TextGrid Newsletter 03 [Mai 24, 2007]
We are pleased to present the third TextGrid newsletter today where we would like to inform you about the latest developments in TextGrid.
This information is also available under the heading news on the TextGrid homepage www.textgrid.de.
This newsletter contains
On March 1-2, 2007, D-Grid was pre-evaluated at the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB). The TextGrid consortium and all other D-Grid projects were rated by a commission elected by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). For TextGrid, the external reviewers were Dr. Peter Wittenburg and Professor Dr. Anke Lüdeling.
The goal of the review was to give information about the achieved results of all ongoing projects and their current status, trying to identify topics that require intervention and steering before the end of the project.
TextGrid has been evaluated with positive comments from all sides. The result of the evaluation is to be announced soon.
So far, all text-based data of the TextGrid community have been distributed and stored on project-site computers. The integration of such data into a storage-grid that is accessible by the whole community has been a pressing need and one of the main TextGrid goals. Particularly the availability of long-term storage with facilities for replication of data has been a primary intention to keep cultural heritage safe.
Since the end of 2006, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has been investing additional funds into all D-Grid projects that are intended for building up a new network infrastructure in Germany. In this respect, TextGrid could move a big step forward. Following the recommendations of the D-Grid steering committee, MediGrid and TextGrid invested jointly in additional hardware that will guarantee a sustainable grid infrastructure for the future.
The GWDG has coordinated and given assistance in obtaining the hardware, using synergy effects as far as possible. The GWDG is an ideal partner for TextGrid because its strategic aim is digital long-term preservation and archiving. SAN-storage components with a total capacity of 30 terabytes, as well as a cluster system made up of 11 nodes with two Intel Xeon 3.0 Ghz Woodcrest processors and eight GB main storage for MediGrid have been purchased. Each community has access to the system via an additional system with the same hardware configuration.
Thus, Göttingen builds up and establishes an active grid node within the GWDG, organizing a number of arrangements around grid computing. The d-Grid projects, Instant-Grid, MediGrid, and TextGrid – all located in Göttingen – are at the heart of the grid forum in Göttingen.
In this regard, we would like to inform you about GoeGrid II, the “Göttinger grid initiative”, taking place on September, 13th will have a heavy practical focus this time. Further information can be found under: www.textgrid.de.
- GES 2007 International experts from four different e-science fields – grid computing, knowledge networking, e-learning, and open access – joined at the first
first German e-Science Conference which took place in Baden-Baden, May 2-4.
Information about all projects was available to participants during the braskes. TextGrid presented a poster together with the Arts & Humanities Support Centre - AHeSSC (GB), Arts and Humanities Data Service - AHDS (GB), Data Archiving and Networked Services - DANS (NL), as well as DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities). A large number of visitors took the opportunity to obtain information about currents grid projects. The themes of interest were future working environments, standardization, tools and security aspects, and licensing issues.
There was the opportunity for new contacts. A cooperation agreement was signed on May, 3 between the MPDL (Max Planck Digital Library) and Goettingen University, resp. the State and University Library Goettingen. The main aim is join forces into building up a digital infrastructure for the humanities. Collaboration is to take place in future projects and defining innovative strategies. We have reported about this issue before (see below). TextGrid Workshop at the annual meeting of GLDV (GLDV Spring Conference 2007) - On April, 12, 2007, TextGrid offered a workshop at the annual conference of the German Society for Linguistic Data Processing (
GLDV). The focus of the workshop was on data structures for linguistic resources and their applications (cf. http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/gldv2007/).
The workshop aimed to present the current TextGrid results to the circle of linguistic experts. There have been four presentations discussing the role of TextGrid within e-humanities and digital ecosystems aiming at the requirements of scholars working in the field of philology, lexicographic editions, the demands of corpus linguistics, and last but not least the TextGrid architecture and technological enhancements. It was made clear that TextGrid has built up an interdisciplinary, international and networked virtual research platform together with some other earlier e-humanities initiatives, thus contributing to the gridification of the humanities. Moreover, the open SOAP-based platform was presented. It enables other projects to integrate further services into the TextGrid platform. Many questions and comments showed a vital interest in TextGrid. At the end of the workshop, a live presentation of the current prototype was demonstrated.
The website of the workshop: http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/gldv2007/textgrid-workshop.html
- TextGrid als digitales Ökosystem:
eHumanities meets eScience (Marc Küster, FH Worms)
- Wie kann TextGrid die Fachwissenschaft verändern – Philologische Edition (Werner Wegstein, Universität Würzburg)
- Diskussion über Erwartungen der Fachwissenschaften an TextGrid
- D-Grid Metadata Workshop
On March 26-27, 2007, TextGrid organized a metadata workshop together with DGI at the SUB Göttingen. The goal of the event was twofold: First, the different aspects of metadata within d-grid was presented, and second, the focus was on the common features of metadata within the different d-grid communities. Tom Baker gave a presentation on the current state of metadata in research and development - particularly RDF and application-oriented modelling. Then, some grid projects demonstrated their metadata scheme. As a quintessence, it was stated that metadata arise at different levels in the grid (administrative metadata, metadata in publications, and semantic metadata in ontology) and are to be managed with different technologies, partly to be stored redundantly.
Discussions focussed on the potential usability of metadata services aiming to support the overall community, mechanisms for metadata exchange, best practices, and other organizational means to guarantee interoperability, particularly by choice of RDF. The slides of the presentations can be found at: https://indico.desy.de/conferenceTimeTable.py?confId=261. D-Grid Security Workshop
The 2nd D-Grid-Security Workshop, which took place in Göttingen on March 27-28, and organized by DGI and MediGrid, was well attended (more than 50 participants). After an introduction devoted to the whole complex of problems by W. Weisz (Austrian Grid), different aspects of security were discussed by DGI- and Community-Grid-representatives. While the topics VO-management and authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI) predominated the first day, stressing the federation software Shibboleth, the practical usability of this technology in the context of libraries was shown on the second day.
In the course of the day, it was recognized that although most authentication problems have been solved D-Grid (as well as grid computing in general) is still in its infancy regarding authorisation.
Further topics of the workshops were firewalls, virtualisation techniques, grid-Cert for security cases, and data management. In a final panel, single aspects were discussed in detail, showing that different communities have different security requirements. All in all, MediGrid and InGrid have the highest security requirements.
All slides can be found here: http://medigrid.de/u_veranst/070327security-ws/security_ws_d.htm- IEEE DEST 2007
TextGrid was involved in this year’s
IEEE Digital Ecosystems Conference in Cairns, Australia (February 21-23) in the special session 3 entitled "e-Humanities for Digital Eco-systems: A Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political Agenda" ( programme).
Many European initiatives and, of course, a number of Australian projects participated in this highlyranking conference. Many important topics for TextGrid were treated collateral with e-business oriented topics, e.g. related to the European projects “Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE)”: trust and reputation, search strategies in changing topologies, REST-based software, cooperation of loosely-coupled systems, etc. TextGrid’s view could be confirmed: Digital ecosystems are not a concrete product but a paradigm similar to service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
The special session on e-Humanities was established as a constant track within the conference as can be seen on the schedule of thenext conference in February 2008, in Thailand. - Interedition
As a result of the meeting of the scientists of different European countries in January 2007, a letter of intent was signed. The aim is to build a platform for web-based editing tools (working title is Interedition). The Huygens-Institute will establish a website and create the repositories for the webservices. At the beginning, the following services will be provided:
* Tokenizer, Lemmatizer
* Name identification
* Annotation exchange
* Collation
Apart from the development of services and tools, urgent issues in the area of standardization need to be solved: How to refer to a text, a piece of work, or a manifestation of a (part) of work. Goettingen Grid Seminar
On November 23, 2006, the first symposium about grid activities in Göttingen took place. About 100 participants from research and development were informed about trendsetting technologies and their influence on everyday work. The director of the Niedersächsischen Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Dr. Norbert Lossau, also welcomed guests of the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF).
For further information please look at the
summary or in the individual presentations.
TextGrid plans to participate in the following events:
- September 2007, UK All-Hands Meeting, London
- September 2007, D-Grid All-Hands Meeting, Goettingen
- September 2007, Fachbeiratstreffen, Göttingen
On September 12, TextGrid’s first expert advisory committee is going to take place. The date has been re-scheduled because of the BMBF pre-evaluation in March. - September 2007, GoeGrid II, Göttingen
On September 13, Göttinger community projects and guest speakers will give a practical view into current grid applications.
International e-Humanities events
- Digital Humanities 2007, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2.-8. Juni 2007
- eResearch Australasia, Brisbande, Australia, 26.-28. Juni 2007
- DRHA07 - Digital Resources in the Humanities and Art, Dartington College of Arts, 9.-12. September 2007.
- "e-Humanities – an emerging discipline", Workshop at the 3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing, 10.-13. Dezember 2007, Bangalore.
Under the title "e-Science in the Arts and Humanities" the Britisch e-Science Institute offers a series of interesting workshops. Coming up shortly:
- Methods and Technologies for Enabling Virtual Research Communities,
18. Juni, e-Science Institute, Edinburgh - Ontologies and Semantic Interoperability for Humanities Data
19. Juni, e-Science Institute, Edinburgh - Collaborative Text Editing
20. Juni, e-Science Institute, Edinburgh
TextGrid Info
All reports and publications can be found on the TextGrid Homepage under "Berichte".
If you would like to get in contact with the project team, please send an email to 
The newsletter is a joint effort of all TextGrid partners. You can subscribe to it on the TextGrid Homepage (http://www.textgrid.de/index.php?id=newsletter). This page also contains an archive of past newsletters.
Archive
TextGrid Newsletter 01 [1. Juni 2006]
TextGrid Newsletter 02 [20. Oktober 2006]