eFoundations

e-Framework - time to stop polishing guys!

The e-Framework for Education and Research has announced a couple of new documents, the e-Framework Rationale and the e-Framework Technical Model, and have invited the community to comment on them.

In looking around the e-Framework website I stumbled on a definition for the 'Read' Service Genre. Don't know what a Service Genre is? Join the club... but for the record, they are defined as follows:

Service Genres describe generic capabilities expressed in terms of their behaviours, without prescribing how to make them operational.

The definition of Read runs to 9 screen's worth of fairly dense text in my browser window, summarised as:

Retrieve a known business object from a collection.

I'm sorry... but how is this much text of any value to anyone? What is being achieved here? There is public money (from several countries) being spent on this (I have no way of knowing how much) with very, very little return on investment. I can't remember how long the e-Framework activity has been going on but it must be of the order of 5 years or so? Where are the success stories? What things have happened that wouldn't have happened without it?

When you raise these kind of questions, as I did on Twitter, the natural response is, "please take the time to comment on our documents and tell us what is wrong". The trouble is, when something is so obviously broken, it's hard to justify taking time to comment on it. Or as I said on Twitter:

i'm sorry to be so blunt - i appreciate this is people's baby - but you're asking the community to help polish a 5 year old turd

it's time to kick the turd into the gutter and move on

(For those of you that think I'm being overly rude here, the use of this expression is reasonably common in IT circles!)

Of course, one is then asked to justify why the e-Framework is a 'turd' :-(.

For me, the lack of any concrete value speaks for itself. There comes a time when you just have to bite the bullet and admit that nothing is being achieved.  Trying to explain why something is broken isn't necessary - it just is! The JISC don't even refer to the e-Framework in their own ITTs anymore (presumably because they have given up trying to get projects to navigate the maze of complex terminology in order to contribute the odd Service Usage Model (SUM) or two). It doesn't matter... there are very few Service Usage Models anyway, and even fewer Service Expressions. In fact, as far as I can tell the e-Framework consists only of a half-formed collection of unusable 'service' descriptions.

So, how come this thing still has any life left in it?

RESTful Design Patterns, httpRange-14 & Linked Data

Stefan Tilkov recently announced the availability of the video of a presentation he gave a few months ago on design patterns (& anti-patterns) for REST. I recommend having a look at it, as it covers a lot of ground and has lots of useful examples, and I find his presentational style strikes a nice balance of technical detail and reflection. If you haven't got time to listen, the slides are also available in PDF (though I do think hearing the audio clarifies quite a lot of the content).

One of the questions that this presentation (and other similar ones) planted at the back of my mind is that of how some of the patterns presented might be impacted by the W3C TAG's httpRange-14 resolution and the Cool URIs conventions for distinguishing between what it calls "real world objects" and "Web documents", some of which describe those "real world objects". The Cool URIs document focuses on the implications of this distinction on the use of the HTTP protocol to request representations of resources, using the GET method, but does not touch on the question of whether/how it affects the use of HTTP methods other than GET.

In the early part of his presentation, Stefan introduces the notion of "representation" and the idea that a single resource may have multiple representations. Some of the resources referred to in his examples, like "customers" (slide 16 in the PDF; slide 16 in the video presentation), when seen from the perspective of the Cool URIs document, fall, I think, into the category of "real world objects" - things which may be described (by distinct resources) but are not themselves represented on the Web. So, following the Cool URIs guidelines, the URI of a customer would be a "hash URI" (URI with fragment id) or a URI for which the response to an HTTP GET request is a 303 redirect to the (distinct) URI of a document describing the customer.

But what about non-"read-only" interactions, and using methods other than GET? The third "design pattern" in the presentation is one for "resource creation" (slide 55 in the PDF; slide 98 in the video presentation). Here a client POSTs a representation of a resource to a "collection resource" (slide 50 in the PDF; slide 93 in the video presentation). The example of a "collection resource" used is a collection of customers, with the implication, I think, that the corresponding "resource creation" example would involve the posting of a representation of a customer, and the server responding 201 with a new URI for the customer.

I think (but I'm not sure, so please do correct me!) that the implication of the httpRange-14 resolution is that in this example, the "collection resource", the resource to which a POST is submitted, would be a collection of "customer descriptions", and the thing posted would be a representation of a customer description for the new customer, and the URI returned for the newly created resource would be the URI of a new customer description. And a GET for the URI of the description would return a representation which included the URI of the new customer.

(In the diagram above, http://example.org/customers/123 is the URI of a customer; http://example.org/docs/customers/123 is the URI of a document describing that customer

And, finally, a GET for the URI of the customer (assuming it isn't a "hash URI") would - following the Cool URIs conventions - return a 303 redirect to the URI of the description.

There is some discussion of this is in a short post by Richard Cyganiak, and I think the comments there bear out what I'm suggesting here, i.e. that POST/PUT/DELETE are applied to "Web documents" and not to "real-world objects".

The comment by Leo Sauermann on that post refers to the use of a SPARQL endpoint for updates - the SPARQL Update specification certainly addresses this area. It talks in terms of adding/deleting triples to/from a graph, and adding/deleting graphs to/from a "graph store". I think the "adding a graph to a graph store" case is pretty close to the requirement that is being addressed by the "post representation to Collection Resource" pattern. But I admit I struggle slightly to reconcile the SPARQL Update approach with Stefan's design pattern - and indeed, he highlights the "endpoint" notion, with different methods embedded in the content of the representation, as part of one of his "anti-patterns", their presence typically being an indicator that an architecture is not really RESTful.

I should emphasise that I'm trying to avoid seeming to adopt a "purist" position here: I recognise that "RESTfulness" is a choice rather than an absolute requirement. However, interest in the RESTful use of HTTP has grown considerably in recent years (to the extent that some developers seem keen to apply the label "RESTful", regardless of whether their application meets the design constraints specified by the architectural style or not). And now the "linked data" approach - which of course makes use of the httpRange-14 conventions - also seems to be gathering momentum, not least following the announcement by the UK government that Tim Berners-Lee would be advising them on opening up government data (and his issuing of a new note in his Design Issues series focussed explicitly on government data). It seems to me it would be helpful to be clear about how/where these two approaches intersect, and how/where they diverge (if indeed they do!). Purely from a personal perspective, I would like to be clearer in my own mind about whether/how the sort of patterns recommended by Stefan apply in the post-httpRange-14/linked data world.

The rise of green?

I attended the Terena Networking Conference 2009 in Malaga a couple of weeks ago where several of the keynote talks focused on the environment, global warming, the impact that data centres and ICT more generally have on this, and the potential for cloud-based solutions to help.  The talks were all really interesting actually, though I must confess I was slightly confused as to why they appeared so heavily in that particular conference. I particularly liked Bill St. Arnaud's suggestion that facilities powered by sources of renewable energy (wind, wave or solar for example) will be subject to periods of non-availability, meaning that network routing architectures will have to be devised to move compute and storage resources around the network dynamically in response.

We've just announced our new Data Centre facility in Swindon and I initially commented (internally) that I felt the environmental statement to be a little weak. My interest is partly environmental (I want the organisation I work for to be as environmentally neutral as possible) and partly business-related (if the ICT green agenda is on the rise then one can reasonably expect that HEI business decisions around outsourcing will increasingly be made on the back of it). On that basis, I want Eduserv's messaging on environmental issues to be as transparent as possible. (I think this is true for any concerned individual working for any organisation - I'm not picking on my employer here).  It is worth noting that we now have an internal 'green team' with a remit to consider environmental issues across Eduserv as a whole.

Based on a completely trivial and unscientific sample of 4 'data centre'-related organisations in the UK - Edina, Eduserv, Mimas and ULCC - I make the following, largely unhelpful, observations...

• It's marginally easier to find an accessibility statement than it is to find an environmental statement (not surprising I guess) though ULCC's Green Statement is quite prominent,
• it's not easy for Joe Average (i.e. me!) to work out what the hell it all means in any practical sense.

On balance, and despite my somewhat negative comment above about its weakness, the fact that we are making any kind of statement about our impact on the environment is a step in the right direction.

Repositories and linked data

Last week there was a message from Steve Hitchcock on the UK jisc-repositories@jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list noting Tim Berners-Lee's comments that "giving people access to the data 'will be paradise'". In response, I made the following suggestion:

If you are going to mention TBL on this list then I guess that you really have to think about how well repositories play in a Web of linked data?

My thoughts... not very well currently!

Linked data has 4 principles:

• Use URIs as names for things
• Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
• When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information.
• Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

Of these, repositories probably do OK at 1 and 2 (though, as I’ve argued before, one might question the coolness of some of the http URIs in use and, I think, the use of cool URIs is implicit in 2).

3, at least according to TBL, really means “provide RDF” (or RDFa embedded into HTML I guess), something that I presume very few repositories do?

Given lack of 3, I guess that 4 is hard to achieve. Even if one was to ignore the lack of RDF or RDFa, the fact that content is typically served as PDF or MS formats probably means that links to other things are reasonably well hidden?

It’d be interesting (academically at least), and probably non-trivial, to think about what a linked data repository would look like? OAI-ORE is a helpful step in the right direction in this regard.

In response, various people noted that there is work in this area: Mark Diggory on work at DSpace, Sally Rumsey (off-list) on the Oxford University Research Archive and parallel data repository (DataBank), and Les Carr on the new JISC dotAC Rapid Innovation project. And I'm sure there is other stuff as well.

In his response, Mark Diggory said:

So the question of "coolness" of URI tends to come in second to ease of implementation and separation of services (concerns) in a repository. Should "Coolness" really be that important? We are trying to work on this issue in DSpace 2.0 as well.

I don't get the comment about "separation of services". Coolness of URIs is about persistence. It's about our long term ability to retain the knowledge that a particular URI identifies a particular thing and to interact with the URI in order to obtain a representation of it. How coolness is implemented is not important, except insofar as it doesn't impact on our long term ability to meet those two aims.

Les Carr also noted the issues around a repository minting URIs "for things it has no authority over (e.g. people's identities) or no knowledge about (e.g. external authors' identities)" suggesting that the "approach of dotAC is to make the repository provide URIs for everything that we consider significant and to allow an external service to worry about mapping our URIs to "official" URIs from various "authorities"". An interesting area.

As I noted above, I think that the work on OAI-ORE is an important step in helping to bring repositories into the world of linked data. That said, there was some interesting discussion on Twitter during the recent OAI6 conference about the value of ORE's aggregation model, given that distinct domains will need to layer their own (different) domain models onto those aggregations in order to do anything useful. My personal take on this is that it probably is useful to have abstracted out the aggregation model but that the hypothesis still to be tested that primitive aggregation is useful despite every domain needing own richer data and, indeed, that we need to see whether the way the ORE model gets applied in the field turns out to be sensible and useful.

Unlocking Audio

I spent the first couple of days this week at the British Library in London, attending the Unlocking Audio 2 conference.  I was there primarily to give an invited talk on the second day.

You might notice that I didn't have a great deal to say about audio, other than to note that what strikes me as interesting about the newer ways in which I listen to music online (specifically Blip.fm and Spotify) is that they are both highly social (almost playful) in their approach and that they are very much of the Web (as opposed to just being 'on' the Web).

What do I mean by that last phrase?  Essentially, it's about an attitude.  It's about seeing being mashed as a virtue.  It's about an expectation that your content, URLs and APIs will be picked up by other people and re-used in ways you could never have foreseen.  Or, as Charles Leadbeater put it on the first day of the conference, it's about "being an ingredient".

I went on to talk about the JISC Information Environment (which is surprisingly(?) not that far off its 10th birthday if you count from the initiation of the DNER), using it as an example of digital library thinking more generally and suggesting where I think we have parted company with the mainstream Web (in a generally "not good" way).  I noted that while digital library folks can discuss identifiers forever (if you let them!) we generally don't think a great deal about identity.  And even where we do think about it, the approach is primarily one of, "who are you and what are you allowed to access?", whereas on the social Web identity is at least as much about, "this is me, this is who I know, and this is what I have contributed". 

I think that is a very significant difference - it's a fundamentally different world-view - and it underpins one critical aspect of the difference between, say, Shibboleth and OpenID.  In digital libraries we haven't tended to focus on the social activity that needs to grow around our content and (as I've said in the past) our institutional approach to repositories is a classic example of how this causes 'social networking' issues with our solutions.

I stole a lot of the ideas for this talk, not least Lorcan Dempsey's use of concentration and diffusion.  As an aside... on the first day of the conference, Charles Leadbeater introduced a beach analogy for the 'media' industries, suggesting that in the past the beach was full of a small number of large boulders and that everything had to happen through those.  What the social Web has done is to make the beach into a place where we can all throw our pebbles.  I quite like this analogy.  My one concern is that many of us do our pebble throwing in the context of large, highly concentrated services like Flickr, YouTube, Google and so on.  There are still boulders - just different ones?  Anyway... I ended with Dave White's notions of visitors vs. residents, suggesting that in the cultural heritage sector we have traditionally focused on building services for visitors but that we need to focus more on residents from now on.  I admit that I don't quite know what this means in practice... but it certainly feels to me like the right direction of travel.

I concluded by offering my thoughts on how I would approach something like the JISC IE if I was asked to do so again now.  My gut feeling is that I would try to stay much more mainstream and focus firmly on the basics, by which I mean adopting the principles of linked data (about which there is now a TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee), cool URIs and REST and focusing much more firmly on the social aspects of the environment (OpenID, OAuth, and so on).

Prior to giving my talk I attended a session about iTunesU and how it is being implemented at the University of Oxford.  I confess a strong dislike of iTunes (and iTunesU by implication) and it worries me that so many UK universities are seeing it as an appropriate way forward.  Yes, it has a lot of concentration (and the benefits that come from that) but its diffusion capabilities are very limited (i.e. it's a very closed system), resulting in the need to build parallel Web interfaces to the same content.  That feels very messy to me.  That said, it was an interesting session with more potential for debate than time allowed.  If nothing else, the adoption of systems about which people can get religious serves to get people talking/arguing.

Overall then, I thought it was an interesting conference.  I suspect that my contribution wasn't liked by everyone there - but I hope it added usefully to the debate.  My live-blogging notes from the two days are here and here.

What became of the JISC IE?

Having just done an impromptu, and very brief, 1:1 staff development session about Z39.50 and OpenURL for a colleague here at Eduserv, I was minded to take a quick look at the JISC Information Environment Technical Standards document. (I strongly suspect that the reason he was asking me about these standards, before going to a meeting with a potential client, was driven by the JISC IE work.)

As far as I can tell, the standards document hasn't been updated since I left UKOLN (more than 3 years ago). On that basis, one is tempted to conclude that the JISC IE has no relevance, at least in terms of laying out an appropriate framework of technical standards. Surely stuff must have changed significantly in the intervening years? There is no mention of Atom, REST, the Semantic Web, SWORD, OpenSocial, OpenID, OAuth, Google Sitemaps, OpenSearch, ... to name but a few.

Of course, I accept that this document could simply now be seen as irrelevant?  But, if so, why isn't it flagged as such?  It's sitting there with my name on it as though I'd checked it yesterday and the JISC-hosted Information Environment pages still link to that area as though it remains up to date.  This is somewhat frustrating, both for me as an individual and, more importantly, for people in the community trying to make sense of the available information.

Odd... what is the current status of the JISC IE, as a framework of technical standards?

Clouds on the Horizon

I note that the NMC's Horizon Report for 2009 was published back in January, available as both a PDF file and in a rather nice Web version supporting online commentary.

The report discusses 6 topics (mobiles, cloud computing, geo-everything, the personal Web, semantic-aware applications, and smart objects) each of which it suggests will have an impact over the next 5 years.

I was drawn to the cloud computing section first, partly because of other interests here and partly because Larry Johnson (one of the co-PIs on the Horizon project) spoke on this very topic at our symposium last year, about which the report says:

Educational institutions are beginning to take advantage of ready-made applications hosted on a dynamic, ever-expanding cloud that enable end users to perform tasks that have traditionally required site licensing, installation, and maintenance of individual software packages. Email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, collaboration, media editing, and more can all be done inside a web browser, while the software and files are housed in the cloud. In addition to productivity applications, services like Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), YouTube (http://www.youtube.com), and Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), as well as a host of other browser-based applications, comprise a set of increasingly powerful cloud-based tools for almost any task a user might need to do.

Cloud-based applications can handle photo and video editing (see http://www.splashup.com for photos and http://www.jaycut.com for videos, to name just two examples) or publish presentations and slide shows (see http://www.slideshare.net or http://www.sliderocket.com). Further, it is very easy to share content created with these tools, both in terms of collaborating on its creation and distributing the finished work. Applications like those listed here can provide students and teachers with free or low-cost alternatives to expensive, proprietary productivity tools. Browser-based, thin-client applications are accessible with a variety of computer and even mobile platforms, making these tools available anywhere the Internet can be accessed. The shared infrastructure approaches embedded in the cloud computing concept offer considerable potential for large scale experiments and research that can make use of untapped processing power.

We are just beginning to see direct applications for teaching and learning other than the simple availability of platform-independent tools and scalable data storage. This set of technologies has clear potential to distribute applications across a wider set of devices and greatly reduce the overall cost of computing. The support for group work and collaboration at a distance embedded in many cloud- based applications could be a benefit applicable to many learning situations.

However, the report also notes that a level of caution is necessary:

The cloud does have certain drawbacks. Unlike traditional software packages that can be installed on a local computer, backed up, and are available as long as the operating system supports them, cloud- based applications are services offered by companies and service providers in real time. Entrusting your work and data to the cloud is also a commitment of trust that the service provider will continue to be there, even in face of changing market and other conditions. Nonetheless, the economics of cloud computing are increasingly compelling. For many institutions, cloud computing offers a cost-effective solution to the problem of how to provide services, data storage, and computing power to a growing number of Internet users without investing capital in physical machines that need to be maintained and upgraded on-site.

The report goes on the provide some examples of use.

I doubt that there will be much here that is exactly 'news' to regular readers of this blog (though this is not true for other sections of the report which cover areas that we don't really deal with here). On the other hand, it is good to see this stuff laid out in a relatively mainstream publication. I remain bemused (as I was last year) at the relatively low level of coverage this report gets in the UK and wonder, in a kind of off the top of my head way, whether a UK or European version of this report would be a worthwhile activity?

Open orienteering

It seems to me that there is now quite a general acceptance of what the 'open access' movement is trying to achieve. I know that not everyone buys into that particular world-view but, for those of us that do, we know where we are headed and most of us will probably recognise it when we get there. Here, for example, is Yishay Mor writing to the open-science mailing list:

I would argue that there's a general principle to consider here. I hold that any data collected by public money should be made freely available to the public, for any use that contributes to the public good. Strikes me as a no-brainer, but of course - we have a long way to go.

A fairly straight-forward articulation of the open access position and a goal that I would thoroughly endorse.

The problem is that we don't always agree as a community about how best to get there.

I've been watching two debates flow past today, both showing some evidence of lack of consensus in the map reading department, though one much more long-standing than the other. Firstly, the old chestnut about the relative merits of central repositories vs. institutional repositories (initiated in part by Bernard Rentier's blog post, Institutional, thematic or centralised repositories?) but continued on various repository-related mailing lists (you know the ones!). Secondly, a newer debate about whether formal licences or community norms provide the best way to encourage the open sharing of research data by scientists and others, a debate which I tried to sum up in the following tweet:

@yishaym summary of open data debate... OD is good & needs to be encouraged - how best to do that? 1 licences (as per CC) or 2 social norms

It's great what can be done with 140 characters.

I'm more involved in the first than the second and therefore tend to feel more aggrieved at lack of what I consider to be sensible progress. In particular, I find the recurring refrain that we can join stuff back together using the OAI-PMH and therefore everything is going to be OK both tiresome and laughable.

If there's a problem here, and perhaps there isn't, then it is that the arguments and debates are taking place between people who ultimately want the same thing. I'm reminded of Monty Python's Life of Brian:

Brian: Excuse me. Are you the Judean People's Front?
Reg: Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea

It's like we all share the same religion but we disagree about which way to face while we are praying. Now, clearly, some level of debate is good. The point at which it becomes not good is when it blocks progress which is why, generally speaking, having made my repository-related architectural concerns known a while back, I try and resist the temptation to reiterate them too often.

Cameron Neylon has a nice summary of the licensing vs. norms debate on his blog. It's longer and more thoughtful than my tweet! This is a newer debate and I therefore feel more positive that it is able to go somewhere. My initial reaction was that a licensing approach is the most sensible way forward but having read through the discussion I'm no longer so sure.

So what's my point? I'm not sure really... but if I wake up in 4 years time and the debate about licensing vs. norms is still raging, as has pretty much happened with the discussion around CRs vs. IRs, I'll be very disappointed.

If you're API and you know it clap your hands

There's a question doing the rounds in JISC circles at the moment, courtesy of the 'Good APIs’ project being led by UKOLN, which is essentially, "What makes a good API?":

The ‘Good APIs’ project aims to provide JISC and the sector with information and advice on best practice which should be adopted when developing and consuming APIs.

I have to confess that the question doesn't make a great deal of sense to me to be honest? Or at least, a good deal more contextual information is required before a sensible answer can be made - is HTTP considered to be an API in the context of this work for example?  If nothing else, the question tends to lean towards an SOA way of thinking IMHO.

A more fruitful line of inquiry might be, "What makes a good architectural approach?", in which case, it seems to me, REST might be a sensible answer.

Anyway... if you think you know what makes a good API, you can provide the answer on a postcard via the project's survey on SurveyMonkey.com.

JISC IE and e-Research Call briefing day

I attended the briefing day for the JISC's Information Environment and e-Research Call in London on Monday and my live-blogged notes are available on eFoundations LiveWire for anyone that is interested in my take on what was said.

Quite an interesting day overall but I was slightly surprised at the lack of name badges and a printed delegate list, especially given that this event brought together people from two previously separate areas of activity. Oh well, a delegate list is promised at some point.  I also sensed a certain lack of buzz around the event - I mean there's almost £11m being made available here, yet nobody seemed that excited about it, at least in comparison with the OER meeting held as part of the CETIS conference a few weeks back.  At that meeting there seemed to be a real sense that the money being made available was going to result in a real change of mindset within the community.  I accept that this is essentially second-phase money, building on top of what has gone before, but surely it should be generating a significant sense of momentum or something... shouldn't it?

A couple of people asked me why I was attending given that Eduserv isn't entitled to bid directly for this money and now that we're more commonly associated with giving grant money away rather than bidding for it ourselves.

The short answer is that this call is in an area that is of growing interest to Eduserv, not least because of the development effort we are putting into our new data centre capability.  It's also about us becoming better engaged with the community in this area.  So... what could we offer as part of a project team? Three things really: 

• Firstly, we'd be very interested in talking to people about sustainable hosting models for services and content in the context of this call.
• Secondly, software development effort, particularly around integration with Web 2.0 services.
• Thirdly, significant expertise in both Semantic Web technologies (e.g. RDF, Dublin Core and ORE) and identity standards (e.g. Shibboleth and OpenID).

If you are interested in talking any of this thru further, please get in touch.

Some (more) thoughts on repositories

I attended a meeting of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group (RPAG) in London a couple of weeks ago.  Part of my reason for attending was to respond (semi-formally) to the proposals being put forward by Rachel Heery in her update to the original Repositories Roadmap that we jointly authored back in April 2006.

It would be unfair (and inappropriate) for me to share any of the detail in my comments since the update isn't yet public (and I suppose may never be made so).  So other than saying that I think that, generally speaking, the update is a step in the right direction, what I want to do here is rehearse the points I made which are applicable to the repositories landscape as I see it more generally.  To be honest, I only had 5 minutes in which to make my comments in the meeting, so there wasn't a lot of room for detail in any case!

Broadly speaking, I think three points are worth making.  (With the exception of the first, these will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog.)

Metrics

There may well be some disagreement about this but it seems to me that the collection of material we are trying to put into institutional repositories of scholarly research publications is a reasonably well understood and measurable corpus.  It strikes me as odd therefore that the metrics we tend to use to measure progress in this space are very general and uninformative.  Numbers of institutions with a repository for example - or numbers of papers with full text.  We set targets for ourselves like, "a high percentage of newly published UK scholarly output [will be] made available on an open access basis" (a direct quote from the original roadmap).  We don't set targets like, "80% of newly published UK peer-reviewed research papers will be made available on an open access basis" - a more useful and concrete objective.

As a result, we have little or no real way of knowing if are actually making significant progress towards our goals.  We get a vague feel for what is happening but it is difficult to determine if we are really succeeding.

Clearly, I am ignoring learning object repositories and repositories of research data here because those areas are significantly harder, probably impossible, to measure in percentage terms.  In passing, I suggest that the issues around learning object repositories, certainly the softer issues like what motivates people to deposit, are so totally different from those around research repositories that it makes no sense to consider them in the same space anyway.

Even if the total number of published UK peer-reviewed research papers is indeed hard to determine, it seems to me that we ought to be able to reach some kind of suitable agreement about how we would estimate it for the purposes of repository metrics.  Or we could base our measurements on some agreed sub-set of all scholarly output - the peer-reviewed research papers submitted to the current RAE (or forthcoming REF) for example.

A glass half empty view of the world says that by giving ourselves concrete objectives we are setting ourselves up for failure.  Maybe... though I prefer the glass half full view that we are setting ourselves up for success.  Whatever... failure isn't really failure - it's just a convenient way of partitioning off those activities that aren't worth pursuing (for whatever reason) so that other things can be focused on more fully.  Without concrete metrics it is much harder to make those kinds of decisions.

The other issue around metrics is that if the goal is open access (which I think it is), as opposed to full repositories (which are just a means to an end) then our metrics should be couched in terms of that goal.  (Note that, for me at least, open access implies both good management and long-term preservation and that repositories are only one way of achieving that).

The bottom-line question is, "what does success in the repository space actually look like?".  My worry is that we are scared of the answers.  Perhaps the real problem here is that 'failure' isn't an option?

Executive summary: our success metrics around research publications should be based on a percentage of the newly published peer-reviewed literature (or some suitable subset thereof) being made available on an open access basis (irrespective of how that is achieved).

Emphasis on individuals

Across the board we are seeing a growing emphasis on the individual, on user-centricity and on personalisation (in its widest sense).  Personal Learning Environments, Personal Research Environments and the suite of 'open stack' standards around OpenID are good examples of this trend.  Yet in the repository space we still tend to focus most on institutional wants and needs.  I've characterised this in the past in terms of us needing to acknowledge and play to the real-world social networks adopted by researchers.  As long as our emphasis remains on the institution we are unlikely to bring much change to individual research practice.

Executive summary: we need to put the needs of individuals before the needs of institutions in terms of how we think about reaching open access nirvana.

Fit with the Web

I written and spoken a lot about this in the past and don't want to simply rehash old arguments.  That said, I think three things are worth emphasising:

Concentration

Global discipline-based repositories are more successful at attracting content than institutional repositories.  I can say that with only minimal fear of contradiction because our metrics are so poor - see above :-).  This is no surprise.  It's exactly what I'd expect to see.  Successful services on the Web tend to be globally concentrated (as that term is defined by Lorcan Dempsey) because social networks tend not to follow regional or organisational boundaries any more.

Executive summary: we need to work out how to take advantage of global concentration more fully in the repository space.

Web architecture

Take three guiding documents - the Web Architecture itself, REST, and the principles of linked data.  Apply liberally to the content you have at hand - repository content in our case.  Sit back and relax. 

Executive summary: we need to treat repositories more like Web sites and less like repositories.

Resource discovery

On the Web, the discovery of textual material is based on full-text indexing and link analysis.  In repositories, it is based on metadata and pre-Web forms of citation.  One approach works, the other doesn't.  (Hint: I no longer believe in metadata as it is currently used in repositories).  Why the difference?  Because repositories of research publications are library-centric and the library world is paper-centric - oh, and there's the minor issue of a few hundred years of inertia to overcome.  That's the only explanation I can give anyway.  (And yes, since you ask... I was part of the recent movement that got us into this mess!). 

Executive summary: we need to 1) make sure that repository content is exposed to mainstream Web search engines in Web-friendly formats and 2) make academic citation more Web-friendly so that people can discovery repository content using everyday tools like Google.

Simple huh?!  No, thought not...

I realise that most of what I say above has been written (by me) on previous occasions in this blog.  I also strongly suspect that variants of this blog entry will continue to appear here for some time to come.

Thoughts on FOTE

Pete's recent post about DC-2008 reminds me that I never wrote up my thoughts on FOTE 2008, the Future of Technology in Education event organised recently by Tim Bush and colleagues at ULCC.

It's probably too late now to do any kind of lengthy write-up of the day.  Suffice to say that there were some good talks and some bad talks.  See my live-blog on eFoundations LiveWire if you want to know more but my closing remark pretty much sums it up:

AP: summing up... i think there have been some very good talks today and some very bad talks.  on balance, i think it has been a good and useful day.  as i mentioned, i think that suppliers (with the exception of the Huddle guy) have a tendency to talk down to the audience - we know the world is changing - what we want is help in thinking about how to respond

One of the best talks (actually, probably one of the best talks I'll see this year) was by Miles Metcalfe of Ravensbourne College.  I include the slides below but you won't get the full effect without the very humorous presentation that went with it.

His closing slide, which he suggested was originally going to be entitled "Like I trust the fuckers", poked fun at the proposal that institutions can trust external service providers such as Google (who were also presenting at FOTE) to provide services critical to their business. Having said that, the earlier parts of the talk also acknowledged that individuals within institutions can now make many of those kinds of outsourcing decisions for themselves - irrespective of institutional policy.

The whole thrust of the presentation was to ask, "where does that leave institutional computing service provision?". We used to think that at least the institutional network was sacred (and to a large extent it still is) but with the advent of widely available 3G, of which the iPhone is the classic example, even that is being nibbled away at.

On the same slide, Metcalfe also argues that moving towards OpenID makes more sense than Shibboleth (in the current environment), a view that I tend to share, albeit acknowledging some of the usability issues that still have to be resolved.

All in all it was a very entertaining and thought-provoking presentation, and well worth turning up at the event to see.

(Note that slides from most of the other presentations during the day are also available.)

An evolutionary view of cloud computing

Quote from the tail end of a special report about 'cloud computing' in the Economist:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology visionary at IBM, compares cloud computing to the Cambrian explosion some 500m years ago when the rate of evolution speeded up, in part because the cell had been perfected and standardised, allowing evolution to build more complex organisms. Similarly, argues Mr Wladawsky-Berger, the IT industry spent much of its first few decades developing the basic components of computing. Now that these are essentially standardised, bigger and more diverse systems can emerge. “For computing to reach a higher level”, he says, “its cells had to be commoditised.”

Thanks to @PaulMiller on Twitter for the pointer.

Building in the cloud

Via @timoreilly on Twitter, I note that George Reese has written a short piece about developing cloud applications, Considerations in Building Web Applications for the Amazon Cloud, his four areas of consideration being licensing, persistence, horizontal scalability and disaster recovery. 

The licensing one caught my eye because it wasn't what I was expecting based on the concerns about cloud computing that I've heard raised at educational events in the recent past.

Reese's point about licensing is that if you've built an application running on hardware you own, using licensed software for which the cost is based on numbers of CPUs, and you try to move it into the cloud then you may be in for a shock because the answer to the question, "how many CPUs is my application now running on?" is non-trivial to answer.  On that basis, open source solutions may get a "shot in the arm" from any kind of mass movement into the cloud (as noted by Tim Bray at FOWA in London recently).

On the other hand, in education, the licensing issues I hear raised most frequently around cloud computing have to do with the terms and conditions under which you are storing material in the cloud and whether there are IPR, privacy/data protection and data recovery considerations that need to be taken into account.

Both concerns are valid of course.  I guess these different perspectives come from a developer-centric vs. a policy maker-centric view of the world.

Buzzwords as a service

In his joint session (with Jeff Barr) on cloud computing at FOWA last week, Tony Lucas from xCalibre introduced three acronyms:

• SaaS - Software as a Service
• PaaS - Platform as a Service
• IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service

From top to bottom they are (approximately)... applications hosted in the cloud (e.g. Google Apps), cloud-based platforms on which you can build your own stuff, and cloud-based low-level (typically virtualised) compute infrastructure (e.g. Amazon EC2).

I appreciate that these aren't particularly new terms or anything... but I confess that two of the three were new to me (and on that basis may be new to others). 

Sitting under(?) these three I guess you have managed hosting (the phrase Hardware as a Service (HaaS) has been superceeded by IaaS, at least according to Wikipedia).  And then there's Data as a Service (DaaS), where data is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet.

All of which leads to Everything as a Service (EaaS, XaaS or aaS), the concept of being able to call up re-usable, fine-grained software components across a network.

I have to confess that I find the distinctions between these terms somewhat blurry... but that is pretty inevitable I guess.  Picking on something at random, the Talis Platform for example... I have no real sense for whether it is best described as SaaS, DaaS, PaaS or IaaS?  Perhaps it doesn't matter.

I particularly like the fact that the Wikipedia entry for PaaS currently says, "This article or section appears to contain a large number of buzzwords".  Quite!

Thoughts on FOWA

I spent Thursday and Friday last week at the Future of Web Apps Expo (FOWA) in London, a pretty good event overall in retrospect and certainly one that left me with a lot to think about.  I'm not going to write up any of the individual talks in any kind of detail - videos of all the talks are now available, as is my (lo-fat) live-blogging from the event - but I do want to touch on several thoughts that occurred to me while I was there.

Firstly, the somewhat mundane issue of wireless access at conferences...  I say mundane because one might expect that providing wireless access to conference delegates should have become pretty much routine by now - a bit like making sure that tea and coffee are available?  But that didn't seem to be the case at this event.  My (completely unscientific and non-exhaustive) experience was that everyone with a Mac in the venue had no trouble with the wifi network but that everyone with a PC seemed to have little or no connectivity.  (Actually, that's not quite true, I did find one person with a PC laptop who had no problem using the wifi).  Whatever... my poor little brand new EeePC didn't get on the network for any significant period of time at any point in the two days :-(

So, OK, we all know that Macs are better than PCs in every way but I was amazed at the stark difference that seemed to be in evidence during this particular event.

The lack of wifi connectivity was of particular annoyance to yours truly, since I was hoping to live-blog the whole event.  In the end, I used the mobile interface to Coveritlive via my iPhone over a 3G connection to cover some of the sessions - not an easy thing to do given the soft-keyboard but actually an interesting experiment in what is possible with mobile technology these days.  By day 2 of the conference my typing on the soft-keyboard was getting pretty good - though not always very accurate.

The conference had quite a young and entrepreneurial feel to it - I'm not saying that everyone there was under 30 but there were a lot of aspects to the style of the conference that were in stark contrast to the rather more... err... traditional feel of many 'academic' conferences.  I don't want to argue that age and attitude are necessarily linked (for obvious reasons) but the entrepreneurial thing is particularly interesting I think because it is something that has a non-obvious fit with how things happen in education.  Being an entrepreneur is about taking risks - risks with money more than anything I guess.  I don't quite know how this translates into the academic space but my gut feeling is that it would be worth thinking about.  Note that I'm not thinking about money here - I'm thinking about attitude.  What I suppose I mean is our ability to break out of a conservative approach to things - our ability to overcome the inertia associated with how things have been done in the past.

I realise that there are plenty of startups in the education space - Huddle springs to mind as a good current example of a company that seems to have the potential to cross the education/enterprise divide - my concern is more about what happens inside educational institutions.  A 24 year-old can run the world's biggest social network yet we don't see similar things happening in education... do we?  Calling all 24 year old directors of university computing services...

Is that something we should worry about?  Is it something we should applaud?  Does it matter?  Is it an inevitable consequence of the kinds of institutions we find in education?

Funding by JISC, Eduserv and the like should be about encouraging an entrepreneurial approach to the use of ICT in education but I'm not sure it fully succeeds in doing that.  Project funding is by its nature a largely low risk activity - except at the transition points between funding.  There are exceptions of course - there are people that I would say are definitely educational entrepreneurs (in the attitude sense) but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule overall and even where they exist I think it is very difficult for them to have a significant impact on wider practice.

The entrepreneurial theme came out strongly in several sessions. Tim Bray's keynote for example, my favorite talk of the conference, where he focused on what startups need to do to react to the current economic climate.  And in a somewhat contrived debate about 'work-life balance' where Jason Calacanis argued that "it's ok to be average but not in my company" - ever heard that in the education sector?  I'm not saying that his was the right attitude, and to a large extent he was playing devil's advocate anyway, but these are the kinds of issues that we tend to be pretty shy about even discussing in education.

Unfortunately, the whole entrepreneurial thing brings with it a less positive facet, in that there tends to be a "it's not what you know, but who you know" kind of attitude.  This comes out both face-to-face (people looking over your shoulder for a more interesting person to talk to - yes, I know I'm a boring git, thank you!) and in people's use of social networks.  The people I'd unfollow first on Twitter are those who spend the most time tweeting who they are meeting up with next. Yawn.

Much of FOWA was split into two parallel tracks - a developer track and a business track.  I spent most time in the former.  Overall I was slightly disappointed with this track and found the talks that I went to in the business track slightly better.  It's not that there weren't a lot of good talks in the developer track - just that they didn't seem like good developer talks.  My take was that many of them would have been more appropriate for managers who wanted to get up to speed on the latest technology-related issues and thinking.  It didn't seem to me that real developers (of which I'm not one) would have got much from many of those talks - they were too superficial or something.

Now, clearly, running a developer track aimed at 700-odd delegates is not an easy task - I certainly wouldn't be able to do any better - but more than anything you've got to try and inspire people to go away and learn about and deploy new technology, not try and teach it directly during the conference.  For whatever reason, it didn't feel like there was much really new technological stuff to get inspired about.  This is not the conference organiser's fault - just timing I guess.  The business track on the other hand had plenty to focus on, given the current economic climate.

As you'd expect, there was also a lot about the cloud over the two days.  Most of it positive... but interestingly (to me, since it was the first time I'd heard something like this) there was an impassioned plea from the floor (during the joint important bits of cloud computing slot by Jeff Barr and Tony Lucas) for consumers of cloud computing to band together in order to put pressure on suppliers for better terms and conditions, prices, and the like.

Overall then... FOWA was a different kind of event to those I normally attend and to be honest it was a very last-minute decision to go at all but I did so because there were some interesting looking speakers that I wanted to see.  It wasn't a total success (hey, what is!?) but on balance I'm really glad I went and I got a lot out of it.

Two final mini-thoughts...

Firstly, virtual economies came up a couple of times.  Once in the Techcrunch Pitch at the end of the first day, where one of the panel (sorry, I forget who) suggested that virtual economies would increasingly replace subscriptions as the way services are supported.  I think he was referring to services outside the virtual world space where these kinds of economies are regularly found - Second Life being the best known example of a virtual world economy - though I must confess that I don't really understand how it might work in other contexts.  Then again in Tim Bray's talk where he noted the sales of iPhone applications at very low unit costs (e.g. 59p a time) - a model that will become increasingly sustainable and profitable because of the growing size of the mobile market.  (I appreciate that these two aren't quite the same - but think they are close enough to be of passing interest).

Secondly, I had my first chance to play on a Microsoft Surface - a kind of table-sized iPhone multi-user touch interface.  These things are beautiful to watch and interact with, and the ability to almost literally touch digital content is amazing, with obvious possibilities in the education and cultural sectors, as well as elsewhere.  Costs are prohibitive at the moment of course - but that will no doubt change.  I can't wait!

And finally... to that Mark Zuckerberg interview at the end of day 2.  I really enjoyed it actually.  Despite being well rehearsed and choreographed I thought he came across very well.  He certainly made all the right kinds of noises about making Facebook more open though whether it is believable or not remains to be seen!

It's easy to knock successful people - particularly ones so young.  But at the end of the day I suspect that many of us simply wish we could achieve half as much!?

Thoughts on ALT-C 2008

A few brief reflections on ALT-C 2008, which took place last week.

Overall, I thought it was a good event.  Hot water in my halls of residence rooms would have been an added bonus but that's a whole other story that I won't bother you with here.

I particularly enjoyed the various F-ALT sessions (the unofficial ALT-C Fringe), which were much better than I expected.  Actually, I don't know why I say that, since I didn't really know what to expect, but whatever... it seemed to me that those sessions were the main place in the conference where there was any real debate (at least from what I saw).  Good stuff and well done to the F-ALT organisers.  I hope we see better engagement between the fringe and the main conference next year because this is something that has the potential to bring real value to all conference delegates.

I also enjoyed the conference keynotes, though I think all three were somewhat guilty of not sufficiently tailoring their material to the target audience and conference themes.  I also suspect that my willingness to just sit back and accept the keynotes at face value, particularly the one by Itiel Dror, shows what little depth of knowledge I have in the 'learning' space - I know there were people in the audience who wanted to challenge his 'cognitive psychologist' take on learning as we understand it.

I live-blogged all three, as well as some of the other sessions I attended:

• Opening keynote - Hans Rosling (partial live-blog due to Coveritlive system maintenance)
• Games short paper session
• 2nd keynote - Itiel Dror
• Identity theft in VLEs session
  
• User informed design short paper session
• Final keynote - David Cavallo

I should say that I live-blog primarily as a way of keeping my own notes of the sessions I attend - it's largely a personal thing.  But it's nice when I get a few followers watching my live note taking, especially when they chip in with useful comments and questions that I can pass on to the speakers, as happened particularly well with the "identity theft in VLEs" session.

I should also mention the ALT-C 2008 social network which was delivered using Crowdvine and which was, by all accounts, very successful.  Having been involved with a few different approaches to this kind of thing, I think Crowdvine offers a range of functionality that is hard to beat.  At the time of writing, over 440 of the conference's 500+ delegates had signed up to Crowdvine!  This is a very big proportion, certainly in my experience.  But it's not just about the number of sign-ups... it's the fact that Crowdvine was actively used to manage people's schedules, engage in debates (before, during and after the conference) and make contacts that is important.  I think it would be really interesting to do some post-conference analysis (both quantitative and qualitative) about how Crowdvine was really used - not that I'm offering to do it you understand.  The findings would be interesting when thinking about future events.

The conference dinner was also a triumph... it was an inspired choice to ask local FE students to both cater for us and serve the meal, and in my opinion it resulted in by far the best conference meal I've had for a long time.  Not that the conference meal makes or breaks a conference - but it's a nice bonus when things work out well :-).  Thinking about it now, it seems to me that more academic/education conferences should take kind of approach - certainly if this particular meal was anything to go by - not just in terms of the meal, but also for other aspects of the event.  How about asking media students to use a variety of new media to make their own record of a conference for example.  These are win-win situations it seems to me.

Finally, the slides from my sponsor's session are now available on Slideshare:

As I mentioned previously, the point of the talk was to think out loud about the way in which the availability of notionally low-cost or free Web 2.0 services (services in the cloud) impacts on our thinking about service delivery, both within institutions and in community-based service providers such as Eduserv.  What is it that we (institutions and service providers 'within' the community) can offer that external providers can't (sustainability, commitment to preservation of resources, adherence to UK law, and so on)?  What do they offer that we don't, or that we find it difficult to offer?  I'm thinking particularly of the user-experience here! :-) How do we make our service offerings compelling in an environment where 'free' is also 'easy'?

In the event, I spent most time talking about Eduserv - which is not necessarily a bad thing since I don't think we are a well understood organisation - and there was some discussion at the end which was helpful (to me at least).  But I'm not sure that I really got to the nub of the issue.

This is a theme that I would certainly like to return to.  The Future of Technology in Education (FOTE2008) event being held in London on October 3rd will be one opportunity.  It's now sold out but I'll live-blog if at all possible (i.e. wireless network permitting) - see you there.

Both sides, now - are we builders or users of services in the cloud?

"I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all"
(Joni Mitchell – Both sides, now)

As an educational charity with a mission to "realise the benefits of ICT for learners and researchers", Eduserv must constantly ask itself how to make the best of its available resources for the benefit of the community.

What kinds of services should we be offering? What maximises our impact?

The answers lie in the expectations, needs and desires of the education community itself. But in an environment where the "cloud" offers us an increasing array of apparently very high quality, very low cost services, those answers are not necessarily easy to come by.

These issues affect not just Eduserv, but funding bodies, institutions and individuals in the community.

For those of you at ALT-C 2008, I'll be thinking about this stuff out loud in our sponsor's session - Wednesday, 11.00am in the Conference Auditorium 1. You are very welcome to come and help me shape my thoughts.

Lost in the JISC Information Environment?

Tony Ross, writing in the current issue of Ariadne, Lost in the JISC Information Environment, gives a nice summary of some of the issues around the JISC Information Environment technical architecture.  He hits a lot of nails on the head, despite using that diagram twice in the same article!  On that basis he seems anything but lost.  That said, one is kind of left feeling "so what" by the end.

The IE does not, can not, have existence. The term is a description of a set of interoperable services and technologies which have been created to enhance the resource discovery access and use for users in HE/FE; it exists to aid conceptualisation of this ephemeral subject. No more, no less.

Well hang on, either it exists or it doesn't (that paragraph says both!) but the creation of services tends to indicate, to me, that it does.  Whatever... it's an angels on the head of a pin type of discussion, best moved to the pub.

In his response, Paul Walk suggests that all models are wrong, but some are useful, the JISC IE architecture being one of the useful ones, and broadly speaking I agree, though one might argue that the prescriptive nature of the architecture (or at least, the prescriptive way in which it has often been interpreted) has got us to a place where we no longer want to be?  And, leaving the diagram to one side for a moment, the technical standards certainly were intended to be prescriptive.  I can remember discussions in UKOLN about the relative merits of such an approach vs. a more ad hoc, open-ended and experimental one but I argued at the time that we wouldn't build a coherent environment if we just let people do whatever the hell they wanted.  Maybe I was wrong?

Referring to the "myth" quotes in the Ariadne article, I don't have a problem with trying to be prescriptive but at the same time recognising that what ends up happening on the ground may well be different in detail to what the blueprint says.

Looking back, I do find it somewhat frustrating that the diagram came to epitomise everything that the JISC IE was about whilst much of the associated work, the work on UML use case analysis for example (which was very much focused on end-user needs), largely got forgotten.  Such is life I suppose?  But let's ignore that... the work certainly had impact, and by and large it was for the good.  Think about when the DNER effort first started, way back at the end of the last century (yes, really!), a time when any notions of machine to machine interaction were relatively immature and not widely accepted (certainly not in the way they are today).  The idea that any service provider would care about exposing content in a machine-readable form for other bits of software to consume and display somewhere else on the Web was alien to many in the community.  Remember Lorcan Dempsey talking about us needing to overcome the information brandscape? :-)

If nothing else, the IE architecture helped contribute to the idea that there is value in going beyond the simple building of an HTML Web site.  In that sense, it had a Web 2.0 flavour to it well before Web 2.0 was a gleam in anybody's eye.  The world has come a long way since then... a long, long way.  The IE architecture got things wrong in the same way that most digital library activities got things wrong - it didn't anticipate the way the Web would evolve and it adopted a set of technologies that, with the exception of RSS, were rather non-Web-friendly in their approach (OAI-PMH, Z39.50, SRW/SRU, OpenURL and so on).  The Web Architecture, the Semantic Web, Web 2.0 (and in particular the emergence of the Web as a social environment and the predominance of user-generated content), REST and so on never really got a look in - nor could they, since the work on the JISC IE came too early for them in many ways.

With hindsight, the appearance of registries down the left-hand side was probably a mistake - what we missed, again, was that the Web would become the only 'registry' that anyone would need.  But it is the largely exclusive focus on resource discovery through metadata rather than full-text, as though the Web was a library of physical books, that is the JISC IE's most harmful legacy - a legacy that we still see being played out in discussions around open access repositories today.  If I've done harm to the community through the work on the JISC IE, then that is where I feel it has been worst.  Remember that in the early days of the JISC IE the primary aim was around the discovery, access and use of commercially valuable content that was not being exposed (to anyone) for full-text indexing, so the initial focus on metadata was probably excusable. Unfortunately, the impact of that design choice has now gone well beyond that.

The addition of the 'indexes' box to the diagram (it wasn't in the original versions) was recognition that Google was doing something that the IE could not - but it was too little, too late - the damage had been done.  That's not to say that metadata doesn't have a place.  It certainly does.  Metadata is about much more than resource discovery after all, and in any case, it brings things to resource discovery that are not possible with full-text indexing alone.  But we need balance in the way it is adopted and used and, looking back, I don't think we properly had such balance in the JISC IE.

Towards the end of his blog entry Paul says:

Turning to the reworked diagram which Tony offers at the end of his piece - I presume this is not offered too seriously as an alternative but is, rather, meant simply to show an ‘non-deterministic’ version. It is interesting that this version seems to miss what is, in my view, the most important issue with the original, in the way it simply copies the same depiction of the client desktop/browser.

That diagram was created by me, initially for a small group of JISC-people but then re-used in the presentation that Tony cites.  It originally had the caption, "what the user sees" and was preceded by the usual diagram with the caption, "what the architecture says".  So yes, some humour was intended.  But the serious point was that every variant of every box on the diagram necessarily offers a human Web interface, irrespective of whether it also presents a machine-interface, so the user just sees a Web of stuff, some of which is joined together behind the scenes in various ways.

As to that "client desktop/browser" icon!?  Yes, it's use was somewhat simplistic, even at the time - certainly now, where we have a much wider range of mobile and other client devices.  But as with the rest of the diagram, there was/is a tension between drawing something that people can easily engage with vs. drawing something that correctly captures more abstract principles.

On balance, I think the UK HE and FE community is better off for having had that diagram and the associated work, around which a useful and significant programme of activities has been able to be built by the JISC, as described by Paul.  Does the diagram remain useful now?  I'm less sure about that tbh.

Web futures - who ordered the pragmatic semantic organism with fries?

In the first of his Ten Futures (which is an interesting read by the way) Stephen Downes suggests that the Semantic Web will never happen and that we need the Pragmatic Web instead:

Forget about the Semantic Web. Whether or not it ever gets built, you can be sure that we will be complaining about it. Because while the Semantic Web gives us meaning, it doesn’t give us context. It will give us what we can get from an encyclopedia, but not what we can get from phoning up our best buddy.

The pragmatic web, by contrast, is all about context. Your tools know who you are, what you’re doing, who you’ve been talking to, what you know, where you want to go, where you are now, and what the weather is like outside.

Whilst I remain unsure about the likely arrival date of the Semantic Web or indeed whether it will ever arrive at all (in any real terms), and whilst I quite like the Pragmatic Web label, I can't agree with him about the cause.  Success or failure of the Semantic Web does not rest with context - there is plenty of semantic work in that area it seems to me, typically referred to as the graph or the social graph.  As Tim BL said at the end of last year:

Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected.

The Semantic Web's problem, if indeed it has one, has to do with complexity and a high cost/benefit ratio.  That said, even given my world view rather than Stephen's, I accept that the 'Pragmatic Web' label still works well as a nice alternative to 'Semantic Web'.

And while I'm on the subject of both the future and the Semantic Web, Kevin Kelly's TED talk, Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web, makes use of a lot of Semantic Web thinking and suggests that the Web of the future is not just going to be today's Web "but only better" but that it will be:

• smarter,
• more personalized,
• more ubiquitous

and the price of that will be more transparency (of us to the Web).  The Web as "an organism" that we interact with.  Hmmm, nice...  I sense a Hollywood blockbuster coming on.

The right time for outsourcing

Paul Walk has an interesting post, “Did Google just make me look like an idiot?”, questioning whether the time is right for universities to start outsourcing services in a Web 2.0, SaaS kind of way.

As Paul notes, this was very much the focus for our symposium earlier on this year.

To be slightly frivolous, I have a gut feeling that no time is the right time but I very strongly agree with Paul that the question needs to be asked, especially given the possibility of global recession and its potential impact on Web 2.0 business models.  The sustainability of whoever you choose to outsource to has to be a major consideration in any decision - whether at an institutional, departmental or personal level.

AtomPub Video Tutorial

From Joe Gregorio of Google, a short video introduction to the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023):

Which, following Tim Bray's exhortation, I shall henceforth refer to only as "AtomPub".

Can you show them a better way?

I don't know... you wait ages for a competition and then two come along at once :-)

Hot on the heels of Elsevier's Article 2.0, the Show us a better way competition asks people to come up with ideas that improve health, education, justice or society at large through the innovative re-use of existing public information:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government's behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here.

To support the competition,a range of public data sources are being made available (though many require a free Click-Use PSI Licence to re-use Crown copyright information) including crime statistics, information about schools and health care services, map data from the Ordnance Survey and so on.

To help show the kinds of things they are looking for (and possibly to prevent the wheel being re-invented too much!) a list of examples is provided.

Doin' the Museum Mash

The Eduserv Foundation has a programme of sponsorship and I'm pleased to say that we sponsored the recent Mashed Museum 2008 event, just prior to the UK Museums and the Web Conference 2008 in Leicester.  Mike Ellis, a colleague at Eduserv who organised the day, has just released this video of what people got up to - taking museum-related data sources and connecting them together in a range of different ways. In Mike's words, the remit of the day was to:

"...give us an environment free from political or monetary constraints. The focus...is not IPR, copyright, funding or museum politics. Our energies will be channeled into embracing the 'new web': envisaging, demonstrating and (hopefully) building some lightweight distributed applications."

For more information, visit www.mashedmuseum.org.uk.

Putting the 'new' into New South Wales' schools - outsourcing email to Google

So schools in New South Wales become the latest area of education to migrate their email from an 'in-house' solution (Outlook and Exchange in this case) to Google.  And a pretty sizable migration it is by the sounds of it - Australian schools dump Outlook for Gmail for 1.3 million students.

Wow!

On the face of it, the transition brings significant benefits, not just in terms of cost (the Education Department are reputedly saving something like 11 million quid over three years) but also in the amount of storage available to each student (6GB instead of 35MB).  But the Google garden isn't to everyone's taste and one certainly hears some grumblings about limitations and performance issues with the Google Apps offering.  How significant they are I'm not sure?

Outsourcing email to Google was one of the areas touched on in discussions at our symposium last month.  As some of you will already know, we are currently funding a series of snapshots tracking the use of Second Life within UK higher and further education.  I wonder if now would be a good time to start doing a similar series of snapshots around institutional outsourcing of services like email?

Interview with Stefan Tilkov on REST

One of the commentators/bloggers I most enjoy reading/hearing on the topic of the REST architectural style and resource-oriented approaches is Stefan Tilkov. Stefan was the guest interviewee in a recent episode of the Software Engineering Radio podcast, and the result is a very clear introduction to the principles of REST and its implementation in the HTTP protocol, and an entertaining conversation around the value of the approach.

Web 2.0 and repositories - have we got our repository architecture right?

For the record... this is the presentation I gave at the Talis Xiphos meeting last week, though to be honest, with around 1000 Slideshare views in the first couple of days (presumably thanks to a blog entry by Lorcan Dempsey and it being 'featured' by the Slideshare team) I guess that most people who want to see it will have done so already:

| View | Upload your own

Some of my more recent presentations have followed the trend towards a more "picture-rich, text-poor" style of presentation slides.  For this presentation, I went back towards a more text-centric approach - largely because that makes the presentation much more useful to those people who only get to 'see' it on Slideshare and it leads to a more useful slideshow transcript (as generated automatically by Slideshare).

As always, I had good intentions around turning it into a slidecast but it hasn't happened yet, and may never happen to be honest.  If it does, you'll be the first to know ;-) ...

After I'd finished the talk on the day there was some time for Q&A.  Carsten Ulrich (one of the other speakers) asked the opening question, saying something along the lines of, "Thanks for the presentation - I didn't understand a word you were saying until slide 11".  Well, it got a good laugh :-).  But the point was a serious one... Carsten admitted that he had never really understood the point of services like arXiv until I said it was about "making content available on the Web".

OK, it's a sample of one... but this endorses the point I was making in the early part of the talk - that the language we use around repositories simply does not make sense to ordinary people and that we need to try harder to speak their language.

Streaming media from the symposium now available

All the streaming media from the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2008 is now available via blip.tv.  See the symposium presentations page for a full listing.

JISC IE blog, Val Doonican and *that* diagram

A very quick note to say that the JISC Information Environment team are now blogging... good stuff.

And while I'm on the subject of the JISC IE, I should perhaps note that that diagram still seems to be doing the rounds.  At the UKOLN 30th celebration Paul Walk invited me to say a few words about it from the floor, at which point I stood up and joked that I'd left UKOLN to get away from the diagram and had no intention of saying anything about it!  Not quite true actually... I had prepared something to say about both the diagram and the work that went on around it but in the end I felt that the day needed something lighter and more anecdotal, so I sat down, stage front, mic in hand and said "I want to tell you a story" instead.

This resulted in much piss being extracted by various of my current and ex-colleagues by way of reference to Val Doonican - Rachel Bruce (one of the authors of the new blog above) even went so far as to send me a photo of good old Val with the caption, "picture of you" :-)  I'll tell the story here, for posterity, another time - I know you're desperate to hear it.  I don't have the time right now.

Anyway, I digress... back to the diagram.  So having turned down an opportunity to talk about the diagram that day, I tuned into the live video stream from the JISC conference a few weeks later and found Sir Ron Cooke (Chair of the JISC) speaking to it in-front of an audience of practically millions.

Hey, if nothing else, it's certainly been good value.  If someone did a tag cloud of Powerpoint slides based on the number of times they'd been shown in JISC-related events, I reckon that diagram would be pretty sizable.

Symposium thoughts

Some brief thoughts on the symposium which happened last Thursday...

Overall, it seemed to go well I think, with relatively few hiccups.  We had one near miss - a Mac which decided not to work 5 minutes before its owner was due to go on stage.  Oh, and the air-conditioning at the venue, which appeared to be totally broken.  Other than that, things went pretty smoothly.  Note that we've still got to read thru the evaluation forms in detail, so it may be that I've got this all wrong and people hated it! :-)

The talks seemed to be well received and I'm grateful to all the speakers for turning up and doing their stuff.  One of the problems with both chairing and getting involved in the technical side of the event (which I love doing) is that I find it very difficult to concentrate on what the speakers are talking about.  It's also difficult to do any real socialising :-(  We're currently waiting for the media from our streaming company to turn up at which point I'll watch all the talks again.  We expect this to be available via the Web site by Friday this week.

Photos from the event are available in the following video:

Alternatively, if you prefer your photos in a more static form, look on Flickr.

We had 180 delegates registered for the day.  For one reason or another about 25 of those were unable to make it, though some sent replacements in their place.  This is understandable - given illness, travel problems and so on - though somewhat frustrating.  With the delegate day rate we were paying for the venue it is perhaps worth noting that it probably represents something like £2000 wasted investment on our part.

We streamed the whole event live on the Web and about 60 additional people watched throughout the day.  In his opening talk, Larry Johnson of the NMC noted in passing that, given the rise of free video streaming services like Ustream.tv, it is no longer necessary to pay large sums of money to stream events live on the Web.  He may be right, though my personal view is that it is worth paying to get an experienced camera operator, sound engineer and vision editor.  Decent sound is, above all, absolutely critical in my experience.  On this occasion we chose to stream in Windows Media format (.wmv).  In part this was because the streaming company assured us that, given the greater number of Windows machines out there, this approach would lead to fewer compatibility problems than streaming in Quicktime (.mov).  I was also a little worried that if we streamed in a format compatible with Second Life, our virtual audience would fork into two sections (those in-world and those not) whereas we wanted them in one place to maximise the social aspects of the live chat facility (see later).  On reflection this was perhaps a bit of a hard line approach.  I certainly lost some sleep the night before the event, worried that Mac users wouldn't be able to see the stream.  However, as far as I can tell, this wasn't a problem for people.  I am aware of one issue, noted by a couple of bloggers including Joe Blogg - the streamed video wasn't good enough to read many of the slides.  Apologies for this.  With slightly more forward planning we could have got all the slides uploaded to Slideshare before the event (though I should note that at least two of the speakers were still tweaking there slides right up to the start of their talks!). 

Anyway, there's definitely room for some improvement in that area.

The use of Coveritlive as a live chat facility for both the delegates in the room on wireless and the remote delegates watching the video stream also seemed to be very successful.  Again, as chair, I didn't get as involved in this as I would have liked, but the virtual discussion certainly seemed to be flowing for most of the day.  We had a member of Eduserv staff in the venue (Mike Ellis) monitoring the chat for possible questions and asking them from the floor during the question and answer sessions at the end of each talk.  Furthermore, my co-author on this blog Pete Johnston, spent the whole day moderating the chat from the back of the room - a thankless task if ever there was one, especially seeing as moderation wasn't really necessary, but one that was imposed on us by the use of Coveritlive as the chat tool. Note that Coveritlive is not really designed for this purpose, it is really a live-blogging tool, so we were stretching its capabilities in rather unusual directions.  However, its ease of use (for delegates rather than for Pete) proved successful.  We also displayed the live chat on the screen in the venue during the Q&A sessions and this really helped to bring the remote audience into the room.

In his blog entry about the event, David Harrison (who spoke during the afternoon session) noted how odd it felt to be giving a presentation at the British Library in London, while his colleagues back in Cardiff answered questions in the live chat as he was speaking.

At this point I should stress that the video stream and the use of Coveritlive were completely separate.  We chose to co-locate them on the same Web page - such is the beauty of small tools, loosely joined - but they were unrelated and separate tools.  Coveritlive doesn't actually do streaming as far as I know.

Finally, we offered a Ning social network for the event, offering a chance for delegates, both real and virtual, to create a profile and share information about their interests - a kind of virtual delegate list if you like.  This worked reasonably well - at the last count there were 119 delegates signed up, though I don't currently know the balance between real and virtual delegates.

In his presentation, Chris Adie questioned whether Eduserv were taking risks in hosting such a network on an external service (because of data protection concerns primarily).  While I think there are valid issues to think about in this area, I don't think we were taking a risk at all - part of the point of using an external tool was to emphasise the topic of the day.  Indeed, I tend to think there is a greater danger in the paralysis that comes from being over sensitive to concerns about data protection, privacy and other legal matters.  Chris also made this point.

In his blog, Michael Webb questions the value brought by the social network, particularly for a one day symposium.  I have to confess I'm not sure either.  Some delegates reported using it to see who else was going to be at the event beforehand and it was very cheap to set up - free actually, though we paid a small amount to get rid of the Google adverts for a month.  So I'm not sure it matters too much.

Anyway, clearly there are things we could have done better - and we hope to do so next time - but all in all I'm pleased with the way the event turned out.  I hope those who took part feel likewise.

Inside out - symposium update

Our annual symposium takes place next Thursday (8th May) at the British Library in London:

Inside Out: What do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?

The day is intended to give people a chance to think about the potentially disruptive impact of current Web trends on the provision and use of ICT services within the educational sector, particularly higher education, and will feature talks from a range of perspectives including:

• Larry Johnson (New Media Consortium, US),
• Bobbie Johnson (Guardian),
• Jem Stone (BBC),
• Geoffrey Bilder (CrossRef),
• Chris Adie (University of Edinburgh),
• David Harrison (UCISA / Cardiff University)
• and Grainne Conole (Open University).

I'm really looking forward to it... though right now things are a bit hectic with all the final preparations and what not.

The event is full but we are planning on streaming all the talks live on the Web, coupled with a live chat facility that will allow delegates (both those in the room and those watching the video stream) to discuss the presentations and ask questions of the speakers.

Presentations start at 10.30am, UK time.

Please note that it is not necessary to register to watch the video stream or take part in the live chat.  However, we have set up a social network for the event and we encourage you to sign up for this if you are planning on attending (either in person or via the video stream).  Doing so will give all delegates a better feel for who is in the audience.

Also note that all the presentations and streamed media will be made available after the event for those not able to see it live.

Finally, we are encouraging people to blog and Twitter about the event - if you do, please use the event tag, efsym2008.

For those with an interest in such things, we are using I S Media to do the live video streaming for us - the same people we used for the symposium last year.  The live chat facility is being done using Coveritlive, which is really a live blogging tool but it supports quite a nice moderated comment facility, so we are going to use it slightly outside its intended space.  It should work OK though.  The social network has been built using NIng.  I'm very impressed with the flexibility and power of NIng and I strongly suspect that would be possible to do an awful lot with it (given the necessary time!) - you basically get full access to the source code if you want it.  Despite that, in some ways I would have preferred to use Crowdvine for our social network, which I think offers a really nicely put together suite of social tools aimed specifically at conference delegates - but unfortunately, the costs were prohibitive for us given the money we are spending on other parts of the event.

Anyway, I'll be keeping my fingers firmly crossed between now and next Thursday and hoping that everything runs smoothly.

Slideshare, Tibet, China and DoS attacks

I Twittered briefly (yes, I know that all tweets are brief by definition) this morning that Slideshare appeared to be down again.  Within minutes I got a response from a member of staff at Slideshare indicating that they were under attack from hackers.

As an aside, I should note that this is not the first time I've received very prompt and helpful technical support as the direct result of tweeting about an issue (and not just from Slideshare either).  This feels very impressive, at least to me as an end-user of the service offering its help.  At the current stage of its development, Twitter seems very good for this right now.  I'm not sure it will last - not because the will won't be there but because the growing numbers of Twitter users will become increasingly difficult to deal with.

Anyway, it turns out (as reported by Techcrunch, SlideShare Slammed with DDOS Attacks from China) that Slideshare is suffering from a series of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks launched from somewhere in China at the moment, apparently in protest at various presentations on Slideshare covering the situation in Tibet.

Now, I'm not in a position to comment on where these attacks originate, nor why they are happening.  But I assume that they are real and, if so, that their effects can be felt by ordinary end-users of the Slideshare service.

In recent comments on my own blog post about Jorum I suggested that the global impact of services like Slideshare is hard to ignore when thinking about where content is best surfaced on the Web.  But success brings with it both negatives and positives I guess.  Most obvious are the issues around sustainability and reliability - like many such services, Slideshare uses Amazon S3 behind the scenes to help cope with peaks in demand and, by and large, it seems to do so reasonably well.  This is a different kind of threat - that success brings with it attention of a less healthy kind.  We've seen similar but different things of late with Second Life, where Linden Lab seem to have come increasingly under the scrutiny of political interests in the US - not of the direct action kind we are seeing here but certainly capable of having a significant impact on the way the service grows and develops.

I'm not suggesting this as a reason for not using the likes of Slideshare - just noting an interesting aspect of the globalised world in which we live and that service architectures and delivery models need to be mindful of those cases where the wrong kind of people want to do the wrong kind of things.  The Internet itself being a classic example I suppose.

Hack Day: and now for something completely different

Friday was Hack Day at Eduserv, an internal event that allowed some of our techies to take time away from their normal day-to-day activities in order to think about and work on something new.  The day was one part of a programme of stuff to try and put innovation back at the heart of what Eduserv does.  I think it worked pretty well for a first attempt and I certainly hope we repeat it.  We had people working on things as diverse as integrating OpenID with an open source blogging system, Shibboleth with a commercial social networking tool, MyAthens with Windows Live Messenger, Google Maps to plot usage of SP resources, and a local positioning system for the Eduserv offices based on triangulating the wireless signal strengths from multiple wireless access points.

For my part, I spent some time investigating the possibility exposing an RSS feed of the list of registered services providers within the UK Access Management Federation (UKAMF).  The point of choosing RSS was not to support news and alerting - rather that RSS is a good machine-readable format for anything that looks like a list of URLs.

Plan A was to take the UKAMF Metadata and transform it into RSS using a Yahoo Pipe, Perl script or XSL transformation.  Unfortunately, I quickly realised both that the metadata doesn't contain any information about the human-oriented services associated with the SAML end-points (to be fair, that is not its function) and that the XML file is so large that processing it in anything becomes rather difficult - it is certainly too big to process using Yahoo Pipes.  I must admit, it hadn't occurred to me before now what an odd architectural decision it is to store all the UKAMF metadata in a single XML file at a single point on the network - I suspect this will lead to significant scalability problems as the Federation grows.  The Federation must have been designed by the same person who came up with the Windows registry :-(.

Plan B was less than ideal and involved tagging all the registered UKAMF services in del.icio.us, using the tag 'ukamfsp' as a unique key and a variety of more normal tags to indicate the subject matter of the services.  RSS is one of the main access mechanisms for del.icio.us content, so an RSS feed for the 'ukamfsp' resources is readily available.

Of course, this approach is nothing more than a proof of concept since I am not in a position to maintain the set of resources tagged in del.icio.us.  However, I'd encourage the UKAMF to maintain this RSS feed in some appropriate way, and using an external tool like del.icio.us brings with it some significant advantages.  Having got an RSS feed, writing a Perl, PHP or Ruby script to re-purpose it into XHTML is very easy to do.

This activity raises a couple of other questions...

Firstly, who is likely to be interested in such a list?  Certainly not end-users, who are interested in the set of resources that they need to get a job done but who have no interest in how they are accessed.

Secondly, where and how are services best described?  At the moment the JISC is funding Intute, the IE Service Registry and the UKAMF, all of which contain some aspects of descriptive metadata about available services.  The metadata in each is different, so the split across the three catalogs/registries may be appropriate (though I must admit that I'm  not totally convinced that it is).  However, what seems to be missing at the moment is a unique key to link the three bits of descriptive metadata together and an appropriate API in any of the services to allow client software to say, "tell me what you know about service X".

Institutions, Web 2.0 and the shared service agenda

For the third and final thread of my UCISA talk on Thursday (see also thread 1 and thread 2) I want to talk about the shared service agenda, Web 2.0 and the potentially disruptive impact on institutional service provision that might result.  I'm basing this thread on the vague premise that there is some relationship between the shared service agenda and Web 2.0, though I have to confess I'm not 100% sure that I'm going down a useful or valid path here and I'm fully expecting people to tell me so if I'm not!

I think it can be argued that UK academia (particularly HE) has been pretty good at taking advantage of shared service approaches, thanks in large part to the JISC's coordinating role, and some high profile examples spring to mind - Athens, Chest, JISCMail, the national data centres and, not least, the JANET network infrastructure itself.  There are many others.  It should probably also be noted that this practice appears to have grown fairly naturally and organically out of the community itself - well in advance of any political agenda that said this is the best way to do things.

So, let's test my hypothesis a little and consider the similarities and differences between the shared service agenda and the use of external Web 2.0 services.  Note that I'm purposely using Web 2.0 in its broadest, and therefore fuzziest, sense here. 

The major similarity is that both the shared service agenda and the growing use of Web 2.0 applications results in services moving outside the institution - i.e. services that are either already delivered within the institution or that one might naturally expect to be delivered from within the institution will move to being delivered by external service providers.

On the other hand, the major differences lie in motivation and control.  The primary driver for shared services has tended to come from the providers (the institutions, sometimes by proxy thru the JISC) looking for the efficiency savings enabled by a shared approach and preventing the need for every institution to replicate every service in-house.  The primary driver for using Web 2.0 services tends to come largely from individuals, who are often attracted by the better user-experience on offer and the network effects that the use of external global services provide.  As a result, the use of Web 2.0 services tends to leave the institution much less in control of what is happening than they would be in a traditional outsourced 'shared service' approach.

To make this somewhat more concrete... as one can see from some of the responses to Brian Kelly's post about his part of the UCISA talk, it is now perfectly possible for individual members of an institution to move all their email and 'office' functionality out to an external provider like Google.  More significantly, it is not inconceivable that whole departments could make such a transition - see Google Apps for example.  I suspect that this is currently a theoretical concern, but it is certainly a possibility that those departments that have traditionally shied away from the centralised IT services offering, in favour of running their own email and Web services, will find outsourcing their own provision lock, stock and barrel to an external provider increasingly attractive.  I doubt this is happening yet, but one issue that IT services need to weigh up is whether the trickle we are currently seeing is the beginnings of a flood or just something that will remain a trickle.

It is also worth noting that this kind of transition isn't limited to the application layer.  It is similarly conceivable that individual members of an institution could go outside for their compute or storage infrastructure in the form of services such as Amazon S3.

I think that Brian is going to argue in his part of the talk that we can "learn to stop worrying about web 2.0".  I'm going to suggest more or less the opposite.  I think that we need to "learn why we should start worrying"!  I think we have to start by acknowledging that we are entering a period of disruption caused by the use of external Web 2.0 services.  I say "we" because the kind of disruption we are talking about affects the current generation of 'shared service' providers (including Eduserv) just as much as it affects institutions.

Rather than hiding our heads in the sand, we need to acknowledge what is happening, embrace the technology and try to understand our new place in the world.

At the same time, we need to remember that education and educational institutions have special requirements around teaching, learning and research - the core of what universities do - and that a generic discussion around outsourcing and shared services is not sufficient.  Those special requirements include supporting and ensuring high-quality research, encouraging scholarly communication, citation and effective peer-review, curating the scholarly record, the relationship between ICT and pedagogy, trust, maximising impact of elearning, adherance to QAA, and so on.  All of these things bring with them special requirements that sit uncomfortably with the anarchy of Web 2.0.

And that brings me to my limited and perhaps somewhat unhelpful conclusions based on the three threads.  Imagine that we are on a roller-coaster in a darkened room.  Our eyes are beginning to adjust to the dark.  I think we need to move as close to the front as we can, partly to help see where we are going and partly because it'll be more fun!  How close we get depends on a judgement about how far we want to close the hype-curve gap between leading edge adoption and mainstream adoption.

More fundamentally, and as I said at the end of my previous thread, I think that IT Services need to see themselves not simply as 'service providers' but as 'service enablers' in the use of external Web 2.0 services

Sharing, socialising and institutional IT service provision

The second theme for my UCISA presentation next week will be around 'sharing and socialising'...

It is clear that there is currently a huge interest in the management and disclosure of scholarly assets by institutions.  This is most visible in the open access repository movement, the growing interest in open data, and the push for open and re-usable learning objects.  The focus tends to be be both on managing and preserving the content, and sharing it openly on the Web with the aim of letting others re-use it in various ways.  And a large part of the policy agenda is concerned with institutional solutions, an approach that I've spent some time arguing against of late.

At the same time there is a whole spectrum of less formal sharing going on in the form of blogs, wikis and uploading content to Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare and so on, most of which tends to happen using Web 2.0 services outside of the institution.

Whist the discussions around how best to openly share content on the Web are interesting, in the context of my UCISA talk I'm more interested in the social networks that grow up around these activities than I am in the sharing activity itself.  Learning and research are social activities and one of the things I'm interested in is how we build online social networks that support them most effectively.  Social networks are like gardens... they need a certain amount of care and attention and they tend to flourish best in the right environment, one facet of which is the concentration effect that Lorcan Dempsey has been talking about recently.  Large-scale globally concentrated social services bring with them network effects that are not possible in smaller-scale service scenarios.

Consider Slideshare as an example, a global Web 2.0 service that has rapidly become "the best way to share your presentations with the world".  It is hard to imagine that the kind of presentation sharing service we see in Slideshare today could have grown up around a set of institutional activities (however well coordinated they might have been) - the service works primarily because it is global in scale.  For similar reasons, social activity has built up around the presentations, both within the confines of the Slideshare service itself (tagging, favoriting, etc.) and beyond (by embedding presentations into other services).  As a result it has become a very compelling place to share presentations on the Web.

So what is the lesson here for institutions and institutional IT services?  I think they need to take note.  Whilst (in some cases) they may have the technical competence to build global-social social services, it is not typically part of their function to do so.  To put it bluntly, their business is to serve the institution, not to serve the world.  As a result, IT services have to begin seeing themselves as the enablers rather than the providers of such services.

This means more than simply providing the network pipe thru which the services are accessed.  There are functional requirements in the educational space that go beyond those catered for by external services directly - the need to preserve the scholarly record and comply with QAA requirements being two good examples.  I'm sure there are others.  I think there is an interesting debate to be had around what it means for institutional IT services to properly enable and support access to external Web 2.0 services.

I'll touch on this again in my third and final theme for the talk - the 'shared service' agenda.

JISC Information Environment blog announced

I note that the JISC Information Environment team have announced a new IE blog:

... the blog will be relevant to people involved or interested in the JISC programmes that fall under the Information Environment theme (a list of these programmes can be seen on the about page of the blog).

Concentration and diffusion - the two ways of Web 2.0

Lorcan Dempsey has now blogged his ideas around two key aspects of Web 2.0, concentration and diffusion, The two ways of Web 2.0, which I referred to in my keynote at VALA 2008 but was unable to cite properly.

As I said in my talk, I think these two concepts are very helpful as we think about the impact of Web 2.0 on the kinds of online services we build and use in the education space.

P vs. P in a user-centric world

I'm currently doing some thinking around the 3 or 4 themes that I want to pull together for a talk at the UCISA 2008 Conference in Glasgow next week.  (Brian Kelly recently blogged about the same talk - it is a joint effort - under the title "IT Services Are Dead – Long Live IT Services 2.0!").

One of the themes I want to touch on is our general move towards user-centricity (is that a word?) and in particular the use of the word 'personal' in both Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and Personal Research Environment (PRE).  I've been laboring under what turns out to be a misapprehension that the P in PLE is used differently than the P in PRE.  Why did I think this?  Well, when I first read the PLE article by Scott Wilson et al, Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems I must have particularly picked up on this paragraph:

While we have discussed the PLE design as if it were a category of technology in the same sense as the VLE design, in fact we envisage situations where the PLE is not a single piece of software, but instead the collection of tools used by a user to meet their needs as part of their personal working and learning routine. So, the characteristics of the PLE design may be achieved using a combination of existing devices (laptops, mobile phones, portable media devices), applications (newsreaders, instant messaging clients, browsers, calendars) and services (social bookmark services, weblogs, wikis) within what may be thought of as the practice of personal learning using technology.

At the same time I conveniently ignored the following paragraph:

However, for the design to reach equivalent or superior levels of efficiency to the VLE, as well as broader applicability, requires the further development of technologies and techniques to support improved coordination. Some initial investigations include the work of projects such as TenCompetence and the Personal Learning Environments work at the University of Bolton cited previously.

I really like the first of these two paragraphs, it sums up my view of the PLE as a way in which the learner can pick and mix from the wide range of [Web 2.0] services out there on the Web in order to get whatever task is at hand done most efficiently.

I tend to dislike the second, only because it puts one in mind of a portal-like approach, i.e. where the learner uses some kind of institutional or desktop tool as an access point to the range of external  services in which they are interested.  I'm afraid that I have a somewhat unjustified hatred of the 'portal' word/concept ever since I used it in the early days of the JISC Information Environment work and then had to spend 4 or 5 years explaining that I didn't really mean what people thought I meant!

Anyway... it seems to me that the P in PRE does tend to be used very much in the sense of 'research portal' - a single point of activity that brings together whatever combination of things it is that a researcher needs to do in order to undertake their research.

A couple of days ago, I asked my Twitter followers a question: is a PLE an approach or a bit of software?

To his credit, Scott replied, summing up the PLE concept rather nicely in 140 characters or less as follows:

@andypowe11: environment (web,society,family)+tools(sw, hw, process, technique)+disposition = PLE   02:25 PM February 29, 2008

I used to have a (regularly broken) rule of thumb that if you can't write something in one side of A4 or less then you haven't thought about it hard enough.  Seeing Scott's reply made me wonder whether that should be downsized to 140 characters - i.e. if you can't tweet it, don't bother!

I remain slightly disappointed that the notion of a PLE has to include some aspect of a tool to aggregate things together (and typically an institutional tool at that) though I suppose I have to grudgingly concede that such a thing is necessary, at least in as much as one needs to tie together assessment-related information based on the learning being undertaken in the PLE.

In terms of the talk, the theme remains pertinent I think.  We are now quite used to using the term 'user-centric' in the context of identity management (particularly OpenID).  But, of course, this trend is more pervasive, covering all kinds of activities and including both learning and research.  Whether there is an in-house aggregation layer (a portal, or PLE, or PRE, or whatever one chooses to call it) to bring the outputs of distributed learning and research activities back together is largely a moot point.  The point is that those activities are increasingly likely to be carried out using services outside the institution and where the institution has varying degrees of control over service level agreements, data protection, and the like.

And despite my negativity, one of the advantages of having that in-house aggregation layer is that it gives the institution some way of pulling external content created by its members back inside the institution where it can be retained as part of the scholarly record or for QAA type purposes, or whatever.

Inside Out - Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2008

I'm very pleased to announce that this year's Eduserv Foundation Symposium, Inside Out: What do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?, will be held on Thursday May 8th at the British Library in London.

Intended as an opportunity to think about how the Web (and in particular Web 2.0) is disrupting the delivery and use of ICT for both learning and research within the education sector, the day will bring together seven different viewpoints covering educational institutions, the mainstream media and academic publishing.

The list of speakers is as follows:

• Larry Johnson, New Media Consortium (US)
• Bobbie Johnson, Guardian (UK)
• Jem Stone, BBC (UK)
• Chris Adie, University of Edinburgh (UK)
• David Harrison, UCISA / University of Cardiff (UK)
• Gráinne Conole, Open University (UK)
• Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef (UK)

The breadth and depth here is intentional - we didn't want a day that was just the education community talking to itself.  Rather we wanted to bring together a mix of viewpoints, trying to understand how recent Web trends impact on service delivery both inside and outside the sector.  I'm really pleased with the line up and am looking forward to an informative and enlightening day.

Interested?  Go to the main symposium page or the registration page.  Please note that registration for the event is free and includes a drinks reception after the presentations.  However, there will be a small charge if you are unable to attend on the day.

Linked Data (and repositories, again)

This is another one of those posts that started life in the form of various drafts which I didn't publish because I thought they weren't quite "finished", but then seemed to become slightly redundant because anything of interest had already been said by lots of other people who were rather more on the ball than I was. But as there seems to be a rapid growth of interest in this area at the moment, and as it ties in with some of the themes Andy highlights in his recent posts about his presentation at VALA 2008, I thought I'd make an effort to pull try to pull some of these fragments together.

If I'd got round to compiling my year-end Top 5 Technical Documents list for 2007 (whaddya mean, you don't have a year-end Top 5 Technical Documents list?), my number one would have been How to Publish Linked Data on the Web by Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and Tom Heath.

In short, the document fleshes out the principles Tim Berners-Lee sketches in his Linked Data note - essentially the foundational principles for the Semantic Web. As Berners-Lee notes

The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data.  With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data. (emphasis added)

And the key to realising this, argues Berners-Lee, lies in following four base rules:

1. Use URIs as names for things.
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information.
4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

Bizer, Cyganiak & Heath present linked data as a combination of key concepts from the Web Architecture on the one hand (including the TAG's resolution to the httpRange-14 issue) and the RDF data model on the other, and distill them into a form which is on the one hand clear and concise, and on the other backed up by effective, practical guidelines for their application. While many of those guidelines are available in some form elsewhere (e.g. in TAG findings or in notes such as Cool URIs...), it's extremely helpful to have these ideas collated and presented in a very practically focused style.

As an aside, in the course of assembling those guidelines, they suggest that some of those principles might benefit from some qualification, in particular the use of URI aliases, which the Web Architecture document suggests are best avoided. For the authors,

URI aliases are common on the Web of Data, as it can not realistically be expected that all information providers agree on the same URIs to identify a non-information resources. URI aliases provide an important social function to the Web of Data as they are dereferenced to different descriptions of the same non-information resource and thus allow different views and opinions to be expressed. (emphasis added)

I'm prompted to mention Linked Data now in part by Andy's emphasis on Web Architecture and Semantic Web technologies, but also by a post by Mike Bergman a couple of weeks ago, reflecting on the growth in the quantity of data now available following the principles and conventions recommended by the Bizer, Cyganiak & Heath paper. In his post, Bergman includes a copy of a graphic from Richard Cyganiak providing a "birds-eye view "of the Linked Data landscape, and highlighting the principal sources by domain or provider.

"What's wrong with that picture?", as they say. I was struck (but not really surprised) by the absence - with the exception of the University of Southampton's Department of Electronics & Computer Science - of any of the data about researchers and their outputs that is being captured and exposed on the Web by the many "repository" systems of various hues within the UK education sector. While in at least some cases institutions (or trans-institutional communities) are having a modicum of success in capturing that data, it seems to me that the ways in which it is typically made available to other applications mean that it is less visible and less usable than it might be.

Or, to borrow an expression used by Paul Miller of Talis in a post  on Nodalities, we need to think about how to make sure our repository systems are not simply "on the Web" but firmly "of the Web" - and the practices of the growing Linked Data community, it seems to me, provide a firm foundation for doing that.

Repositories thru the looking glass

I spent last week in Melbourne, Australia at the VALA 2008 Conference - my first trip over to Australia and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.  Many thanks to all those locals and non-locals that made me feel so welcome.

I was there, first and foremost, to deliver the opening keynote, using it as a useful opportunity to think and speak about repositories (useful to me at least - you'll have to ask others that were present as to whether it was useful for anyone else).

It strikes me that repositories are of interest not just to those librarians in the academic sector who have direct responsibility for the development and delivery of repository services.  Rather they represent a microcosm of the wider library landscape - a useful case study in the way the Web is evolving, particularly as manifest through Web 2.0 and social networking, and what impact those changes have on the future of libraries, their spaces and their services.

My keynote attempted to touch on many of the issues in this area - issues around the future of metadata standards and library cataloguing practice, issues around ownership, authority and responsibility, issues around the impact of user-generated content, issues around Web 2.0, the Web architecture and the Semantic Web, issues around individual vs. institutional vs. national, vs. international approaches to service provision.

In speaking first I allowed myself the luxury of being a little provocative and, as far as I can tell from subsequent discussion, that approach was well received.  Almost inevitably, I was probably a little too technical for some of the audience.  I'm a techie at heart and a firm believer that it is not possible to form a coherent strategic view in this area without having a good understanding of the underlying technology.  But perhaps I am also a little too keen to inflict my world-view on others. My apologies to anyone who felt lost or confused.

I won't repeat my whole presentation here.  My slides are available from Slideshare and a written paper will become available on the VALA Web site as soon as I get round to sending it to the conference organisers!

I can sum up my talk in three fairly simple bullet points:

• Firstly, that our current preoccupation with the building and filling of 'repositories' (particularly 'institutional repositories') rather than the act of surfacing scholarly material on the Web means that we are focusing on the means rather than the end (open access).  Worse, we are doing so using language that is not intuitive to the very scholars whose practice we want to influence.
• Secondly, that our focus on the 'institution' as the home of repository services is not aligned with the social networks used by scholars, meaning that we will find it very difficult to build tools that are compelling to those people we want to use them.  As a result, we resort to mandates and other forms of coercion in recognition that we have not, so far, built services that people actually want to use.  We have promoted the needs of institutions over the needs of individuals.  Instead, we need to focus on building and/or using global scholarly social networks based on global repository services.  Somewhat oddly, ArXiv (a social repository that predates the Web let alone Web 2.0) provides us with a good model, especially when combined with features from more recent Web 2.0 services such as Slideshare.
• Finally, that the 'service oriented' approaches that we have tended to adopt in standards like the OAI-PMH, SRW/SRU and OpenURL sit uncomfortably with the 'resource oriented' approach of the Web architecture and the Semantic Web.  We need to recognise the importance of REST as an architectural style and adopt a 'resource oriented' approach at the technical level when building services.

I'm pretty sure that this last point caused some confusion and is something that Pete or I need to return to in future blog entries.  Suffice to say at this point that adopting a 'resource oriented' approach at the technical level does not mean that one is not interested in 'services' at the business or function level.

[Image: artwork outside the State Library of Victoria]

Blastfeed - a small case-study in API persistence

Blastfeed is a service that I've used over the last 6 months or so to build aggregate channels from a set of RSS feeds.  For example, I've been using it to build an single RSS feed of all my favorite Second Life blogs which I can then embed into the sidebar of ArtsPLace SL.

Blastfeed isn't the only option for doing this, Yahoo Pipes would have been an obvious alternative, but it was quick and easy to use and, up until now, was also free.  Recently I got this by email:

Blastfeed has been running smoothly (almost no glitch besides one last November, sorry again) since its debut a little over a year ago. We hope here at 2or3things that you've enjoyed using Blastfeed.

Hence at this stage we feel it's no longer necessary to keep Blastfeed in a beta mode. We have also decided to focus the service onto corporate applications, while letting the opportunity to web users to subscribe for a fee to unlimited usage.

In line with the above we shall discontinue the free service from February 15th 2008 on.

Should you wish to continue using Blastfeed after that date, please contact us by return email stating your Blastfeed username and email and we'll make a quick and fair proposal. However we'll bind the proposal to the number of potential subscribers.

I'm not complaining.  Blastfeed have never promised to remain free forever and until recently they still badged themselves as a beta service.  But this does serve as a timely reminder (for me at least) to take steps to mitigate this kind of thing happening.

The "API" to the aggregated feed service(s) that I've built using Blastfeed is effectively an HTTP GET request against the feed URI, with RSS XML returned as a result.  With the demise of the free service, I can recreate the aggregated feed somewhere else easily enough - but doing so will change the URI and hence the API that I've built for myself.  I'll have to remember all the places that I've used my API (e.g. in the ArtsPLace SL sidebar) and update them with the new URI.

With hindsight, what I should have done was to make the API more persistent by using a PURL redirect rather than the native Blastfeed URI.  That way, I could have changed the technology that I use to create the feed (e.g. replace Blastfeed by Yahoo Pipes) without changing the API and without having to update anything else.

Oh well... live and learn!

Following your nose

I think one of the most helpful principles which I've picked up on from following various discussions around the topic of the Web architecture is that sometimes described as "following your nose".

I'm not sure there's a concise one document summary of the principle anywhere (or at least I struggle to find one with Google). (Edit: It looks as if this draft W3C TAG finding by Noah Mendelsohn is an attempt to provide one. And I should emphasis that it is very much a draft, as it clearly indicates that it is incomplete.) The principle has been highlighted in a number of recent presentations related to the GRDDL specification (see e.g. Dan Connolly, Practical Semantic Web Deployment with Microformats and GRDDL), but I think it's important to emphasise that it is in no way specific to that context. Rather, it is a general principle of the Web, and indeed it arises from some of the central constraints of the REST architectural style: that messages should be self-descriptive. Or as Mark Baker phrases it in a presentation from 2004, "The meaning of a message is fully grounded in public specification, or the Web itself". Each message which forms a representation of resource state should carry information which indicates - in Web-friendly ways - the conventions used in that message that are important for its interpretation.

Mark's presentation in turn references Tim Berners-Lee's keynote presentation from the World Wide Web Conference of 2002, in which he emphasises that working on the Web involves "a serious commitment to common meanings", and traces the application of the principle to bitstreams on the Web, illustrating the role of the chain of unambiguous references to various public specifications in the interpretation of messages on the Web.

And the "follow your nose" approach is not an "optional extra"; on the contrary, it is fundamentally necessary in order to support the highly devolved, loosely coupled nature of interaction on the Web. As the Mendelsohn draft puts it, "Web architecture dictates that any user agent may at any time issue a GET and attempt to interpret representations for any HTTP resource." It is not sufficient to rely on an expectation of some additional pre-coordination between provider and consumer, some private agreement on the use of specialised conventions, in order to to enable interpretation.

The use of URIs as names - and in particular URIs that can be dereferenced using the HTTP protocol - is a critical enabling factor in the "follow your nose" approach. Just at the level of naming/identification, the use of a URI provides for disambiguation in the global context in a way a plain character string can not. But further, when a server provides a URI in a representation, the client can in turn seek to dereference that URI to try to obtain more information about the resource identified by that URI provided its owner. That information may take the form of a human-readable document, but it may also provide information to enable further processing of the original representation. (Aside: This was another note that I started writing before Christmas, and I noticed that in the meantime Ed Summers has posted a draft of a forthcoming Information Standards Quarterly (available from NISO) article titled "Following your nose to the Web of Data", in which he explores this further.)

Over the last couple of years there has been a good deal of interest in embedding structured data in X/HTML documents, not only in the case of GRDDL but also that of microformats. One of the important "hooks" for establishing this "chain of meaning" in this context is the use of HTML's meta data profile feature and the profile attribute of the HTML head element. And indeed a page on the microformats wiki notes that "it is ACCEPTED that each microformat should have a profile URI". For each microformat, an HTML meta data profile provides more information about the interpretation of that microformat, either for a human reader or an application or both. (In practice, unfortunately, as Dave Orchard notes, many microformats implementers - even where a profile has been defined by the microformat creator - ignore the recommendation to use the profile URI in their HTML instances.)

There are examples of conventions used within the digital library and e-learning communities (and indeed more broadly), at least some of them enshrined in de facto or de jure standards, which ignore, or at least do not adhere as closely as perhaps they should to, the "self-describing messages" principle. In many cases, I guess that can be put down to a case of "if we'd known then what we know now...", but I'd like to think we now recognise the need to ground our future specifications firmly in the Web. I'll mention a couple of examples where I think a relatively minor change could make a substantial step towards addressing the problem.

The OpenID Authentication specification (Version 1.1, Version 2), for example, makes use of a number of simple tokens which are used as application-specific link types (e.g. openid.server, openid.delegate, openid2.provider, openid2.local_id) in link elements in the headers of HTML documents to represent relationships between resources. These tokens are defined by the OpenID specification, and are supplementary to the "built-in" link types defined by the HTML specification itself. While the intent in the HTML spec is indeed that the list is extensible, AFAICT, the OpenID specification ignores the advice of the HTML specification to use a meta data profile and the profile attribute to provide access to documentation of those extensions:

Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types.

So currently an agent processing an HTML document and encountering one of these OpenID link types can not "follow its nose" to obtain further information; OpenID relies on the client having prior knowledge of the OpenID link types and the set of character strings that represent those types. Dan Connolly provides an example of how the provision of such a profile, and the use of the HTML profile attribute to reference that profile, would ground OpenID more firmly in the Web.

Similarly, in the current alpha drafts of the OAI ORE specifications, there is a proposal for a set of conventions proposed for embedding data in HTML documents. However, this too relies on the consumer of the document having advance built-in knowledge of those specific conventions and of specific character strings used as HTML attribute values. I'd suggest that for the ORE case, what is required is:

1. Clarification of what relationships we wish to assert, and what RDF triples are required to make those assertions, including any additional terms required. (The core ORE data model is based on RDF, so this should be relatively straightforward to do)
2. Development of a convention for representing those triples in HTML which is firmly grounded in the Web and compatible with the "self-describing message"/"follow your nose" principle, either (a) by defining an ORE-specific microformat with its own associated profile URI and using that profile to enable GRDDL-based extraction of those triples from an HTML instance; or (b) adopting the use of (a small subset of) RDFa. (My slight concern about the latter is that RDFa still seems to be work-in-progress - but OTOH so is ORE, and as long as that is made clear in our documentation that may not be an issue.)

I'm currently in Washington, D.C. for a meeting of the OAI ORE Technical Committee over the next two days, so I guess I'll get to have these discussions in a few hours time :-) Having said that, the combination of time zone adjustment (which I seem to find ever harder these days) and a slightly noisy hotel room means that I've managed only about five hours sleep for two nights running, so at this rate, far from resolutely fighting the corner of Web architecture, I'll probably be dozing over my laptop by lunchtime.

Socialising our Applications

In addition to the travels that Andy mentioned, we've also been grappling with the disruption caused by a relocation to a different office, so I seem to have accumulated a number of half-written posts which I'll try to find the time to get out this week.

For now, a brief pointer to a nice post by Roo Reynolds in which he compares the character and functionality of the UK government's Hansard Web site (which provides access to the "official" " edited verbatim report of proceedings" in the two houses of the UK Parliament) and two independent sites, TheyWorkForYou.com and The Public Whip, which take advantage of the availability of that data to provide more "social" functionality around the same information:

While the text is the same, the simple addition of some additional markup, links and photos brings it to life. The addition of user comments turns the whole thing into a social application, allowing us to discuss what our MPs and Lords are shouting across their respective aisles at each other every day.

In addition, Roo highlights the importance of underpinning such applications with an entity-/object-based approach - what I would probably call a resource-oriented approach:

Social software designers talk about the 'atoms', (or objects, or entities) of an application. For example, YouTube’s atoms include videos (of course) but also comments, playlists and users. Flickr’s atoms include photos, comments, users, groups and notes. TheyWorkForYou’s atoms are speeches and comments. Don’t get the impression that ’speech’ necessarily means a long speech. It could be a question, an interruption, an answer or a statement. Sometimes even standing up to speak is enough to get an entry in Hansard.

In his discussion of The Public Whip, Roo emphasises that  such entities include people and also 'abstract resources' such as 'divisions' and 'policies'. I guess I might add that such entities aren't necessarily 'atomic' in the traditional sense of that word, indicating something 'indivisible': a collection or list of other entities/resources can also be an entity/resource in its own right, and indeed such entities are visible in those services.

But it's a good post, highlighting very simply and clearly the value of open data and what the "social" dimension can bring to an application. 

HTTP Client Error Codes in Cartoon Form

Via a post by Stefan Tilkov, a Flickr set of cartoon representations of the HTTP 4xx status codes by Adam Koford, now available in poster form via Jesse Friedman.

The poster is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

Petaflops for health

Most people are probably familiar with SETI@Home and similar initiatives that use spare CPU cycles on networked commodity PCs (both in the office and at home) to deliver what effectively amounts to a very large-scale parallel computing facility.

The Folding@home initiative - which uses the same technique to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases - is going one step further, using the streaming processors now more common in consumer electronics such as games consoles.

This advance utilizes streaming processors now common in inexpensive consumer electronics, such as the Cell processor in Sony’s PlayStation 3  or personal computers with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from ATI, to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology, we are able to attain performance on the 100 gigaflop scale per computer, at a very modest cost (~$500).

Thus, armed with this new technology, we are setting out on a new initiative to take Folding@Home to even greater heights.  By combining merely ~25,000 computers (each with some sort of streaming processor), we could perform calculations on the Petaflop scale (1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second) – a level of performance currently unmatched even by the fastest supercomputers. As Folding@Home currently consists of approximately 200,000 actively processing computers, we expect that as this hardware becomes more common, we would easily surpass the 10 Petaflop level.

OK, the PS3 isn't that popular as a games console right now.  But it's an interesting development in terms of where technology is going.

Roy Fielding on REST and relaxation

Found via a post by Stefan Tilkov, a pointer to a presentation by Roy Fielding, given at the JAZOON07 conference in Zurich in June but which I hadn't come across before, called "A little REST and Relaxation"

He explains the rationale for his use of the notion of "architectural styles" and the specification of REST as the architectural style for the Web. I particularly enjoyed the way he puts these developments (and others' reactions to them) into a historical context.

He also has a nice point on the Lego analogy for service-oriented architecture: the reason Lego works so well being precisely that the components offer a uniform interface!

P.S. Stefan also points to a forthcoming Fielding presentation in which it sounds as if he may extend the coverage of the points he discusses towards the end of the JAZOON07 presentation on the relaxation of constraints to introduce his work on a new network protocol.

QotD

To say [...] that REST is important is like saying the fan in my laptop is “important”. There’s really nothing to discuss about it. RESTful services are fundamentally critical to the continued evolution of the Web. It just is. You just need to do things in a RESTful way. Period.

(From James Snell, "Fantasy IT", snellspace.com)

QotD

In woodworking it's important to work with the grain of the wood. The Web, too, has a grain, and a RESTful web service is one that works with it.

(From Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby, RESTful Web Services)

APP moves to Proposed Standard

Via Tim Bray, the announcement that the Atom Publishing Protocol has been given the status of an IETF Proposed Standard.

One of the comments on Tim's post, from Peter Keane, reflects, I think, what Andy was suggesting in a couple of recent posts and also emphasises the importance of advocacy and education to explain what the standard can enable, and the provision of tools which support it:

The question (I think) is whether folks will be able to recognize it as the 'right tool for the job'. It can be a simpler Dublin Core (base line metadata schema), a simpler WebDAV (transfer protocol), a simpler OAI_PMH (protocol for metadata harvesting). As an application developer I need those protocols to tie together increasingly distributed systems. If the tools and libraries (mod_atom +1) become ubiquitous, it ought to work. If on the other hand, it is seen as simply something for reading and writing to blogs, perhaps not.