Activities

Current web development and research activities have included:

• a version of the Egyptian Galleries Online in Arabic (largely DB driven) for The Fitzwilliam Museum
• a virtual exhibition about Egyptian Books of the Dead - Passport to the Egyptian Afterlife - for The Fitzwilliam Museum

Development

• a CDROM presentation of the Passport to the Egyptian Afterlife (same content re-packaged, in-progress here)
• expansion of the current Passport to the Egyptian Afterlife (50+ pages, 200+ images) with the intention to make this the main resource for the 'Ramose Book of the Dead' papyrus
• a redesigned but automated (drawing on the existing content base) presentation of Egyptian web material as 'E-gypt' for use 'in-gallery'

Voluntary

• Some testing assistance to the OpenCollection project - an open source collections management system. A little more information about that here

Research

• Content Management Systems (CMS) in support of finding open source solutions for small to medium sized enterprises. Previously I have authored an open source web delivery system - phpsiteframework - which provides a delivery side CMS solution for the Fitzwilliam Museum (phpsiteframework runs Cybergate9.Net too). A recent contender in this area which has appeal is TYPOLight - I might not have built phpsiteframework had this been available when I needed a solution at The Fitzwilliam Museum...
• Collection Management Systems in support of finding an open source solution for small to medium sized enterprises. OpenCollection is *alpha* (the step before beta which, in turn, is the step before production..) and the first attempt I have seen at an open source solution in this area and is therefore worth some support.
• Embedded multi-media metadata including XMP for images. Again, to find open source solutions for small to medium sized enterprises in the general area of 'Digital Asset Management'.

And, more broadly, it strikes me that the above three are simply 'variations on a theme'... an open source platform for building custom applications in these areas anyone?

Along those lines, an interesting development in the PHP area is the Zend Framework - it implements the MVC architecture pattern, attempting to create a high quality development framework for web applications. It's early days for Zend Framework - from my early tests with the framework a key piece which is missing is forms processing, but that is apparently in the 'pipeline'...