Theory | -=( In Between )=-

2Academic Services renewed

Feb 172011

I never promised a regular update on my blog, but the last post has been from december 2009. For over a year I’ve written nothing here. For a variety of reasons, one of them was that I became bored with all the new developments that really weren’t new. Really, really bored. People ran from one web 2.0 tool to another and nothing has changed, really. The semantic web has remained a laboratory exercise mainly. Social media became a fad and again it has not led to change, not really.

But my boredom has left me. Not that anyhting has happened, really, but because change has become obligatory. A sense of urgency replaced boredom.

Libraries as we know them now are on the verge of extinction. There is no reason, really, to have a library on campus. We may need a building that we can call a study hall, but that’s it. Information should be available online and is already online for a large part. In fact, there is no real reason to have zillions of library websites, for zillions minus 2 universities. Information can be accessed from any place, so there is no reason to have many library places, not online, not offline. But it is not just access to information that can be provided. One can also provide guidance. Guidance to internalize the material presented (learning and teaching) and guidance to using the information, by researchers for instance. And we can, in principle, point at other relevant sources of information. So, teaching, research, support for teaching, support for research can be offered via the internet.

There are a few barriers to overcome. One is that not all information is freely available. Without some form of open access we can’t use the full potential of the internet. There is nothing to guide you through if you can’t access the basic materials. Two is that there is as yet no clear vision on how to combine tools for information presentation with communication tools. It is not enough to use twitter, e-mail and what have you; it should be firmly rooted in the content. Meaning that if I am stuyding, say, Nietzsches views on time, I need to be able to communicate with those who are undertaking similar studies or, preferably, to those who have done this. We need a map that helps us navigate through content, experts, and people with similar interests. Three is that universities, and not just their libraries, have no vision on how to restructure their teaching and research so that it becomes accessible for all.

If we present information, we should label it such that anyone with an interest in it can find it. We should make it possible too to establish contact between people with similar interests and perhaps provide the means to start a communication. We should not remain within the walls of a university, but incude many other institutions or information resources, like public libraries, museums, private research institutions, and more.

We need a new system for dealing with information, a system that comprises social and technical elements. In my department we are now trying to work out such a system. We are using the expertise available in a small company called communitysense. We have to see where it leads us to. We’ll start small, we’ll use anything we can, even web 2.0, but we will not call ourselves a library anymore.

Relations between scholars

Theory 1 Response »

Dec 142009

While converting the metadata in our repositories to “RDF”, we (my student Florian Kunneman and I) wanted to express a few simple relations between authors. Initially we thought we could use foaf:knows for people who co-authored a document. But that’s plain silly, of course. We can use foaf:knows, but would need to subclass it. We would need something like the extension made by Eric Vitiello’s extension to FOAF to express family relations (you know: friendOf, parentOf, siblingOf, etc).

We would like to extract relations of the following sort:

Author1 cites Author 2
Author1 mentions Author2
Author1 hasCoAuthor Author2
etc..

A problem might be the fact that such relations have to be derived from publications. Take the first example. It would in fact be a derivation from other relations:

Author1 isAuthorOf Document1
Document1 hasCitation Document2
Author2 isAuthorOf Document2
it then could follow that
Author1 cites Author 2

I wonder how I can find work relevant to this question. Perhaps we first need to define relations that can exist between persons and documents, and from that deduce relations between persons (the same goes for documents of course). What are the relations between authors that could interest us? It may sound silly, perhaps it is, but I don’t know how to proceed (well we could make our own AOAA -Author Of A Author- vocab, but that again sounds silly).

Identity: how?

Theory 1 Response »

Nov 172009

The infamous httpRange-14 issue is about making a distinction between informational and non-informational resources, or resources that are on the internet and those that are, or cannot, be on the internet. Since all resources should have an identifier (URI) it seems good to know which resources can have a URL (be on the internet), and which resources (say a person) can only have a URN.

The W3C Technical Architecture Group proposed an operational definition to make that distinction. It goes as follows:

If an “http” resource responds to a GET request with a 2xx response, then the resource identified by that URI is an information resource
If an “http” resource responds to a GET request with a 303 (See Other) response, then the resource identified by that URI could be any resource;
If an “http” resource responds to a GET request with a 4xx (error) response, then the nature of the resource is unknown.

It is almost too obvious that this will never work, for a variety of practical and technical reasons. If arguments for this are needed, the reader is referred to httpRange-14, Cool URIs & FRBR or The web’s identity crisis and httpRange-14.

But there is something fundamentally wrong too with this proposal. It classifies types of resources using properties of URI’s (in the context of the way the internet works). We should not use URI’s to classify things, we should use metadata for that. Classification determines, for the purpose of the classification, what things are identical. Establishing absolute identity is just classification with extreme discrimatory power.

Following Leibniz we should say that thing x is the same as thing y (are identical) when each and every predicate that is true of x is also true of y, and vice versa. In library terms: if the metadata describing x are the same as the metadata describing y, then x and y are identical. If the metadata are coarse, many things that we see as different will still be the same according to this definition. This leads us to an operational definition of identity.

If x and y are described by the same metadata, they are the identical. If, for some reason, we see a significant or relevant difference between x and y, we should add new metadata-elements that express this.

The above mentioned solution to the httpRange problem clearly violates this principle.

But classification using metadata (predicates) on the internet is not without its problems. I will mention three:

It is hard to find all relevant metadata for a given thing, so a complete comparison is often not possible. Identity, in practice, has to be concluded using incomplete evidence.
Not all metadata seem to be used to express identity. Some metadata relate things without defining their identity, but just relate things. That document x is a commentary on document y and not on document z does not allow us to conclude that y and z are different. Or does it? In any case, the question is which metadata elements define identity? To say that all metadata do seems too easy an answer.
On the internet, what has received a name (is called x), may change over time. So what is described may not be fixed.

Problem 3 seems to be the most fundamental. Things need to be named, singled out if you want, before they can be described. (Yes, we need some intuition about what things are. The internet supports this intuition by the way it is organized. At any given moment in time one URI/URL produces an identifiable thing.)

So how can things be named that can change all the time. Here the recent memento proposal comes in handy. It offers a (partial) technical solution to the problem of web archiving by introducing a system that allows us to identify representations of resources at particular times (and relate these timed traces to the current URI). Conceptually the memento proposal allows to see all that happens on the internet as events and offers a system to identify (name) those events.

So the internet then becomes a system of named events. We have the primitives at hand, ready to be described. We have the possibility of naming all that happens on the internet using URL’s (including parameters) and time. Having a set of events at hand, allows us to work with the pragmatic definition of identity given above: events are identical if all the metadata are the same (whereby it is always possible to split up equivalence classes by adding (or finding) extra metadata.

Formally, the internet is the set of all events $E$ , whereby an event $e$ is a tuple $e=<URL,time>$ .

Using metadata, we can define equivalence classes on this set. Metadata are events themselves too, of course. An event is a metadata event if it contains a reference to another event That other event can be a metadata event too. So it is the content (having a URI in the content) that determines whether an event is a metadata event.

What is said about that reference could, if one so wishes, determine whether the talked about “object” is informational or non-informational. Being informational or not, is the proper subject of metadata.

The second problem needs to be solved by singling out a set of attributes that create the equivalence classes. Equivalence becomes a matter of perspective, a matter of selection of appropriate metadata events. Which ones are appropriate may depend entirely on the application one has in mind.

The first problem becomes one of finding metadata events given an event. We discussed this already (if only partially) in an earlier post called From data to metadata.

From data to metadata

Theory 1 Response »

Nov 152009

Providing a document with a proper context of other documents, annotations, citations, data sets, previous versions of documents, guidelines and the like, is the proper subject of whole spectrum of recent developments. The semantic web provides the theory and an ever growing set of tools to describe relations to documents in way that machines can process. OAI-ORE is one of the additions to the semantic web repertoire that allows one to describe a bundle of such documents as one whole. Relations between documents and groupings of documents are two important structures that can provide a context to a document. A context that may be really useful at reading time.

But, given a document, how can we find the metadata? The problem is that documents and metadata are often separate resources which are not necessarily bi-directionally linked. In practice, the link from a document to resources containing metadata about that document is often missing.

Let’s first change our terminology before discussing this in more detail. Following the principles and accepted terminology of the web architecture we will not use the term document, but replace it with the more general term resource. A resource refers to a variety of objects, including textual documents, audio-visual material, data sets, running code, etcetera. We will only deal with resources that have an online presence.

A resource can take two roles. It can be a metadata resource describing other data resources and a data resource itself. To safe on typing we will use the acronym MR to refer to a metadata resource and DR for a data resource. If a resource refers explicitly to another resource and gives some extra information about it, the referring source is a MR and the referred to resource a DR. Two resources can refer to each other and so be both a DR and a MR at the same time. A catalog, for example, can describe a series of art objects and it can itself be described by yet another resource, for instance one that critiques the catalog as an art object in itself. The catalog is both a data and metadata resource. Seen from a philosophical perspective it can perhaps be noted that everything refers to something else, so everything is metadata. So, being a DR or an MR are roles a resource can take.

Any MR needs a reference to a DR, while a DR does not need a reference to a MR. Without loss of generality, I think, we can assume that a MR is a set of RDF triples. All metadataformats can in principle be expressed in the RDF datamodel. What is needed to realize this transformation is that every resource is globally unique identifiable. RDF uses URI’s for this. Let’s however ignore this "problem" for a while.

We then have the situation in which MR’s and DR’s have a URI, if the URI’s are URL’s both should lead to a representation (retrievable over HTTP) of the resources. There are only a few methods thinkable to retrieve a MR (or more) when a DR is known.

There is an algorithm (or convention) that derives the URI’s of a, or all, MR’s from the URI of a DR.
There is an algorithm (or convention) that derives the URI’s of a, or all, MR’s from the content of a DR.
There is at least one registry where a MR registers itself as an MR for a given DR URI.
The site that hosts a DR can be notified of the existence of MR’s that mention it.
Embed into the DR references to a MR.

Each of these options need to be detailed. Option 1 could be (partially) solved by Cool URI’s and the finer details of the HTTP response mechanism (especially HTTP 302/303 responses) need to be explored. In option 4 one of the refback methods (HTTP) might be used, or perhaps a variation on the trackback mechanisms used in the weblog world. But this is not the place to present those details.

What is noteworthy in all solutions is that a community effort is needed to get it done. Technical details need to be worked out, but first conventions need to be written down, workflows and responsibilities need to be written out and handed over to organisations. Registries might be needed and certain groups have to maintain them. What is lacking therefore is a community that sets itself to these tasks.

Tinkering or thinking?

Theory 1 Response »

Nov 132009

We too often start with tools and wonder what we can do with them. A large part of the Library 2.0 movement is like that. There are sites, like 23dingen that seem to promote that attitude. Learn what the internet has to offer and then use it, professionally if possible. The workflow seems to be as follows: become aware of what the internet has to offer, get used to it, and apply it. Do all that, then take the attitude of an evangelist, and your are a modern 2.0 librarian.

This is tinkering.

The idea that our work should be demand-driven leads to tinkering too. We define services in collaboration with researchers and librarians and then realize that service. Serving our customers is of course our main goal, in the end, but librarians should not jump from "demand" to "demand". What is lost is a reflection on that what may connect the services thus developed, what is lost too is a critical attitude to the foundations of a library. For example, customers tend to take many things for granted (like: libraries shuffle documents, whether online or offline, libraries offer search tools that answer questions by presenting a list of documents). A rethinking of the foundations of libraries and the resources it works with will rarely be triggered by obeying customer demands.

Tinkering works from existing "infrastructures": takes them for granted. Not tinkering, but thinking might be instrumental in changing that infrastructure in order to deliver future services with a maximum of ease. It is not that no one thinks about such an infrastructure. OAIS reference architecture, SOA, 5S and similar undertakings show that infrastructural issues are addressed in the literature. Also, the Linked Data Initiative has come with clear advice on how to represent metadata and how metadata can be re-used. Registries of identifiers are seen as essential in this context. The issues around Open Data and rights of (re-)use have received considerable attention too, and are an integral part of a solid infrastructure. That work could lead to the definition of an overall architecture and to the development of a flexible infrastructure on top which new services can be developed.

It would be advisable, I think, to retract from the demand oriented strategy and start working on the specification of a good and flexible infrastructure using one of the existing methodologies (a few were mentioned). I think it is an essential step that would make future developments less costly and increase the likelihood of developments to become stable and sustainable services. And we surely should not waste our time with 23 things, there is no inherent evil in that work, but it distracts us from the core issue: build an adequate infrastructure for the digital library.

We need to think more and tinker less.

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-=( In Between )=-

2Academic Services renewed

Relations between scholars

Identity: how?

From data to metadata

Tinkering or thinking?

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