In this post I want to look at what makes the various kinds of “Open” tick.

Open CourseWare, Creative Commons, Open Source and Free Software are all frameworks for sharing various kinds of information-artefacts. (Open standards is a different kind of thing, which I won’t be talking about here.) This is a different slant on the debate than “Here’s why open is good” . I want to review: “What is this open?”. As with another recent post debunking reasons not to go open, I wrote this to help get my thoughts in order ready for Michael Sankey’s OCW ’summit’ which took place yesterday. There is some action on the long-stalled Open Courseware effort at USQ, and it’s really exciting but it’s not up to me to announce it, so I’ll stick to theorising and opining.

I’ll look at the backbone of the various kinds of ‘open’, then look at what I think some of the opportunities are from where I’m sitting.

Where am I sitting, you ask?

Y-block at the University of Southern Queensland’s Toowoomba Campus, looking out towards the Japanese Gardens.

Why is this relevant?

OK, the gardens aren’t. But Y-block is where the Distance and eLearning Centre resides, and where my team has its roots. The Distance and eLearning part is important. USQ is a distance-learning provider of some note, and as such has a rich collection of distance materials suitable for independent and isolated learners to study. Don’t get me wrong, USQ does offer a very high-touch service to its off campus students, and not all courses are built around self-paced learning materials (which is why the ‘business’ won’t come to an end if we release open courseware) but the distance-ready materials are a key asset.

Illustration 1: The view from my window, the Japanese Gardens are beyond the parked cars

Fundamentals It’s about © licenses

What’s the foundation for these frameworks for sharing? This might be counter-intuitive to some, but it’s the same thing as drives the sometimes brutal and voracious publishing, film, music and commercial software industries.

Copyright1 law makes ‘the opens’ work.

Richard Stallman invented open licensing when he created the GNU General Public License (GPL). Stallman showed how to create a mechanism for distribution of copyright works that guaranteed that the works would be accessible-to and usable-by other people. The key trick was to use the power vested in a copyright holder to say; “You have a license to use this stuff, and to change it, and to distribute it, and when you distribute it you must extend exactly the same terms to the others you share it with”.

Stallman had a mission to make stuff free, in his case software. That’s free as in libre, as in freedom. He was interested in Rights for software users and creators, and made the GPL as infectious as possible so that worked to make more software free. But the legal mechanism he invented, the open license, enabled other approaches with other goals. For example in software, there is the Open Source movement, which is more pragmatically motivated.

You can read more about these concepts in a free online course: Introduction to Free Software from the Free Technology Academy [1], which is run by a consortium of universities. If you do their free online course, that counts towards Masters degrees at your pick of the host institutions.

This Free/Open thing is an important distinction. You could look at OCW in a Stallman-esque way from the point of view of public good. Generally speaking this is the MIT approach; “benevolent university contributes to the world”. Or, you could look at it from more of a ‘business’ perspective asking (to put it a bit gauchely); “what can I get out of this?”

IP?

I wrote last year about why I think we need to be very clear in Higher Ed when we frame arguments around open distribution of learning materials, because it’s all too easy to talk about “Intellectual Property” and “protecting our IP”, just as Richard Stallman says. I argued that appeals to protecting IP in universities are actually pretty-much meaningless unless you (a) focus in on copyright or (b) take “Protect our IP” as code for “Manage our knowledge”, which is code for “Create a learning and sharing environment for our community”. I’m not going to win this one, I don’t think, but I’ll keep trying: Don’t say Protect our IP, think about what you mean, and pick the right legal framework in which to talk about protection.2

Which means talking about copyright not Intellectual Property.

At USQ, broadly speaking IP, er sorry, copyright is assigned like this:

• Staff hold the copyright in research publications they write.

• The University holds copyright in learning and teaching materials written by its employees.

• Copyright in other stuff, books, movies, journals, and so on is a nightmare – Australian Copyright law offers quite limited “Fair Dealing” and universities have to deal with a collection agency, CAL.

To learn more about all this, why not sign up for the September start of the course on Copyright 4 Educators at P2PU which uses a free text on copyright [2]?

What this means is:

With research publications, researchers typically sign away copyright in articles to publishers in exchange for the services rendered by the publisher, which include coordinating peer review and frequently selling the work back to the institution that produced it3. Sometimes, researchers get to keep their copyright post-publication for one reason or another and then they would be free to license it any way that they choose – that is as long as they had not entered into a contract with someone else, like say a publisher, not to.

In the Institutional Repository world, it’s pretty standard for some version of a research article to be put up online, quite often without an explicit license, so ‘officially’ that means that fair-use or fair dealing applies. I thought that this was a bit of a problem as it left readers with no explicit licence to read – so a year ago when I put up a copy of an article I wrote that had been signed-over to an Elsevier journal I tried to ask them what license statement to put on my article. They ignored me. So I put it up on my blog but warned people not to read it.

Since attending a CAIRSS copyright workshop, led by our colleagues from Swinburne, though, I understand why repository managers and publishers live with this situation – nobody wants to have to deal with thousands of publishers and authors in working out explicit licenses. It makes sense to just take the permission from the publisher to put up a copy of the article, find the right version and run with it. Why am I mentioning this? Just to show that while copyright is key sometimes it’s more practical not to worry about licenses or nothing would get done, and also to note that some of the decisions around copyright have a risk-management flavour, and that many of these kinds of discussions are best had in camera.

With courseware, at USQ – and I’m talking mainly about the quality-controlled distance-Ed stuff here – the default is that the university keeps the copyright and provides access for students; only the students who have enrolled in that course can see it.

Some materials do find their way onto web servers, pretty-much on the same kind of basis as repositories work, with no explicit license with an implicit expectation of fair-use although the copyright is very often also implicit – ie nobody put a copyright statement on it at all. In reality, who knows what happens to some materials. I’ve heard reports from some lecturers that they find their stuff being used all over the place.

What counts as OCW?

So what is OCW, actually? (The statement on the main OCW site is rather unhelpful) but this appears to be the policy:

OCW course materials are made available to the public under a license that:

• Grants users the right to use and distribute the materials either as-is, or in a modified form:

• Allows users to create derivative works:

  • Edit

  • Translate

  • Reformat

  • Add to, combine with, or incorporate into other materials

• Obliges users to meet certain requirements as a condition of use:   

  • Use must be non-commercial (optional)

  • Materials must be attributed to [Your Institution] and to original author/contributor

  • Publication or distribution of original or derivative materials must be offered freely to others under identical terms (“share alike”) (optional).

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/community/toolkit/makingthecase/infopacket/copyrightsummary

The Open Source Initiative have a list of approved Open Source licenses, and the Free Software Foundation have a list of GPL compatible licenses, I don’t think such lists exist for Open CourseWare, would probably be a good idea.

The basics, summarised

I’m not sure if I have much of a conclusion to this little excursion, except that in discussions of OCW it’s worth being aware of the underpinnings, and the other kinds of open licenses.

And it all comes back to copyright.

Copyright is all-important in open sharing systems. Whoever owns that can set license terms for others. Sometimes, it makes sense to assert your copyright (even though it is automatic in some jurisdictions) and not to specify a license, but if you want to play with the OCW or OpenSource crowd then you have to use a license of which they approve in order to join the group or use their branding.

This use of copyright to share something, seems to me to be pretty straightforward compared to most other aspects of IP law and even is certainly simpler than the issues we see in OA repositories, where we have to let some complex issues slide past, and in teaching and learning materials where we are unable to let anything slide, and have to go through very complex auditing processes.

Some final thoughts

There is an obvious advantage to being the one whose materials are out there being used. Your copyright statement, and maybe the license can act as a viral Internet advertisement. I’m not sure what is available in the way of open licenses that would specify not just that attribution is required but a particular form that attribution should take, such as leaving a logo in place. Anyone?

There are some potential deals to be done here – if USQ went with an open model then they could consider assigning copyright back to course writers, for example if they were able to get it accepted into a peer reviewed journal or published as a book.

One (unpopular) idea I raised at the summit was that we could release course materials (just as materials, not with support) complete with a reading list but with no readings, and any third-party copyright material greyed-out, with an invitation to sign-up as a student on some low-cost basis to see the missing bits. This is not an idea I like at all, but I think it will keep coming up if we pursue OCW on a broad scale.

A more noble idea and one that got more support at the summit would be to encourage our course-writers to develop ‘clean’ courses that don’t have dependencies on things that collection agencies like CAL can take an interest in, but given our apparent dependency on third-part copyright materials that will be difficult. And I note, via Open Education News that when Michael Geist suggested a similar move in Canada recently he was called “irresponsible” and accused of “rabble rousing”. Geist’s defence of open access materials is worth a read. In Australia at least, the collection agency has worked to get centralised deals which make it less attractive for one player to start reducing its dependency on third-party copyright materials.

1. González Barahona J, Seoane Pascual J, Robles Martínez G. Introduction to free software. Available from: http://openaccess.uoc.edu/webapps/o2/handle/10609/227

2. 2009 Hofman J. Introducing Copyright: A plain language guide to copyright in the 21st century. Commonwealth of Learning.

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

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There’s a lot of talk at the moment about EPub as a repository-relevant format, both for distribution, and as a packaging format.

Recently Brian Kelly has been exploring EPub delivery, and there’s a really good discussion going on in the comments of his blog where people are suggesting tools and discussing the role of EPub. As for tools we already have EPub support in our content management (ICE) and repository (The Fascinator) toolkits, I’ll post a summary of those features soon.

In this post I thought I’d go through some of the thinking we’ve been doing at the Australian Digital Futures Institute on how to package Scholarly documents for the web, and for reposit, so they can be:

• Treated like paper and published as PDF.

• Used as plain-old web pages.

• Deposited in repositories – reposited.

• Used in Learning Management Systems (LMSs – VLEs for the UK readers).

• Blogged.

• Linked-to at at least the section level, maybe at the paragraph level.

• Bundled with or linked to data that supports them.

This means, we have been considering how documents can be packaged so they can be adapted the continuum of reading experiences that I have tried to lay-out here:

Figure 1: The continuum of reading experiences

Different points on the continuum1 allow for different affordances:

• Paper → You know what paper is.

• Digital Paper, by default PDF → PDF is (at its simplest and worst) just paper for putting on the computer – it can be set up for annotations, but only under some circumstances, and in my experience it usually isn’t. Not ideal for reading on small screens depending on how well structured the file is but it might be fine on a pad-type device if the resolution suits the screen size and your visual acuity.

  There are new digital-paper type formats turning up now that the iPad has arrived – some of these are no more than pictures of text, far from ideal for scholarship.

• Re-flowable but mostly static reader apps and devices like Kindle (ePub, Mobi) → I’ve conflated two things here; the mode of packaging, putting a document into a re-flowable container, and the application that you use to read it. Depending on the app, the platform, the device it’s running on and the distribution channels involved you may or may not be able to annotate, or highlight and share your annotations, but you should at least be able to resize the text to suit you. These are reading-specific environments, not open-ended browsers like you use for the web. Some of the hardware used is general purpose such as phones, while some is optimised for reading, eInk devices like Kindle.

• The old-fashioned web → There’s nothing to stop ‘documents’ going on the web as HTML (apart from the continued lack of accessible tool-chains for ordinary authors to create long and/or complex content that is). This is what we use for USQ courseware at present.

• The new web, where a document can be an HTML 5 app that can host data visualizations via the canvas element and adapt itself to different device-environments; here we could have very rich annotation services for local and shared use, and essentially distribute reader software with every document.

In order to support all this, I have been talking with various people about the idea of delivering documents in a sort of mega-package, which would be a zip file stuffed full of document stuff:

• The source-files (word processing, XML, LaTeX, whatever).

• HTML

• Images / video (yes – video needs is tricky – you need to transcode for different environments, how many formats you put in a package is an open question)

• Data (if appropriate) and links to data (which really should be appropriate to all modern scholarship).

• And most importantly a whole lot of manifests and tables of contents for loads of packaging formats:

  • HTML 5 manifest and scripts for a self-contained reader – such as the Paquete project we have at ADFI.

  • IMS content package manifest.

  • EPub TOC.

  • METS package manifest.

  • Atom feed/archive.

  • OAI-ORE with links to the local files.

  • Bagit.

Yes – all in one Zip file; to give the package the best possible chance of survival in the wild.

Of course once the package has made it into a repository then it could serve up just the bits that people need and/or push the content on to other services. Duncan Dickinson suggest the use of “stripper tools” to remove the unwanted parts.

I summarised this idea on that Twitter thing:

ptsefton Working more on “Scholarly HTML” as a magic zip file that can be filtered-down to EPub for static reading but come alive in HTML 5.

Well, it turns out that the EPub e-book spec actually covers this use-case quite well. It’s actually three specs:

“.epub” is the file extension of an XML format for reflowable digital books and publications. “.epub” is composed of three open standards, the Open Publication Structure (OPS), Open Packaging Format (OPF) and Open Container Format (OCF), produced by the IDPF. “.epub” allows publishers to produce and send a single digital publication file through distribution and offers consumers interoperability between software/hardware for unencrypted reflowable digital books and other publications.

EPub allows for more than one version of the same thing, and specifies a basic set of image formats that must be supported, while allowing for inclusion of richer content via the object element in HTML. Importantly, ePub readers are required to ignore scripts, but there’s no reason that scripts can’t be there, so it would be possible to ship, say a chemistry thesis with a built-in 3d molecule viewer which would view as on-screen paper, but come alive on your new Android A4 pad-device.

We would have to work out how to make documents which contain declarative links to data files, such as chemical markup language, wrapped around an place-holder image, with the smarts to ask their environment “Hey, environment, can you render CML? “ and if it can, then show a 3d molecule using something like CanvasMol (which doesn’t support CML, yet). Or music research could come with data files that can be rendered in-browser via something like VexFlow, or fed to a synthesiser.

This means that repositories in particular could be set up to support certain kinds of renditions for a certain period, like having JMOL for rendering molecules for say three years, but after that time could just let the document fall-back to having a link to the data file. It could also mean that we could ship an HTML 5 app for reading and annotating a thesis which would work for reading on an old-web browser, but come alive and get all interactive in a more modern environment.

And the point of this is?

A user finds something.epub on their desktop. The worst case is that they have to Google to find out what kind of thing .epub is, but then they should be able to do something with it, read it in a reader, put it on their phone. Sure, the ePub they’re using is bloated with extra stuff that they don’t necessarily need but it least it should be usable.

In a repository context, the repository could use the ePub or IMS tables of contents for the content and deliver an in-browser book-viewer. We have some technology for this, or there are things like bookworm (via Steven McPhillips in the comments to a previous post). The repository could also deliver the PDF, and original source document. This contrasts with the current approach where we are really just relying on convention. Upload a Zip file to Eprints and it unzips it into data streams and looks for a default.html file for example. And you have all that stuff archived, giving more chances that you have backed a winning format for the future re-use and/or re-discovery of your content.

But does it make sense?

Am I talking sense here – bundling lots of stuff into one package?

After all, if we really got our ducks in a row we could set up systems that delivered ePub for mobiles, an OAI-ORE or METS package for repository deposit, IMS content packages for LMSs without any of this extreme package-overloading.

Comment, please.

How to make this happen

So, if this does make sense, and that’s far from a given how would we go about doing it?

One idea I’m considering is that we could enable a lot of this via SWORD services. It might work like this.

• Write a long document in Word and decide to deposit it.

  (Your authoring environment, could be Word itself, could be a Drupal, could be SharePoint, has a ‘deposit’ button.)

• Click Deposit.

• The authoring environment has a conversation with the servers/services it knows about.

  One service would be: ‘convert this to HTML’; and other services might offer more things that you can do with the HTML: ‘convert this to EPub’, ‘blog this’.

  Another service would be ‘deposit this in a repository’.

  Another would be ‘add data’ – in interactive service to help locate and link data that needs to be included in or referenced in the package. This service would have to be integrated into a research data repository, and obviously the researcher would have to be inducted into its mysteries.

• You choose the services you want and click Go.

• Your authoring environment orchestrates a series of SWORD transactions.

  • First-up it would make a minimal EPub package with just the word doc and a PDF in it. The HTML component would be just a README that points to the source file and PDF.

  • Posts your document to a server that generates an HTML rendition and returns a Zip file with the original Word document plus an HTML rendition. (This service could, of course be local to your machine).

  • Posts the result to a blog service – relaying its questions back to you. “What category?” “Do you want Twitter with that?” (You don’t necessarily get anything added to the package except maybe a record that it was blogged, and where, for the scholarly record.)

  • Posts the result to an ePub generator.

  • Sends the whole (now quite portly) package to your institutional repository.

  • And so on…

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

This post was written in OpenOffice.org, using templates and tools provided by the Integrated Content Environment project and published to WordPress using The Fascinator.

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We’re having a workshop about Open CourseWare (OCW – AKA Open Educational Resources or OERs) here at USQ soon, organised by Michael Sankey. I’d like us to talk about some of the potential costs and benefits of going OER from the points of view of Students, Staff and the University as well as the external stakeholders, independent learners (potential students of USQ) and our broader society. I’ll post on that soon.
In this post I want to mention my two favourite objections to going open, which come up every time I start talking (ranting?) about OCW and OERs at USQ.

1. If we release our best stuff then that’s the end of our business!

2. And if we expose poor quality courseware, won’t that hurt our brand?

There are other more legitimate concerns like the amount of copyright material that is embedded in our materials; both licensed stuff, and stuff that is not licensed properly. Actually, the licensed stuff represents an opportunity, and with the unlicensed we really don’t know the scale of the problem, if there is a problem at all. I’ll return to this issue. But now for those two objections.

Poor quality materials are embarrassing

This one’s easy.

“So it’s OK to give these less than perfect materials (if indeed they exist) to the students, as long as your peers and the rest of the world don’t see the less than perfect content you/your staff/those other faculties have been teaching with?”

Let in the sunlight I say.

The sky is falling!

My favourite frequently heard objection is that somehow our enrolment revenue depends on keeping our high-value course materials locked up. I like it because it encapsulates so many assumptions that need to be challenged. This one came up again when I was talking to a very senior USQ person, as-in reports to the Vice Chancellor kind of senior. It went something like this:

Me: So one of the things we might see, is funder mandates that educational resources have to be open, the way we are starting to see in the research space. The government is paying us to write this stuff, they might like to reduce the amount of redundant work in the same way they don’t want to pay for the same old research more than once, they want to pay for new research.

X: Oh. If that happens we can kiss our business goodbye. That’s the end of us.

Me: I see. If we release our best-of-breed distance-ed materials then we’re finished. So what happens if someone else releases courseware of the same or better quality. Isn’t our business over then too?

X: I see the point you are making, Dr Sefton.

Me: Which is happening, as you know. We can sit here like the newspapers while our ‘business’ dissolves or we can do something NOW.

(Me again) If we’re afraid that the self-directed learners are going to get what they need out of our stuff without bothering to enrol, because they are learning on their own or in a community of their own making, then we need to:

1. Accept that this is a new trend.

2. Find the price point at which some learners pay for assessment-only enrolment and look for offerings that will entice them into the USQ experience. There’s clearly room for lots of different levels of engagement with different kinds and cohorts of users.

3. Work out ways to mobilise volunteer labour to assist the independent learners (Prof Jim Taylor continues to explore ways to do this at USQ).

4. Release our materials first with our copyright, on our terms and have © USQ materials be the ones that start undermining other people’s ‘businesses’ – each one carrying an ‘ad’ for USQ in the form of the copyright statement and (at least) an ‘attribution required’ license. The OU has already made a big move here, so if the fear is well founded then we’re doomed unless we join in the cannibalism of our old ‘business’.

5. Be among the first (at least in Australia) to start learning how to operate in this new environment.

From there we moved into the broader discussion about how going open might work as a ‘business’ model.

Come the revolution, we’ll get over this ‘business’ stuff.

Note that I don’t believe for a minute that OERs and self directed learning would kill-off the traditional high-touch models we use now, although they will probably erode them more than a bit in some circles, notably with postgrad learners, I’m just following through the argument that keeps coming up about why we can’t release our stuff, because when you follow it through, the conclusion has to be release early and learn rather than cower in fear and hope you’ve retired before things change too much.

The cost of the current attitude

Above, I was really talking about two fears:

1. Fear of exposure – I have usually heard this directed at other people’s materials.

2. Lack of confidence in what it says in our strategy, that USQ is a relationship brand and we are all about the student experience that we can deliver to our largely-off campus learners.

   (cf MIT’s confidence that releasing its curriculum materials (not distance stuff – at least not so far, but read on) and video lecturers doesn’t undermine the MIT experience. And happy tenth anniversary OCW@MIT!)

This attitude that sharing is too risky, lives hand-in-hand with the fear that getting any substantial change in policy, and getting the grass roots support from teachers is going to be too hard. And this attitude is costing us, NOW.

I wrote a about this recently, Cheap laugh #1. Suggest opening up courseware just a little. That piece was about opening up access to all our courseware to all our students, so they could, like, see what we had and you know, enrol in things, thus bringing us revenue, and revise prerequisite subjects they may or may not have done thus improving their result, improving our retention rate. With many other colleagues, I am trying to get these ideas considered, but it’s hard work.

The good news is that ADFI’s new Executive Director, Prof Gilly Salmon, who will start in January 2011, reports that at Leicester where she’s currently working, once OERs got started, lots of objections and fears melted away. I’m sure she’ll join us in pushing (at least trials of) OERs at USQ.

Finally note that MIT is going to start creating the kinds of OERs that are USQ’s core territory:

This fall, OCW will begin to introduce course materials designed specifically for use by independent learners, which will include complete sets of content, increased focus on problem-solving, and additional self-assessment opportunities. Through these and other pilot programs, the OCW team hopes to develop a better understanding of how to increase the benefits for this varied global audience.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/329/5991/525

Now we can all be afraid. There goes our business!

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

Following my last post on the demise of Google Wave and the future of scholarly word processing, Anthony Hornby of Charles Darwin University asked:

@ptsefton Met Cameron Loudon here @CDU, he mentioned ICE. Could any parts of that system allow a simple path from docs to DocBook XML?

DocBook, XML, and the cost of ‘doing it right’

For those of you who don’t know.

DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation.

As a semantic language, DocBook enables its users to create document content in a presentation-neutral form that captures the logical structure of the content; that content can then be published in a variety of formats, including HTML, XHTML, EPUB, PDF, man pages and HTML Help, without requiring users to make any changes to the source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook

Which sounds like a good idea for documents – getting all those formats for free, right?

It is, but you have to take into account the cost of creating the documents, inducing the authors to capture the semantics, and providing tools for authors that they will actually use. (And keep in mind that a lot of those output formats are actually HTML based: HTML, XTHML, ePub HTML help, more on that later).

Back in 2004 I used the analogy that XML is like a hill – and presented that idea at Open Publish. The message was that if you manage to climb up high enough then generating output formats like HTML is a downhill slide. (Or a semantically rich document is like a tightly wound spring, ready to unleash its stored energy).

The XML as hill metaphor, together with the author as cyclist metaphor to talk about the importance of picking the right tool, and the right template/schema for your authors. You can get them to pedal up hill (ie encode potential energy into their documents) if they get a small reward; a downhill coast. That is, they will follow a standard if they can see the point, such as a web-site of their course building before their eyes. They will not cooperate if you ask them to climb too steep a hill for no apparent reason.

As I noted in my last post, when USQ tried to get academics to climb a steep hill with the GOOD system, they simply wouldn’t do it (and nor would I have). We ended up with a system with a much flatter gradient, ICE.

Anyway, back in the present, to Anthony I said:

@ahornby SHort answer is yes. Longer answer (that HTML is all you need) coming via blog soon
1:14 PM Aug 7th via web in reply to ahornby

Now, the promised long answer.

The facts

ICE templates can be used to make DocBook documents. Dr Ian Barnes did the work for this back when he was with the Australian Partnership for Digital Repositories, APSR for a project called “Digital Scholar’s Workbench”. The final report gives some more detail, including future plans for development that didn’t happen.

Ian wrote fiendishly complicated XSLT stylesheets that could turn open office documents (and by extension Word documents loaded via Open Office) into DocBook – assuming the use of a set of styles, which is where ICE came in.

There have been other systems that attempt to use word processor styles to create DocBook documents, notably a software application of legend from O’Reilly called Aardvaark which I wrote about here1. You can find other half-hearted attempts littered around the web.

My opinion

So having answered the question “can you” with a yes, I want to say, “but don’t”.

If you have a set of word processing documents that have enough structure in the form of Headings etc to even consider something like DocBook as a format then you can use ICE or an equivalent system (if such a thing exists) to:

1. Make PDFs of them and push them out on the web by using the word processor to make the PDF – no loss of formatting as you try to deal with edge cases that might not fit into DocBook. (One of the things that Ian had trouble dealing with is that lots of word processing documents use a mixture of numbered and not-numbered headings. That’s a no-no in DocBook.)

2. Turn them into HTML and weave them into the fabric of the web.

3. Make other formats as required: eg ePub for mobile use, IMS packages for educational use. (Both of these are HTML derivatives).

4. Some kind of package format for deposit in a repository with HTML, PDF and the rest. (This is work in progress, but DocBook won’t help).

Given that both Word and OpenOffice.org now use well-specified XML based formats bundled in Zip files, I would assume that the range of formats mentioned above takes care of preservation. What else is DocBook going to give you?

The one thing I can see is that DocBook can be turned into PDF using standard, free, tools. That’s reasonable, you might want to use it as part of a rendering system. But don’t forget you’ll be dealing with all the things that might be embedded in those word processing documents, charts, diagrams, complex tables with very important formatting like double borders in the right places, and best of all, maths. Sure, DocBook can do mathematical typesetting, but you have to get all the maths out of the word processing docs and into DocBook you have to get it right. This is hard and there are no right answers, only compromises. My team at ADFI continue to work on these compromises for the Integrated Content Environment, ICE.

You get what you pay for / get back the effort you put in

But wait! I can hear you saying, DocBook is much richer than HTML!

So it is. But in my considerable experience, the sweet-spot for using a word processor is around the use of headings to create a document outline, some sanity in lists using our very carefully designed set of styles, plus blockquotes, preformat text. That’s about the extent of what you can collect from large groups of authors who are not obsessed with document structure and semantics. Go after those simple things and you will get usable documents. Go after something that attempts to layer a few hundred elements of DTD over a flat word processor document and you’ll get nothing, as in nobody will comply and you will have to add all the structure to the DocBook later. That’s fine if you have the business case for such activities. I know I don’t.

If you want to do more than simple basic structure then a word processor is not the right tool, you might as well use an XML editor.

But then you won’t get a large general user base using an XML editor.

At this point we have come full circle so I’ll leave it at this. Word processors are good for capturing simple structure and semantics and that turns out to be all you need in many cases. If you do want more then HTML has a way to do semantic extensions. It’s called the class attribute. (And we’re exploring ways that more semantics might be layered into Word processing documents using a kind of word processor equivalent to RDFa).

But I still want DocBook!

Like I just said, the structure you get from an ICE-like word processor document after it has been converted into DocBook is exactly the same level of complexity as the HTML we generate from ICE: Headings, lists , quotes, preformat.

For the final word on why you don’t need DocBook, I refer you to Mark Pilgrim who authored a wonderful book in DocBook but abandoned the DocBook format for plain-old HTML in the latest edition.

Summary

So, the main points I have made are:

• Yes you can make a kind of cut-price DocBook from ICE, or any reasonably structured word processing file, but it won’t be getting the best out of DocBook.

• In situations where source documents come from word processors I don’t see the point in adding another format to the tool-chain unless you (a) really need to produce PDF in a variety of formats from the source text (rather than just automating a ‘Save as PDF’ or (b) you are going to add value by using DocBook or similar later in the editorial process and you have the resources.

  But note that there are other options for generating PDF/Print from HTML including HTML to PDF XSL-FO stylesheets or using (non-free) Prince. I predict that this will be a continued growth area.

But, If Anthony Hornby really wants to have DocBook, and I suspect he does, then what could he do?

Me, I’d talk to Ian Barnes, who is now residing in Scotland and is available to consult and/or program – he’s the localhworld expert on ICE-to-DocBook and has explored many of the options for rendering to PDF (including from HTML).

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

This post was written in OpenOffice.org, using templates and tools provided by the Integrated Content Environment project and published to WordPress using The Fascinator.

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This post is about the past, the present and the future, and also about word processors, PDF and that doomed Google Wave thing about which I have written a few posts.

Wave bye bye to the future

Cameron Neylon has posted some reflections on the impending demise of Google Wave, in which he saw great promise for the future of the dynamic scientific document, or whatever you call it. Document’s probably not the right word for what Wave did, and it’s not clear how document-like future scientific outputs will be. The start of his post is a lament about PDF and its constraints on scientific discourse; we’re on the same page there. Wave, on the other hand, was dynamic:

The key for me about the promise of Wave was its ability to interact with web based functionality, to be dynamic; fundamentally to treat a growing document as data and present that data in new and interesting ways. In the end this was probably just too abstruse a concept to grab hold of a user. While single demonstrations were easy to put together, building graphs, showing chemistry, marking up text, it was the bigger picture that this was generally possible that never made it through.

http://cameronneylon.net/blog/the-triumph-of-document-layout-and-the-demise-of-google-wave/

Me, I won’t miss Wave. I liked the idea of the document as a dynamic thing to which many parties could contribute, and I liked the way dynamic stuff could be plugged in. The dynamic parts were not all that much different to the OLE embedding that’s been in Word processors for years, just repackaged for the web, but the idea of massively parallel editing by people and machines was exciting. What I didn’t like was that Wave was actually a time-ordered conversation. You could branch the conversation at any point, as with a threaded discussion, but re-ordering was impossible. What I wanted to see, and still want was something with Wave-like collaboration but with well-structured HTML documents underneath. I’m with Cameron Neylon in thinking that we’ll eventually figure out how to make these beautiful to behold (and hold – iPad style) and use and interact with.

I’ll return to this at the end of this document,

Now to a contemporary critique of the past.

The present: word processors are (according to Sam) evil

In the past I have spent a lot of time and effort working on publishing systems for ‘ordinary’ users, focusing on word processor-driven web publishing. The latest of these, the Integrated Content Environment (ICE) is a core system at the University of Southern Queensland. I’m used to debating this core design choice of a word processor as an editing tool, and explaining over and over again why we chose Word and OpenOffice.org as the editors for our hundreds of users.

Actually, we didn’t choose.

They chose. The users did.

Give them anything else with which to edit a long document and a significant percentage of contemporary academics will type it up in Word, or increasingly Google Docs. A smaller percentage will type it up in any old text editor with LaTeX markup, and some other small percentage will use an HTML editor. Some gulp down the WordPress panacea.

Enter Sam Moffat, who works in the same division of the university as me, as a programmer, with his short piece: “The evils of a word processor”. Sam reports that his mother is having difficulty with her word processor:

I’m observing my mother fight with Word. To make things complicated she’s copy and pasting items from a PDF.

http://pasamio.com/2010/07/21/the-evils-of-a-word-processor/#more-669

The way I read this situation is that the culprit here is actually PDF not the word processor. PDF was designed to drive printers and to make it easy for publishers to lock documents to a particular set of formatting choices. Yes, I know PDF can be elegantly structured – but you know it rarely is. This is similar to what Cameron Neylon’s saying; PDF constrains us. Pasting PDF into just about anything is going to be a hassle. (You did show mum how to paste-special as plain text, didn’t you Sam?)

Sam’s right, we do need to help our users get on with thinking about what they’re writing and editing, and free them from the struggle to format things. And you know what? That’s the intent of the ICE system; it uses styles in the word processor with an easy-to-use toolbar to apply them, and ICE users soon become comfortable with the way they can create a single source document – we don’t turn off the other features of the word processor but we do try to wean people off them. But Sam’s wrong about one thing, we don’t ‘trash’ the formatting (see the next quote), we use the WYSIWYG word processor view of the document to make PDF. Why? Because that’s a cheap way to render documents where all the disciplines and not a few of the people have special requirements.

It is nice to see that our programmers are thinking about the big-picture, productivity and the utility of our tools:

I ponder this at times when the USQ course material publishing system went from a semantic based system into a system driven by OpenOffice.org and Word. I wonder just how much time our academics waste trying to get the format right when eventually it probably is going to be trashed anyway?

http://pasamio.com/2010/07/21/the-evils-of-a-word-processor/#more-669

My judgement is that right now using a word processor to produce our single-source print and web materials probably wastes the least amount of time overall, taking into account the academics, support staff, trainers, systems developers, materials managers, publishing services people and so on, but I’m always on the look out for alternatives. We’re exploring this as we consider what version three of ICE might look like. A SharePoint plugin? Part of a repository of quality-assured courseware? A Word Add-in?

One things is for certain, Wave wasn’t it, and neither was a heavy-weight ’semantic’ XML publishing system. We tried that.

The past: Why did USQ leave behind the ’semantic’ publishing system?

Sam wonders about the demise of USQ’s XML based ’semantic’ publishing system.

It was called GOOD, but most of the academics regarded it as anything but. It came with an XML editor which was very complicated to use, not to mention hundreds of dollars per seat to license. There was very widespread resistance to its rollout. I remember the lead developer attempting to show me how he used it for the system’s own documentation and giving up in frustration ‘cos he couldn’t really make the editor work. I also remember playing with it and trying to split a too-long section of text into two parts, with a sub-heading. That’s actually quite the gymnastic performance in a validating editor; creating a new section, getting the heading in the right element, moving the text, unless you know the tricks. Easy to do in a word processor, though, just whack in in a paragraph where you choose, and style it as a heading, relying on the well known fact that both machines and people can infer a perfectly good hierarchical document structure from cues given by different levels of heading – even if the headings are, gasp, put into table for formatting reasons..

And why am I putting those scare quotes around ’semantic’?

Well, there was the sad case of work.title. In GOOD, as in all good semantically-oriented publishing systems there was a plentiful supply of elements for describing things independently of the formatting used to display them in various media. GOOD had lots of ways of marking up stuff like the titles of works (someone wanted an element for the names of marine vessels, not sure if they got it – there were a lot of various expensive conversations about that kind of thing) and various kinds of emphasis. As you’d expect, more than one of these important semantic elements was rendered as italic in print. What happened was, the publishing services team, who worked on other people’s manuscripts and wanted to get things done started using work.title for all italic formatting whether it was for the title of a work or for emphasis, or the name of a sailing ship. By the time people on the XML project team noticed, and more expensive meetings were held and so on, the only sensible thing to do was to batch-update all the documents so the polluted ’semantic’ element became, you know, <italic>. (NOTE: this is from memory so the exact element names may be a bit wrong, but the story is true.)

In ICE we sidestepped this problem and we use the core inline HTML elements <i> and <b>. But, if ships are important to you then you can define a style i-i-frigate and format it how you like in your word processor, and ICE will give you <i class=”frigate”> … </i>. Guess what? Nobody does that.

Sam concludes:

As a LaTeX user, this is food for thought.

Um, right. LaTeX. I’m not sure what he’s getting at here, as LaTeX is only semi-semantic and is often not really re-usable outside of the author’s home directory.

Unfortunately, we haven’t had much luck getting a LaTeX editing system that can produce both PDF and HTML for more than one person’s output. Surprisingly there is no general purpose LaTeX to HTML converter on the web. I checked. More than once. And there is apparently no on-campus LaTeX user with the tenacity to (a) come up with a generically useful set of templates and (b) convince a community of others to all do things the same way. The quite tenacious Bron Chandler keeps trying to make this happen, though she’s not a LaTeX user, working with a few of the less foaming-at-the mouth LaTeX users. Maybe Sam can help.

The future

Cameron Neylon liked Wave because it was not about formatting, and it was dynamic. I hated that it was not actually properly ‘of the web’ and it didn’t make web documents; what I think we need in scholarship is the web, but editable, with ways to hook-in dynamic processes and declarative datasets that do interesting things when the dynamic processes get to them.

The good news is that Ron Ward, from our team at ADFI has been thinking deeply about this for a long time, and last week when the team had a ‘choose your own adventure’ innovation week, he chose to work on a pure-JavaScript in-browser editor. I know what you’re thinking – there are tons of those already. Not so, according to Ron. Most of the editors you’ll be thinking of are either not HTML editors (like Google Docs and Wave) or are using the in-built browser editing components. What Ron looked at was a real-life from the ground up ‘line editor’ for HTML something which apparently is widely regarded as being too slow and too hard. He had to build things from the blinking cursor up and did a remarkable job in a couple of days. Performance seems fine, and we’re all really excited about the possibilities.

Ron’s editor lets you click in an HTML paragraph, type away, changing the actual documents as you go . This real-live HTML has some interesting features. Type multiple spaces, for example and you only get one ‘cos that’s how browsers render space. The test rig is set up to capture editing events and replay them, opening up lots of possibilities for Wave-style time-slider interfaces so you can watch the evolution of a document.

Ron points out that parallel editing is not going to be that hard to do, if you set it up so multiple people can load the page at the same time. I haven’t looked, but it could be that some of the theory behind Wave and some of the messaging framework might be useful here.

Ron’s editor thing is really just a proof of concept at this stage, but things to explore include:

• Building-up the editor until it has an ICE-style toolbar like the one I’m using to write this document:

  

• Hook it up to our Anotar annotations framework so document-deltas can be stored as stand-off annotations. And there are conversations to have with Stijn Dekeser in USQ Maths and Computing, who researches in this area.

• Package it as an HTML 5 app to make a lightweight note taking thing for mobile devices.

I’ll ask Ron to add a link to a demo/wiki here in the comments ASAP.

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

This post was written in OpenOffice.org, using templates and tools provided by the Integrated Content Environment project.

The last couple of days of the Open Repositories conference were devoted to the user-group streams, splitting the community into the Duraspace crowd and the ePrints devotees. You can move between them, of course, but some of the stuff that’s in those sessions is not really software specific, and I think that it would be good to have a bit more cross-fertilisation between the software platforms (assuming they don’t all end up under one big foundation . But I know from talking to a couple of people from the program committee over dinner that streaming this conference is a very difficult balancing act. Some people will only come for ‘their’ software sessions, and others only want the general sessions.

I attended a few talks on the use of repositories in eLearning (in Dspace and in ePrints) and on using ePrints for creative-arts outputs. I was interested to see what others are doing, as these are both areas where our team is working very actively at USQ. What I saw really reinforced for me that the work we’re doing at ADFI is on the right track.

In this post I want to talk briefly about one of the main issues that repository designers are facing as they move away from hosting mainly articles, mainly in PDF, into learning and creative-arts resources; the need for packaging and its impact on repository architecture, and then look to the opportunities that we have at USQ to apply some of our repository expertise – which has mostly been on the research-outputs side – to learning resources.

Issue: packaging

Packaging is important; learning resources and creative-arts outputs need to be organised into ordered , hierarchical sets or resources that people can click through in a comfortable way. A screen-full of PDF files to download is not optimal.. In the learning world that’s why there are standards like IMS content packaging and SCORM. And for the creative arts there are lots of use-cases around organising things into exhibitions and portfolios. Exhibitions might travel around, and have different makeup in different places. Not to mention complexities like a photo in your repository that depicts more than one painting, all of which Duncan Dickinson at ADFI has been looking at modelling using CCO: “Cataloging Cultural Objects”.

The thing is, this business of packaging things is putting pressure on the data models inherent in IR software like Eprints and DSpace which grew up around discrete ‘items’ that have a metadata page, with click-to-download files. When we start looking at an exhibition of photographs this model is put under a fair bit of strain.

In the session on Kultur – the Eprints extension for creative arts output; Stephanie Meece showed some of the extensions that improve the metadata page in Eprints for exhibitions. While it does provide a basic way to show-off a large number of images, I think her talk showed up some of the architectural issues really well – she noted that sometimes the repository manager has to add circa fifty images files to an ‘exhibition’ item, using an interface that requires a lot of scrolling backwards and forwards. I talked to her afterwards, and found that there is no real way, yet, to deal with exhibitions that change over time, or to re-use items across portfolios (the Eprints team did say that there is a collections feature now that could be used for this). One thing that Kultur did achieve is to work out the basis for metadata for creative-arts metadata; work that has been re-used in Australia. This is informing our work at USQ, and we have helped disseminate it via CAIRSS.

Back in the day, on the RUBRIC project, I was a vocal critic of the notion of ‘hard’ collections I don’t like the way DSpace was designed around ‘communities’ and ‘collections’ and I argued that for most of the use-cases people were talking about then were better served by ’soft’ metadata-driven collections. If you want to look at all your theses, for example that should just be a ’slice’ of the repository based on a query not some process of hand-curating a list, or having to deposit items into a particular collection.

But as I noted above there are cases where you do need to hand-curate sets of items.

In our current work on The Fascinator, Duncan Dickinson is leading the team in efforts to capture creative-arts outputs, partly for the ERA assessment where exhibitions are particularly important. Bron Chandler is managing the media repository project, where courseware media objects (video, audio that sort of thing) that need to be grouped into course-materials packages along with the traditional long-form course books for which USQ is famous. This work has led us to create a flexible architecture where you can either:

1. Add a manifest/table of contents to a single compound repository item containing lots of stuff; for example we have pre-populated a repository with all of USQ’s current course offerings from ICE and each course can be considered one item.

2. Group several discrete items together into a package.

Oh, and you can package packages too – something we’re going to have to think about very hard when it comes to user-interfaces.

One output of this work is some web-interface code for navigating and managing packages, called Paquete. Paquete can build a table of contents and forward/back links to a set of web resources using a simple JSON table of contents. It’s like having a pure web-based eBook or IMS package reader. We’re thinking it could be deployed in all sorts of places, such as on top of ePrints, or in WordPress, and, of course in a learning management system. One use would be in JorumOpen, the DSpace-based OER repository which is in need of a way to view IMS packages. It would be easy to add an IMS organiser support to Paquete, or produce a standalone tool to add a Paquete manifest to an IMS content package.

You can see a simple demo of an early version Paquete at our demo site. Note that each part of the package, which behind the scenes is a separate HTML page, has a proper URL, so I can send you direct to the intro, or to the bit about JSON. The idea is that on an HTML 5 device like an iPhone, you could use ’save as App’ to grab a copy of an entire resource, via the HTML 5 manifest, and the stable URLs mean we can combine it with our annotation software that allows tags and discussion to take place in-line.

Using Paquete, it won’t matter to users whether the resources on show are spread out across several repository items or all jammed into one big item. So, for an exhibition, you could put ALL the pictures into a single ePrints object, then make multiple new items which consisted of slightly different packages representing variants of the exhibition. Or, each picture could be a first-class item with a number of exhibition items that simply reference them.

There’s lots more we can do with this viewer with a bit more coding– to make it show pictures and videos gracefully, and to work in presentation mode like PowerPoint. Speaking of PPT, why not render each slide as a JPEG and then let people flip through them there in the repository without having to download? (We’re very close to this in our work on The Fascinator). It could also be made easier to use on mobile devices, mimicking the tap-to-page-turn behaviour of eBook apps like Stanza or Kindle along the lines of this thing that Russell Beattie did. Contributions are welcome if any of this sounds like something you can do. I’d be really happy if someone with some Eprints skills was able to do a plugin that can recognize where there’s a Pacquet or IMS manifest present and show the HTML resource in-line.

There’s a lot more to say about this packaging stuff, and how we might be able to use the ePUB format to ship repository content around, I’ll come back to this in a future series of posts.

An idea for USQ

One of the repositories on show at OR10 in a session led by Yvonne Howard was an effort at Southampton to provide an open platform for sharing: EdShare. This is an ePrints repository that’s being built-in behind the Learning management System / Virtual Learning Environment they use at Southampton. I think the idea is that eventually, there will be seamless integration with BlackBoard so that resources can show up as part of the course-experience there, but be sitting in an open content repository behind.

There’s an interesting design pattern here; a sharing oriented repository that’s also hooked in to an access-controlled learning environment. At Southampton the emphasis is on low-barrier to participation so that lecturers can get stuff up as quickly as possible, with the downside that some of the metadata provided can be a bit lacking and many of the resources end up being quite fragmented. For example in the HumBox site for sharing humanities resources last Friday, the latest uploads were a bunch of individual PDF files that didn’t mean much on their own. Fom my point of view as someone discovering stuff I would have preferred them to be in one bundle so I could begin to make sense of them.

At USQ, on the other hand, where a large number of our courses go through a production process in which many people collaborate with the course writer to bake-in pedagogy, get the referencing right, and deal with licensing for readings and other supplementary materials, we are well on the way to having very well-described well-organised materials already in a repository. It would be so easy to tag a course as ‘ok for Open Access’ and have it flow through to an externally-facing site as a high quality Open Educational Resource (OER).

There are lots of reasons that we might want to go open, even just a little bit. I’ll rehearse them here, yet again:

1. For prospective students: I bet high-quality courseware would bring lots of traffic from people searching for stuff . Some of them might enrol, particularly if we lower the barriers to participation.

2. For staff: open resources can be good for a lecturer’s profile – even better if we can work out a way to build in a genuine peer review process that helps some kinds of resources also count as research outputs (which = $$$$ and prestige in a way that learning resources currently just don’t). OERs would mean that you get to take your work with you to the next institution.

   There are some things to think about re copyright, too. At the moment USQ owns the courseware, but in new models there might be ways to let authors keep their copyright, with an agreement that they license it openly.

3. For USQ there’s that thing about many eyeballs. Back when we first looked at open courseware, some senior people wondered if we wanted to expose some of the content. A bit of sunlight should work wonders if there are substandard bits of courseware (I’m not saying there are). Feedback and re-use has the potential to help us improve our materials.

   When we first launched our minimal set of OERs at USQ Prof. Jim Taylor was working on a project to get volunteer tutors (focusing on retired academics) to help learners in an LMS environment. That project didn’t come off, but I am wondering if there might not be some people willing to review courseware1.

Those are just some of the reasons we might open our courseware, there are other stories about why we might use stuff created elsewhere.

It sounds silly, but at the moment we can’t even share our own courseware with our own students. As I said not long ago, we should at least open up all the resources to our existing students so they can (a) go back to prerequisite stuff they missed or forgot and (b) discover new things to enrol in.

To bring this back to Open Repositories – there’s a research project around the idea of having two channels into our course materials, one via the existing institutional systems we use for students and staff; the Moodle LMS and the course production systems, but with a public-facing discovery system that lets us expose at least some of our resources under open licenses so we can see if the potential benefits are realised and work out what the various stakeholders can do with openly licensed quality-controlled learning materials.

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

This post was written in OpenOffice.org, using templates and tools provided by the Integrated Content Environment project and published to WordPress using The Fascinator.

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[Update: added link to the paper]

The short paper Duncan Dickinson and I put together for this conference is organised around the conference themes, and what our Research and Development group at the Australian Digital Futures Institute is doing about each of them. In this presentation I will pick out some of the the work we’re doing and some of the issues we’re thinking about, and try to relate this work back to the conference themes.

It’s gratifying to be able to make this presentation. Some of the core ideas we’re talking about here were the subject of a proposal I submitted for Open Repositories 2007, but it received mixed reviewer feedback and was relegated to a poster; my message that repositories were stuck in “Web 0.5” and needed to be made more webish was not timely.1

So, what is this AWE thing?

I brought an iPad with me on this trip, but I have found that I can’t put music on it or look at the books I have bought across four – yes, four – different reader applications using standard file-operations. Imagine the problems if we have to deal with valuable research data which lives on these controlled devices. A whole new era of format lock-in that makes Microsoft look like a free-software hippy.

This is one reason why the web, and delivering stuff in web formats is important.

One of the other things were look at at ADFI is ways of bootstrapping the Linked-Data/Semantic Web. I (Peter) have proposed a way of embedding RDF statements in documents using simple interoperable URIs. Duncan has taken this work further with a system that can serve ‘proper’ RDF. The demo here shows this technique for metadata, but it could also be applied for other kinds of semantics, when you are talking about someone, for example rather than asserting that they are an author or an editor.

Copyright Peter Sefton & Duncan Dickinson, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

This post was written in OpenOffice.org, using templates and tools provided by the Integrated Content Environment project and published to WordPress using The Fascinator.

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In my last post I asked “What should we call this name-authority, vocabulary-server, linked-data URI factory service we are building for ANDS?” I got a few answers, one of which I really like, but they’re really suitable as names for a particular service rather than the class of services.

MINT

“Mashing Identifiers and Names Together” – Debbie Campbell of the NLA.

AWESOME

Dorothea Salo suggested this without a gloss. I’m not sure if she realised the tie-in with AWE – The Academic Work(ing) Environment which is a working title for the technology stack we use, and which is the theme of my talk for Open Repositories 2010. So with my, um, awesome, DIY backronym skillz it’s:

“Academic Work Environment Semantics for Open Materials Exchange”

CATNIP

“Collating All Terms Name Identifier Project”. This is Andew Treloar’s [update: fixed spelling] attempt. Not really in the same class as ARROW, DART and ARCHER.

But still, the class of thing I was describing doesn’t seem to have a name, and nobody at the round table had a suggestion. I am now thinking that it should be called an Linked Authority Control Service. That is, it’s a thing to do authority control, in a linked-data, semantic-web way.

But what call the instance of the service?

Well, the naming convention we’re developing for The Fascinator, the software construction-set which will power the service is to have “editions”, so the thing you would download and install would be called something like “The Fascinator, Linked Authority Control Edition” which you might install alongside “The (forthcoming) Fascinator, Institutional Repository Edition” and set up to integrate with instances of “The Fascinator, Desktop Edition” sprinkled around the institution, picking up data and related publications at the source, from people’s local drives, labs, instruments etc.

Once you’ve installed it and you need a name to call it by, I don’t think you can go past “The Mint”, so thanks Debbie, I’ll get you something minty next time I see you.

Just think what we can do with our own linked-data mint. We can control the linked-data economy. If we wanted to cause inflation by minting new URI’s for John Smiths without having enough actual John Smiths to back them up then we, like, could. Not that we’d use our power for evil or nothing.

Come to think of it, if I could mint another Alan James Smith I would.

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

This post was written in OpenOffice.org, using templates and tools provided by the Integrated Content Environment project and published to WordPress using The Fascinator.

Today I am at the National Library, at the “Names Round Table”. I’m part of the ARDCPIPAG, which stands for “Australian Research Data Commons Party Identifier Advisory Group”. We’re advising a team at the library who are building party-identifier services for researchers and research institutions in Australia.

At my work, at ADFI we’re working on developing specifications for Metadata stores for ANDS. The first cab off the rank is an application architecture developed with The University of Newcastle and Swinburne University. I posted about this earlier this year. ANDS agreed that it would be a good idea to take a linked data approach to the design of the application. Linked Data is a non-threatening way of talking about the The Semantic Web, which is definitely coming real soon now. No, really, 2010 will be the year, or at the very outside 2012.

Or 2013.

Our metadata stores work is covered in blog posts here.

My presentation today focussed on the name-authority part of the architecture and looked at the process of establishing name-identities at an institutional level before joining in a broader federation. I asked the audience, what is the name we should use for this class of service? (We’re still looking for a name for the metadata-stores app as well, something better than “The Fascinator, Research Metadata Store Edition, Pro” or the current working title of “Ingect”.

What does a Linked Data Approach mean for a metadata stores project?

1. No more typing name-strings into web forms.

2. Agreed names/URIs for things like resource-types.

3. Sorting out URIs for things so that (unlike with Institutional Repositories) we can:

   1. Agree on terms before we start.

   2. Match-up terms later if we don’t reach agreement.

In our forthcoming collaboration with the UoX we wanted to make sure that when we named the things in the institution with the role of ‘research’ or ‘owner’ of data we used URIs. In ANDS speak, these things are ‘parties’. Some of the are people, some are institutions, organisations, or organisational units.

Goal: Establish URIs for person-parties at UoX before we start

So, a simple matter of:

• Extracting name data from the existing institutional repository
  (the UoX model is to build their metadata store so collections are described in the IR)

• Disambiguating name-strings, for the usual reasons; there is typically more than one string used to refer to the same person and often the same string used to refer to more than one person. Sorry, party.

• Establishing new URIs for each party that the UoX cares about (they don’t care about parties from UoY).

• Injecting the URIs back in to the IR.

Establishing IDs? How?

We considered these options.

1. Use People Australia / ARDC-PIP services. (It was a bit early)

2. Use Nicnames (plus).

3. Use a combination of the above.

We chose option 4

Build a name-authority server inspired by and informed by the NicNames work.

Why?

1. Can ship as an integrated part of the broader application we are building, in the same language (Java).

   1. Easy-install under the same web container as Fedora and Solr.

   2. Same configuration files as the “Ingect” application.

2. Having a local service means we can use:

   1. Private data such as staff-IDs internal to the application.

   2. Local URI-schemes for local things, such as internal projects.

3. Our service will deal with JSON formatted , not RDF to make it easy for web-interface designers.

Process

But wait! There's more!

This new module, which is called, um … will:

• 'Mint' a new URI whenever someone types a string (in desperation).

• Provide locally available, fast services for accessing any ontology. Eg:

  • FOR codes.

  • Geonames.

One final thing

(And this bit is not ANDS funded)

We want to make it possible to encode and decode web-semantics in a URI. Eg:

http://ontologize.me/meta/?r=http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator&o=http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-541658

I can use this to assert that “ptsefton” is the author of this resource.

Would ANDS and/or the NLA consider supporting services like this?

Oh, and nobody at the ARDCPIP round table had an answer for me about what we call this class of name-authority linked-data-endpoint-factory application.