Based on a presentation by Peter Burnhill at launch of Discovery – “a UK metadata ecology for UK education and research” in May 2011 JISC consolidation of service
Creating ‘new or novel knowledge products, increasing serendipity, cross-fertilisation of resources a metadata ecology for UK education and research No one size fits all solutions – mixed economies (technical and subject expertise, infrastructures, cultural differences across domains and organisations)
A key concept in the RDTF Vision is aggregation , directly or represented through metadata: to unlock riches held in our organisations, typically digital and online. This recognises the added value in assembly for tactical purpose – to improve ‘discoverability’. The ultimate aim being to improve access for research and educational purpose: for researchers, students and their teachers, - with few barriers for potential take-up beyond that Promiscuous metadata, washing your dirty metadata in public, making sure your metadata is well dressed !!! It’s very easy to publish in the web. Maximising the full potential of that content is another matter entirely.
the audience for any given work, service or aggregation is now machine as well as human Make content easier to use in global informaiton ecosystem, reducing technical and licensing barriers, potential to create new knowledge products or services, foster social innovation, Let your metadata speak for you when you have no one to speak for you, Removeal of duplicate of effort
The process of disintermediation
Technical support provided by EDINA SDSS Expert Group in Identity and Access Management Keep at a strategic level rather than diving into detailed issues and concerns Orientate towards opportunities and feasible steps, however small those might be.
Restricted outside JiscMedia Hub and Unrestricted content outside JISC Media Hub, collections inside JISC Media Hub available under subscription
SUNCAT – getting permission from contributing libraries – make data available in ODC PDDL Carmichael Watson – gaelic folklorist – digitising his greatest work Carmina Gadelica – an anthology of hebridean charms, hymns, songs, poetry
.Aggregation should be regarded as intervention to achieve value added improvement and context as aid to discoverability. Among their recommendations is that “such Aggregations should have supported APIs which are attractive to and convenient for developers”. Interpretation of other recommendations suggest that the Framework should: (a) assist Aggregators (extant and as funded aggregation projects) to demonstrate value to Content Providers were they to progressively follow each of the four Linked Data steps (b) encourage Content Providers to provide a semantic sitemap prior data aggregation, e.g. publication of RDF schema of underlying database, from a registry of recommended schemas provided as guidance by Aggregation services. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData
Multi-part work – data is meaningless without ancillary material (i.e. provides both context & meaning) – ancillary material in machine-readable formats Publish your DDI compliant XML codebook.
An extension of one of Tim O’Reilly’s 7 principles of Web 2.0 (2005) – Harnessing Collective Intelligence Bearing mind that there is a cost to keeping data closed !!! Open data are really open when they can be ‘always’ reused!
‘ aggregation as a tactic’ - to support discovery Peter Burnhill & Stuart Macdonald EDINA national data centre University of Edinburgh CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI7) University of Geneva, 23 June 2011
Key concept in RDTF Vision is aggregation, directly or represented through metadata – to unlock the online & digital riches held in our organisations
‘ Regard aggregation as intervention t o exploit the telematic opportunity for things [that] are 'remote, digital & published’ - a phrase derived from an IASSIST conference in 1990 exploring what it meant with the Internet if we regarded all [content] as ‘remote and published’.
The Web in mid-1990s simplified and thus improved
Unfortunately, even now, much which is online and on the Web is badly or inadequately published …
We have to improve, re-interpreting what it means to be ‘well-published’
‘ aggregation as a tactic’ - a phrase coined to end an an impasse during a meeting to discuss technical aspects of the RDTF Vision statement to identify stakeholder groups
Digital Library has mixed parentage - a ‘re-mix’ of the document
tradition & the computation tradition
“ approaches based on a concern with documents, with signifying records : archives, bibliography, documentation, librarianship, records management, and the like … [ Content Provider speak ]
“ approaches based on uses of formal techniques , whether mechanical (such as punch cards and data-processing equipment) or mathematical/computational (as in algorithmic procedures).” [ Developer speak ]
Prof. Michael Buckland, Presidential Address, American Society for Information Science, JASIS’s 50th (1998)