Deadline for PhD applicants closing soon

A couple of months ago I announced an opening for a PhD student at the Heritage Lab where I work. The deadline for applications is closing on 15th January, so I encourage you to have a look at the call ASAP if you’re planning to apply.

Download the call here in Spanish or English.

Talk at the EUVE

I’ll be giving an invited talk at the Heritage and New Technologies mini-conference organised by the European Virtual Engineering Technology Centre (EUVE) in Vitoria, Spain, next Wednesday 12th November. My talk is titled “Information Technologies and Cultural Heritage: Learned Lessons”, and I’ll be describing the whys and hows of a few technologies that I and my team tried to apply to archaeology and heritage management in the past with various success rates; some were promising but didn’t work, and some did work albeit they lacked a solid foundation.

If you happen to be nearby Vitoria on the 12th, contact EUVE and drop by!

Juanolas and OO modelling

What do throat lozenges and OO modelling have in common?

In particular, what do Juanolas and whole/part relationships in class diagrams have in common? I guess you’ll understand if you follow the links, or if you are familiar with both Juanolas and OO modelling.

Let me give you some background.

I am participating in a project where a formal language for the description of heritage buildings is being developed. The project team is made of two archaeologists, an architect, and me as the software guy. They are the domain specialists; I am the techie. From the very beginning, I started using class diagrams to capture the information that my three colleagues would consider relevant, and they seemed to like them. They got themselves a copy of Visio and started producing their own class diagrams. I gave them a quick description of what specialisation, whole/part relationships and associations mean, and showed them how to use different symbols to depict them. No, I didn’t use UML symbols. UML is broken and invariable drives you to irresoluble quandaries, so I wouldn’t be so mean to expose my poor software-virgin humanities friends to mind-twisting UML. I used OPEN/Metis notation, as I have been doing for almost a decade now.

The outcomes of all this is that, after a few weeks, my team mates are actually class modelling now. Amazing. The only unorthodox bit is that they call whole/part diamonds “Juanolas” for evident reasons.

Call for pre-docs

As I said a few days ago, I am seeking excellent candidates to do doctoral studies with me here at CSIC. We are offering a good grant/position package plus extra funding for travel and stays.

You can download the full text of the call in Spanish and English here.

If you are interested, please let me know by 30th November. Thanks!

Building up the team

I am trying to build up a team to do research on information technologies applied to cultural heritage. This is not an easy task, the major difficulty being, of course, finding the right people. At the moment I am looking for somebody who would like to to enroll as a PhD student in this area and also for a good software developer with experience with the Microsoft .NET platform.

Please contact me if you’re interested. Thanks!

I did it

I’m just back from Madrid where I received excellent grades from the panel that assessed my CV and research proposal for a permanent, full-time, research-only position with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). I will begin at my new position shortly, focusing on the application of information technologies to the management of and research on cultural heritage.

Emergent Databasing, Emergent Diversity

I have just found out that my friend from a former life, Robin Boast, is blogging too. And talking very insightful stuff.