In mid-May, I attended the annual Open Repositories meeting for the third time. I noted after attending this conference for the first time in 2007 that it was the most practical conference that I had attended in some time. And the last two years have done nothing to disabuse me of that notion. In fact, if there were anything that I would complain about, it would be that the conference is a bit overwhelming because it is so information rich.
I should note that Sayeed Choudhury and Elliot Metsger also attended this meeting and have already blogged about it.
Data Curation, Archiving, and Preservation
Because of the Data Conservancy (our DataNet project currently in the start-up phase) and our DataPub project currently underway, curation of and long-term access to data is of key importance to the Digital Research & Curation Center (DRCC) and the Sheridan Libraries in general. Many of the presentations covered issues of interest in this area. I'll highlight a few of them below.
As Sayeed mentioned in his post, Michael Witt of Purdue spoke about research into the development of data curation profiles. This work is a collaboration between Purdue and UIUC's Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Their approach is based on discussions with researchers and employs an initial unstructured interview to get the conversion started. One of the most interesting findings thus far relates to issues of the data sharing (with whom, after what activities. Michael presented an earlier version of this work at a Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) meeting. More information can be found on the project site.
John Kunze of the California Digital Library and our own Sayeed Choudhury both spoke in a session devoted to the recommended NSF DataNet projects. John spoke about the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) project, led by University of New Mexico. Sayeed spoke about our project, the Data Conservancy. My focus was on the IT and data frameworks of the two projects. The approaches are different in many ways and it will be interesting to work together to establish the kinds of data management partnerships envisioned by NSF in the creation of the DataNet program.
In addition to the talks, Sayeed and I pulled together a birds of a feather session, which he was unfortunately unable to attend. I was there to represent the Data Conservancy's process and approach. John Kunze and Stephen Abrams, both of whom I was fortunate enough to wrangle at the last minute, represented the perspective and approach of DataONE.
Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) and the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE, or ORE for short) are two relatively recent developments meant to, respectively, reduce the burden of content deposit and improve the description and exchange of resource aggregations (think compound/complex objects) on the Web. We are employing both of these technologies in our DataPub (curating published data) project. Elliot has done a nice job of highlighting some of the ORE presentations in his post, so I will just add a few comments about the SWORD talks.
Pablo Fernicola gave a presentation describing work on an authoring add-in for Microsoft Word on the Windows platform. The add-in, currently in beta, will support ORE, SWORD, and the Publishing tagset of the NLM DTD. We have been working with Pablo on the ORE components of the add-in. This technology will allow an author to create a document, link it with data and rich media, describe the relationships of this components, and submit the package to a repository -- all without leaving Microsoft Word. While other approaches will be needed for other authoring environments (e.g., LaTeX), these tools go a long way to lowering the barriers to contributing and reusing content.
Adrian Stevenson and Julie Allinson shared a talk describing ongoing work in the second phase of development (SWORD2) and some of the history behind the development of the original SWORD protocol specification and implementations. It is now possible to deposit content into a properly configured Fedora, DSpace, or Eprints repository through Facebook, a web client, and a desktop client (among others). As I mentioned previously, the Microsoft Word will soon support SWORD deposit via an add-in.
Repository Challenge
The Repository Challenge started last year at the Southampton Open Repositories meeting and was organized by David Flanders, then of the JISC-funded Common Repositories Interface Group, with the goal of getting "developers working in small teams to try to quickly pull together established platforms and services to demonstrate how to achieve real-life, user-relevant scenarios and services."
This year's Challenge was again organized by Flanders, now of JISC proper.
The Repository Challenge winner this year was Tim Donohue of UIUC. Tim used JavaScript (JS) to implement a system he called "Mention It". This JS library allows a web page designer to embed into a web page an aggregation of mentions of a specified string on Twitter, FriendFeed, Technorati, and Google Blog Search. Among many other uses, this would allow repository developers to embed the display of mentions for a digital object by specifying its splash page, item, or Handle URI.
The runner-up, Rebecca Sutton Koesar of Emory, created FedoraFS, which combined a Fedora Commons repository with FUSE (Filesystem in User Space) to support access to repository content as if it were in regular files. For example, a PDF file stored as a datastream within a Fedora digital object could be accessed with a standard desktop PDF viewer. Her entry video is available on vimeo.
Showing posts with label or09. Show all posts
Showing posts with label or09. Show all posts
Monday, June 1, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Open Repostories 2009
Open Repositories (OR) continues to be the best conference I attend each year, and OR 09 didn't disappoint. The diversity of the presentations (and platforms) and the amount of talent and intellectual capital aggregated in one place facilitates discussion and ideas that may not happen independently. OR has "big ideas", cool software, and offers a preview of what the future holds for "repository" technology.
ORE Implementations
One of the nascent technologies at OR 08 was the OAI-ORE specification, which wasn't even in final draft at that point in time. Workshops on ORE had taken place independently prior to OR 08, and there was a workshop held for ORE at OR 08, but even as Herbert was presenting at OR 08, the draft was not final. At OR 09, there were a number of software stacks that leveraged or implemented ORE, including but not limited to ICE-TheOREm, LORE, and DSpace. At the risk of oversimplifying these technologies, I must make an attempt at summarizing their use of ORE.
ICE-TheOREm (presented by Jim Downing and Peter Sefton) integrates electronic thesis management with repository deposit. A thesis is broken down into its components (chapters, data sets) and an ORE object is used to represent the thesis. The ORE object is the "thing" that is exchanged between the thesis management system and the repository. The repository, upon receipt of the ORE object, dereferences the components of the thesis and ingests them into the repository, maintaing the semantics of the aggregation. One of the interesting things ICE allows is embargoes on specific portions of the thesis (say a chapter or paragraph). By disaggregating thesis content in this way, it may allow more open access by allowing a thesis which would normally be entirely embargoed to remain mostly open, only restricting access to the embargoed chapter or paragraph.
LORE (Literature Object Re-use and Exchange) is a fascinating FireFox browser plugin, allowing ORE object graphs to be created, visualized, edited, and annotated in the browser and saved back out to the repository. LORE objects encapsulate FRBR bibliographic data with digital resources. LORE is not released yet, but will be released under GPL v3. I imagine there are ways this plugin would be utilized in the Rose scholarly community. LORE leverages Sesame 2 to store ORE objects. When stored in a repository (in this case a Fedora repository) the ORE ReM is serialized as RDF XML. The domain ontology is configurable, allowing it to be adapted for other disciplines. Future developments include a rules engine to infer object relationships, and the ability to attach license information to the objects in order to facilitate re-use.
Finally, the Texas Digital Library machine implemented ORE on top of DSpace, allowing DSpace objects to be exposed as ORE Resource Maps (ReMs). The DSpace data model was mapped to ORE, and a crosswalk was written from DSpace DC to ORE. This way members of the TDL DSpace federation can expose their collections using ORE via OAI-PMH. The federating server, with some modifications, harvests the ORE ReMs, and is able to present "real" DSpace collections, or it can present a collection as a view on an ORE aggregation. The TDL work allows for three levels of aggregation ranging from metadata only, to metadata with references to the items (with the bits stored on the member server), to metadata with references to the items (with the bits stored on the federating server).
Nascent Tech
The nascent technology this year is the DuraSpace initiative which is promoting a web-based approach to repositories: web apis, cloud storage (DuraCloud), etc. One of the things that the DSpace Foundation brings to the table of the DuraSpace initiative is the large, existing, install base of DSpace 1.x repositories. With its soup-to-nuts approach to repository implementation and one-size-fits-all data model, DSpace 1.x hits a sweet spot for many institutions, including museums and other cultural heritage organizations. If DuraSpace can provide hosting solutions for these folks, there seems to be a potential source of untapped revenue. It was encouraging to hear that prototypes of DuraCloud exist, with a formal release "winterish" 2009.
The second nascent technology this year is DSpace 2 (DS2). DSpace 2 is a ground up clean room re-write of DSpace in an effort to modernize its architecture: make the data model flexible, make the architecture pluggable, and enable re-use of shared components between web developers (Cocoon blocks) and repository developers (Akubra) alike. The architecture is solid but the implementation is not feature compatible (with DSpace 1.x) nor feature complete. The future of DS2 is cloudy in my mind, but I also didn't attend any of the roadmap sessions where that may have been resolved.
Cool Stuff
Vireo is a ETD submission and management system developed by the TDL machine, and designed for use by the 18 (?) schools of the TDL (labs demo). It is implemented using Manakin, and requires three additions to the DSpace database schema. Otherwise the DSpace codebase remains untouched. Vireo deserves a more complete review, but I'm running out of steam. It is Shibboleth aware, can be configured for different schools' workflow, and has all kinds of ajaxy goodie bits. It doesn't prescribe a workflow, so the system is quite flexible. However, it does gently nudge users and administrator in the right directions.
Matt Zumwalt of MediaShelf presented on ActiveFedora, which is a Ruby API over the Fedora API, allowing rapid development and prototyping of lightweight user interfaces on top of Fedora.
Themes
There were some themes throughout the conference: data modeling - approaches to atomistic modeling.
Lowering barriers to entry: on the user side (reducing the resistance of the wire, appropriate incentives, proper licensing of digital content) and the developer side.
Repository tech seems to be moving further towards the service/infrastructure layer, only because more and more interactive applications are being built on top of them, enabled/abstracted by technologies like OAI-ORE and SWORD. The end user doesn't know, and wouldn't care, that various services like search, storage, or deposit are being handled by the repository.
ORE Implementations
One of the nascent technologies at OR 08 was the OAI-ORE specification, which wasn't even in final draft at that point in time. Workshops on ORE had taken place independently prior to OR 08, and there was a workshop held for ORE at OR 08, but even as Herbert was presenting at OR 08, the draft was not final. At OR 09, there were a number of software stacks that leveraged or implemented ORE, including but not limited to ICE-TheOREm, LORE, and DSpace. At the risk of oversimplifying these technologies, I must make an attempt at summarizing their use of ORE.
ICE-TheOREm (presented by Jim Downing and Peter Sefton) integrates electronic thesis management with repository deposit. A thesis is broken down into its components (chapters, data sets) and an ORE object is used to represent the thesis. The ORE object is the "thing" that is exchanged between the thesis management system and the repository. The repository, upon receipt of the ORE object, dereferences the components of the thesis and ingests them into the repository, maintaing the semantics of the aggregation. One of the interesting things ICE allows is embargoes on specific portions of the thesis (say a chapter or paragraph). By disaggregating thesis content in this way, it may allow more open access by allowing a thesis which would normally be entirely embargoed to remain mostly open, only restricting access to the embargoed chapter or paragraph.
LORE (Literature Object Re-use and Exchange) is a fascinating FireFox browser plugin, allowing ORE object graphs to be created, visualized, edited, and annotated in the browser and saved back out to the repository. LORE objects encapsulate FRBR bibliographic data with digital resources. LORE is not released yet, but will be released under GPL v3. I imagine there are ways this plugin would be utilized in the Rose scholarly community. LORE leverages Sesame 2 to store ORE objects. When stored in a repository (in this case a Fedora repository) the ORE ReM is serialized as RDF XML. The domain ontology is configurable, allowing it to be adapted for other disciplines. Future developments include a rules engine to infer object relationships, and the ability to attach license information to the objects in order to facilitate re-use.
Finally, the Texas Digital Library machine implemented ORE on top of DSpace, allowing DSpace objects to be exposed as ORE Resource Maps (ReMs). The DSpace data model was mapped to ORE, and a crosswalk was written from DSpace DC to ORE. This way members of the TDL DSpace federation can expose their collections using ORE via OAI-PMH. The federating server, with some modifications, harvests the ORE ReMs, and is able to present "real" DSpace collections, or it can present a collection as a view on an ORE aggregation. The TDL work allows for three levels of aggregation ranging from metadata only, to metadata with references to the items (with the bits stored on the member server), to metadata with references to the items (with the bits stored on the federating server).
Nascent Tech
The nascent technology this year is the DuraSpace initiative which is promoting a web-based approach to repositories: web apis, cloud storage (DuraCloud), etc. One of the things that the DSpace Foundation brings to the table of the DuraSpace initiative is the large, existing, install base of DSpace 1.x repositories. With its soup-to-nuts approach to repository implementation and one-size-fits-all data model, DSpace 1.x hits a sweet spot for many institutions, including museums and other cultural heritage organizations. If DuraSpace can provide hosting solutions for these folks, there seems to be a potential source of untapped revenue. It was encouraging to hear that prototypes of DuraCloud exist, with a formal release "winterish" 2009.
The second nascent technology this year is DSpace 2 (DS2). DSpace 2 is a ground up clean room re-write of DSpace in an effort to modernize its architecture: make the data model flexible, make the architecture pluggable, and enable re-use of shared components between web developers (Cocoon blocks) and repository developers (Akubra) alike. The architecture is solid but the implementation is not feature compatible (with DSpace 1.x) nor feature complete. The future of DS2 is cloudy in my mind, but I also didn't attend any of the roadmap sessions where that may have been resolved.
Cool Stuff
Vireo is a ETD submission and management system developed by the TDL machine, and designed for use by the 18 (?) schools of the TDL (labs demo). It is implemented using Manakin, and requires three additions to the DSpace database schema. Otherwise the DSpace codebase remains untouched. Vireo deserves a more complete review, but I'm running out of steam. It is Shibboleth aware, can be configured for different schools' workflow, and has all kinds of ajaxy goodie bits. It doesn't prescribe a workflow, so the system is quite flexible. However, it does gently nudge users and administrator in the right directions.
Matt Zumwalt of MediaShelf presented on ActiveFedora, which is a Ruby API over the Fedora API, allowing rapid development and prototyping of lightweight user interfaces on top of Fedora.
Themes
There were some themes throughout the conference: data modeling - approaches to atomistic modeling.
Lowering barriers to entry: on the user side (reducing the resistance of the wire, appropriate incentives, proper licensing of digital content) and the developer side.
Repository tech seems to be moving further towards the service/infrastructure layer, only because more and more interactive applications are being built on top of them, enabled/abstracted by technologies like OAI-ORE and SWORD. The end user doesn't know, and wouldn't care, that various services like search, storage, or deposit are being handled by the repository.
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