On Friday, I wrote "How we got into crosswalking XML specifications" and on Wednesay, I wrote "Overcoming the current limits of technical analysis through community input".  I wanted to explain why I've been writing these little pieces.  As Rick Beaubien and I have writing our paper, I have found it helpful to carve out small but possibly tangential writing assignments to help me figure out what I'm really trying to say in my paper.  For instance, we are writing about METS to IMS-CP crosswalks.  The academic writing style drives us to pithy, logically tight statements of why this might be important.  However, these statements often seem to be rather desiccated, drained of the excitement and personal motivation behind the work.  Not that the audience for my paper should or would want to know the "story behind the story" of how we got into crosswalking METS to IMS-CP.  However, by writing the story of how it happened, I came to understand some of the deeper reasons for our excitement -- reasons that we are trying hard to include in our paper.

Other little blurbs I've written (or in the process of writing) might be helpful to others.  I realize that only in writing a paper that my notions of "application profiles" and "crosswalks" were sound but not as rigorously thought through as I would like.  To get to that level of rigour, I've compiled some information about both topics.  Hence, the wiki entry on application profile.  Look for one on crosswalks soon -- actually, let me just dump my thoughts into my wiki now.

My web efforts (blog + wiki) to share what I know and I'm doing are a bit of mess -- but I'm working to improve them quickly.