Capturing expert knowledge in Arnhem Land

Recommended free talk at National Library of Australia, in Canberra, 15 June 2007:

Please join us for the next in our Digital Culture series of talks:

Bidwern: capturing expert knowledge

Most scientific research is based on examining objects from a specific perspective. The danger in this approach is that some information, which might be considered non-relevant to the specific discipline, can be omitted. Researchers are good at capturing data and metadata in their field, but they might unwittingly neglect other usable data.

Bidwern is a tool that discovers and captures knowledge by using experts' field knowledge. It provides a way of bringing together research data from various sources and integrating them under one discovery system via implicit or explicit relationships.

Users can tag objects with appropriate metadata, for example Indigenous knowledge (ecoterms), language, mythology or geographic location, to trace and discover relationships. Bidwern uses standard metadata capture and access tools that make archiving the information easy.

Time: 12.30 to 13.30
Date: Friday, 15 June 2007
Venue: Library Theatre
Entry: Free
Speakers: Kim Mackenzie and Leo Monus
Introduced by Colin Webb, Director Web Archiving & Digital Preservation Branch,
National Library of Australia

This talk is open to the public.

Bidwern is an ARC eResearch Project for digital tools to document projects in Northern Australia:

A pilot project will use a selection of visual and audio data created by social and environmental scientists working with Indigenous communities on a major land management project across the western Arnhem Land Plateau.

The key innovations of the research will be to develop new methods for cataloging and preparing digital data for uploading to the DSpace digital repository at the Australian National University. Once in the repository, the data will be preserved for long term access by researchers and Indigenous communities in the western Arnhem Land Plateau.

From: Bidwern Project, ANU, 2006

See also my "Ten Canoes: From Samoa to Arafura Swamp".