The main aim of the assembly was to share our experience and demonstrate the tools developed to the JISC (and the rest) community. Even more importantly we needed feedback and input from other JISC projects and experts on the work done so far. The focus was more on the XCRI side of the work the project has carried out.

The tool set developed by MUSKET consists of three components:

• the Transform Tool (Doc 2 XML);
• the OWL Tool (XML-2-OWL); and
• the Semantic tool.

Although there still remains a lot of work to do, the tools are at a very early beta version stage where they could be demonstrated.

From the MUSKET point of view, the day was more than a success. There was a good mix of people varying from totally new to XCRI to field experts bringing different views and perspectives to the day. There were rich discussions regarding the work already being carried out on XCRI in various JISC projects to many paths still open to pursue.

Alan Paull started the day by giving an informal but interesting introduction to XCRI, its inception and the various avenues of investigation it has taken. The teams from the University of Nottingham and Liverpool shared their experiences and work done. Two important outcomes for MUSKET from the day:

• The possibility of using vocabularies already built
• The suggestion of using a UML meta-model of key concepts.

The next stage for us is to look at vocabularies and semantics in order to make our tools usable by any businesses, employer or individual from outside the academic world who may wish to follow a particular programme. Following the assembly there has already been collaborative meeting s with UWIC on MUSKET’s work on converting word documents to xml via UML model mappings.

We hope to have further discussions and collaborations at the meetings on the 22nd July in the West Midlands.

Geetha Abeysinghe

g.abeysinghe@mdx.ac.uk