: normally the notes are kept by the student and only the
      report is submitted. So we can use these notes as testing material.


Based on these two points, here are our (=Tom and me) thoughts: we
should try and get available notes as soon as possible (Tom should be on
the case), first of all to analyse them and then to enter them into our
system. In this way we can completely decouple the "input" and "output"
aspects of the study. Entering the pre-existing notes in batch can also
help us validate/debug the basic functionality of the system.

So on one hand we will have an experiment where we compare finding
information using our system to the use of the original notes and the
original report based on the same notes. This will basically be an
information retrieval task (there are studies around this topic, so I
will try to look for specific references we can use). One question that
still needs to be clarified, though, is what exactly to expect from this
comparison (beyond obvious advantages of electronic systems). This
strongly depends on the design of the "output side" of the system, on
which I am still working. In general I hope that ideas from provenance
can be integrated here (Luc, I am looking at the documentation on the
opm website to get ideas..).

We will still need to show that it is also possible to use the system to
enter notes directly (rather than adding pre-existing ones), so we still
need to run a "field" (=not usability lab) study. To add to the
motivation for participants to use the system, it would be good to
either have multiple users working around the same topic (so by using
the system they learn about each other's work) or have the system 
pre-populated with information that is relevant to the participants. The
topics of the MA projects seem to be quite scattered, so we are still
trying to figure out who else could take part in this -- perhaps we
could do something related to Portus? We are planning to talk with Pina
(a PhD student involved in Portus, Tom to arrange this meeting), with a
PhD student (the only one) in osteoarchaeology (Angeliki should set up
that meeting) and with the supervisor of Osteo-MA students (Graeme,
Angeliki & Tom suggested that you arrange this meeting). I also just
sent an email to Leif asking for more information about the digital data
related to Portus.

>From the meeting with Mike J about the integration of intervention 3 and
the ontology, it seems that the intervention and the ontology are quite
aligned, thanks also to recent discussion between Mike and Luc. Open
issues (on which I need to work) include:

    * finalizing the input side of the interface, including deleting
      notes and handling user accounts
    * design the output side of the interface
    * list the back-end calls that the interface needs (e.g. from create
      and edit note to search operations) -- it seems that most (if not
      all) of these are already supported

Tom & Mike, is there anything I forgot?

As usual, feedback is welcome.

In general, my apologies for slow responses on this, but I am very busy
with preparing the lessons for a new course I teach in the second half
of this semester (on Computer Vision).

Thanks,
Enrico

-- 
Dr Enrico Costanza
Lecturer, Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, UK, SO17 1BJ

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ec
http://d-touch.org

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