The #cetis10 Locate, Collate and Aggregate extravaganza

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Next week Phil, John and I will be running a session at the JISC CETIS conference with the snappy title Locate Collate and Aggregate. The aim of this session is to explore innovative technical approaches related to, but not confined to, the JISC / HEA OER 2 Programme which are applicable to finding, using and managing content for teaching and learning, including:

  • Building collections of OERs.
  • Drawing together information about learning resources
  • Building rich descriptions from disparate sources of information

We’ve got an eclectic bunch of contributors lined up including David Kay, Sero; Vic Lyte, MIMAS; James Burke, deBurca; Chris Taylor, oErbital; Rob Pearce, Engineering a Lo-Carbon Future; Pierre Far, OCW Search; Pat Lockley, Xpert and some bloke called Phil Barker. Our contributors will be presenting and leading short discussions on a diverse range of topics including cross-silo semantic search opportunities, using mainstream and niche search engines to discover OERs and automatic selection of resources for a UKOER collection.

We’ve also been promised the world premiere of the long awaited dogme masterpiece The Plight of Metadata by acclaimed repository manager and film maker Pat Lockley. Mr Lockley assures us that the film will be “awesome, despite the limited CGI budget.”

So who should attend this Locate, Collate and Aggregate extravaganza? Anyone interested in open content, innovative use and management of teaching and learning resources, techies, geeks, rss wranglers, data miners and even the odd repository manager.

And what do we want? We want ideas! Lots of them! We want ideas, comments and input to other peoples ideas. We’re also looking for ideas for JISC CETIS technical mini-projects we can potentially take forward to run in parallel with the OER 2 Programme.

We’re not quite sure what the outputs of this session will be but we’re aiming to go beyond the boundaries of JISC programmes and domain focussed initiatives and we’re hoping for cross pollination and propagation of innovation throughout the nation.

cetiswmd Activities

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Phil has already blogged a summary of last week’s memorably tagged What Metadata or cetiswmd meeting. During the latter part of the meeting we split up to discuss practical tasks and projects that the community could undertake with support from CETIS and JISC to explore the kind of issues that were raised at the meeting. We agreed to draft a rough outline of some of these potential activities and then feed them back to the community for comment and discussion. So if you have any thoughts or suggestions please let us know. CETIS are proposing to set up a task group or working group of some kind to develop this work and to provide a forum to explore technical issues relating to the resource description, management and discovery in the context of open educational resources.

I helped to facilitate the breakout group that focused on what we might be able to achieve by looking at existing metadata collections. Here’s an outline of the activity what we discussed.

Textual Analysis of Metadata Records

A large number of existing collections of metadata records were identified by participants including NDLR, JorumOpen, OU openlearn, US data.gov collections, all of which could be analysed to ascertain which fields are used most widely and how they are described. Clearly this metadata exists in a wide range of heterogeneous formats so the task is not as simple as comparing like with like. The “traditional” way to compare different metadata schema and records is through the use of cross-walks. However developing cross walks is a non-trivial task that in itself requires considerable time and resource.

An alternative approach was put forward by ADL’s Dan Rehak who suggested treating the metadata collections as text, stripping out fields and formatting and running the raw data through a semantic analysis tool such as Open Calais. Open Calais uses natural language processing, machine learning and other methods to analyse documents and find the entities within them. Calais claim to go “well beyond classic entity identification and return the facts and events hidden within your text as well.”

Applying data mining and semantic analysis techniques to a large corpus of educational metadata records would be an interesting exercise in itself but until we attempt such an analysis it’s hard to speculate what it might be possible to achieve with the output data. It would certainly be valuable to compare frequently occurring terms and relationships with an analysis of search web logs to see if the metadata records are actually describing the characteristics that users are searching for.

There was general agreement amongst participants that this would be an interesting and innovative project. Participants felt it would be advisable to start small with a comparison of two or three metadata collections, possibly those of JorumOpen, Xpert and the OU Openlearn before taking this forward further.

One thing I am slightly unsure about regarding this method is that Open Calais identifies the relationship between words but once we strip out the metadata encoding of our sample records this information will be lost. I don’t know enough about how these semantic analysis tools work to know whether this is a problem or if they are clever enough for this not to be an issue. I suppose the only way we’ll find out if the results are sensible or useful is to give it a try!

I’d also be very interested to hear how this approach compares with work being undertaken on a much larger scale by the Digging into Data Challenge projects and Mimas’ Bringing Meaning into Search initiative.

Other Activities

Phil has already summarised the other possible tasks and activities put forward by the other breakout groups which include:

  • Establishing a common format for sharing search logs.
  • Identify which fields are used on advanced forms and how many people use advanced search facilities.
  • Analysis of the relative proportion of users who search and browse for resources and how many people click onwards from the initial resources.
  • Further development of the search questionnaire used by David Davies. If sufficient responses could be gathered to the same questions this would facilitate meta analysis of the results.
  • Work with communities around specific repositories and find out what works and doesn’t work across individual platforms and installations.
  • Create a research question inventory on the CETIS wiki and invite people to put forward ideas.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions on any of the above ideas we’d love to hear from you!

Time travelling at RepoFringe10

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Last week I attended the Repository Fringe in Edinburgh. Unsurprisingly openness was one of the key themes of this year’s event and Tony Hirst kicked off with a typically inspiring keynote on content liberation. Tony suggested that although repositories play an important role in preserving institutional memory they are less good at presenting content as data. In addition, many document formats, such as pdf, lock data within them preventing other people from representing that data in useful and interesting ways. Charts and graphs presented as images are dead data. Open document formats help to liberate content and get the data flowing. And once data has been opened up it can be combined and reconnected in new and interesting ways. In addition to open data open queries enable us to see the assumptions that are embedded in queries and how results and reports have been generated. Tony went on the demonstrate some powerful information processing tools, based on Mendeley, yahoo pipes, tic tocs, YQL and rss that require little or no coding.

Tony also pointed out that most document stores have a structure comprised of how documents relate to each other, but we are not good at making use of that structure. He then demonstrated how Gephi can be used to visualise structures and data clusters across multiple data stores. This presents new ways of navigating the content and can be used to provide topic or facet based browsing on the cheap. Earlier this week Tony demonstrated exactly this kind of data visualisation by using Gephi, yahoo pipes and google custom search to analyse altc-2010 twitter streams.

Tony concluded by reinforcing the importance of Ranganathan’s five laws of library science:

  • First law: Books are for use
  • Second Law: Every reader his or her book
  • Third Law: Every book its reader
  • Fourth Law: Save the time of the reader
  • Fifth Law: The library is a growing organism

I am quite sure that I was the only person in the audience that had never come across these laws before but it seems they could apply equally usefully to educational resources, open or otherwise.

Herbert Van de Sompel presented another new and interesting way to access data online with Memento: Timetravel for the Web. Resources on the web change continually over time and Memento uses the http protocol to navigate these resources through time by linking current resources and archived resources. Memento used a “timegate” to redirect uri’s to a time specific version of a web page. The Memento tool suite includes the MementoFox plug-in that allows you to set a datetime to navigate the Web with. For MediaWiki servers there is the Memento plug-in that supports responding to datetime content negotiation requests issued by clients and for Wayback Archives a plugin that adds Memento Timegate and TimeBundle support. I’m a big fan of the internet archives and Memento looks like it could be an invaluable tool for browsing old web resources. Before Herbert had finished his presentation a large number of Fringe delegates had installed the MementoFox plug in and were enthusiastically browsing back backwards and forwards* in time. This despite that fact that, as Herbert informed us, the first journal paper on Memento had been rejected with the comment along the lines of “who would be interested in looking at old websites” ;)

Time travel of a different kind was in evidence during a round table discussion on teaching and learning resources which spiralled back in time into “what’s the definition of a learning object” territory. It became apparent that learning objects were being conflated with the specific standards often used to described and package them, specifically IEEE LOM and IMS Content Packaging. Open educational resources were put forward as a more useful and viable alternative to learning objects. I’m inclined to think that both learning objects and open educational resources can take any form and that the main distinction between the two is the presence of an open license for the latter. However the round table did give us an opportunity to talk to Patrick Sweeney of the University of Southampton about their repository usage stats which could potentially reveal some very useful information about how users search for teaching and learning resources. This is exactly the kind of data we hope to explore at the forthcoming CETIS What metadata is really useful? or CETISWMD event in October.

We also had the opportunity for another interesting conversation with Herbert Van de Sompel regarding the use of OAI ORE to aggregate open educational resources. This is something I’ve been curious about for a while, as there has been little exploration of the use of ORE in the context of educational materials. It seems to me that the resources produced by the JISC HEA OER Programmes, which are scattered all over the web and accompanied by highly variable metadata would provide an interesting usecase for OAI ORE. Herbert was able to point us towards one promising example of OAI ORE implementation in an educational context. Unlocking the Archive is a project based at the Jewish Women’s Archive which has developed an OAI-ORE presentation tool. As far as I can gather the aim of the project as to produce a powerpoint like web based tool which will allow users to aggregate any kind of content housed by the archive and view it using any standard web browser. The open source code developed by the project is available from drupal.org. We haven’t had an opportunity to investigate this project further but it certainly sounds like it’s worthy of further exploration in the context of the new OER2 Programme.

Of course the real high point of the entire two day event was Phil Baker’s pecha kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide) presentation “An open and closed case for educational resources.” I may be biased, but I thought it was an excellent presentation and I was astonished that Phil could talk that fast! You can enjoy a video of the fast version of Phil’s session here and a rather more leisurely write up of the same on his blog.

All in all I found RepoFringe10 a very interesting and thought provoking event. I went to Repository Fringe last year and came away rather frustrated as I found that the event was trying so hard not to be a conference that the format actually got in the way of what could have been an opportunity for really interesting discussion. Not so this year, the event had a good balance of presentations, roundtable discussions, some very slick pecha kucha sessions and there was plenty of opportunity for networking and discussion. Well done guys!

* Okay you can’t really browse forward in time, I made that bit up ;)

Briefing Paper: the Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data

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CETIS has published a new Briefing Paper on the Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data. This briefing paper provides a high level overview of key concepts relating to the Semantic Web, semantic technologies, linked and open data; along with references to relevant examples and standards. The briefing is intended to provide a starting point for those within the teaching and learning community who may have come across the concept of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web but who do not regard themselves as experts and wish to learn more. Examples and links are provided as starting points for further exploration. The briefing paper is supplemented by the blog post When is Linked Data not Linked Data? which provides a summary of the debate surrounding the definition and characteristics of Linked Data.

The briefing paper can be downloaded in pdf format here or you can pick up printed copy at a CETIS event near you soon!

CETIS OER Technical Support Project Final Report

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The CETIS OER Technical Support Project was funded by JISC from August 2009 – April 2010 to provide support to the JISC HEA Open Educational Resources Pilot Programme. The project’s Final Report is now available to download from the Publications page of the CETIS website.

Support provided to the programme included advising JISC on technical direction, setting technical guidelines for the programme, reviewing and advising on projects’ technical choices and liaising with other programme support elements, particularly JourmOpen. The project conducted technical review calls with all 29 projects and recorded the outcome of these interviews using the CETIS PROD directory. Over the duration of the programme CETIS facilitated a number of programme support events including a technical round table at the annual CETIS conference, and two 2nd Tuesday online seminars in addition to participating in all three JISC programme level events.

The outputs of the CETIS Technical Support Project have been synthesised and published in a series of posts on the CETIS blogs and pages on the CETIS wiki. These outputs were also disseminated through more formal channels including position papers, journal papers and presentations at a number of national and international conferences. The support project surfaced a number of technical issues worthy of further investigation these include; the use of RSS for depositing resources into repositories, technical approaches to aggregating resources and methods of tracking resources. These issues are now being taken forward through an additionally funded technical project.

Then and Now

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A position paper for the ADL Repositories and Registries Summit by Lorna M. Campbell, Phil Barker and R. John Robertson

Between 2002 and 2010 the UK Joint information Systems Committee (JISC)1 funded a wide range of development programmes with the aim of improving access within the UK Further and Higher Education (F/HE) sector to content produced by F/HE institutions and to establish policies and technical infrastructure to facilitate its discovery and use. The Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS)2 is a JISC innovation support centre that provides technical and strategic support and guidance to the JISC development programmes and F/HE sector. CETIS contributed to scoping the technical requirements of the programmes summarised here.

Programmes such as Exchange for Leaning (X4L, 2002 – 2006)3 focused on the creation of reusable learning resources and tools to facilitate their production and management while Re-purposing and Re-use of Digital University-level Content4 (RePRODUCE, 2008 – 2009) aimed to encourage the re-use of high quality externally produced materials and to facilitate the transfer of learning content between institutions. At the same time the Digital Repositories5 (2005 – 2007) and Repositories Preservation Programmes6 (2006 – 2009) focused on establishing technical infrastructure within institutions and across the sector.

These programmes were informed by a strategic and technical vision which was expressed through initiatives including the e-Learning Framework7, the e-Framework8, the Information Environment Technical Architecture9 and the Digital Repositories Roadmap10. The IE Architecture for example sought to “specify a set of standards and protocols intended to support the development and delivery of an integrated set of networked services that allowed the end-user to discover, access, use and publish digital and physical resources as part of their learning and research activities.”

These programmes and initiatives have met with varying degrees of success across the different sectors of the UK F/HE community. The rapid growth in the number of open access institutional repositories of scholarly works including both journal papers and e-theses may be attributed directly to the impact of JISC funding and policy. The number of open access institutional repositories has approximately doubled since 2007 to 17211 currently . Arguably there has been less success supporting and facilitating access to teaching and learning materials. Although the number of repositories of teaching and learning materials is growing slowly, few institutions have policies for managing these resources. Indeed one of the final conclusions of the Repositories and Preservation Programme Advisory Group, which advised the JISC repositories programmes, was that teaching and learning resources have not been served well by the debate about institutional repositories seeking to cover both open access to research outputs and management of teaching and learning materials as the issues relating to their use and management are fundamentally different12. The late Rachel Heery also commented that greater value may be derived from programmes that focus more on achieving strategic objectives (e.g. improving access to resources) and less on a specific technology to meet these objectives (e.g. repositories). In addition the findings of the RePRODUCE Programme13 suggested that projects had significantly underestimated the difficulty of finding high quality teaching and learning materials that were suitable for copyright clearance and reuse.

Rather than a radical shift in policy these conclusions should be regarded as reflecting a gradual development in policy, licensing and technology right across the web. This includes the advent of web 2.0, the appearance of media specific dissemination platforms such as slideshare, youtube, flickr, iTunesU, interaction through RESTful APIs, OpenID, OAuth and other web-wide technologies, increasing acceptance of Creative Commons licenses and the rise of the OER movement. As a result there has been a movement away from developing centralised education specific tools services and towards the integration of institutional systems with applications and services scattered across the web. Furthermore there has been growing awareness of the importance of the web itself as a technical architecture as opposed to a simple interface or delivery platform.

These developments are reflected in current JISC development programmes where the priority is less on using a particular technology (e.g. repositories) or implementing a particular standard but rather to get useful, useable content out to the UK F/HE community and beyond by what ever means possible. The JISC Higher Education Academy Open Educational Resources Pilot Programme14 (OER, 2009 – 2010) is a case in point. To illustrate how both strategic policy and technology have developed it is interesting to compare and contrast the 2002 X4L Programme and the current OER Pilot Programme

X4L Programme 2002 – 2006

The X4L programme aimed to explore the re-purposing of existing content suitable for use in learning. Part of this activity was to explore the process of integrating interoperable learning objects with VLEs. A small number of tools projects were funded to facilitate this task: an assessment management system (TOIA), a content packaging tool (Reload) and a learning object repository (Jorum). Projects were given a strong steer to use interoperability standards such as IMS QTI, IMS Content Packaging, ADL SCORM and IEEE LOM. A mandatory application profile of the IEEE LOM was developed for the programme and formal subject classification vocabularies identified including JACS and Dewey. Projects were strongly recommended to deposit their content in the Jorum repository and institutions were required to sign formal licence agreements before doing so. Access to content deposited content in Jorum was restricted to UK F/HE institutions only.

OER Pilot Programme 2009 – 2010

The aim of the OER Pilot Programme is to make a significant volume of existing teaching and learning resources freely available online and licensed in such a way to enable them to be reused worldwide. Projects may release any kind of content in any format and although projects are encouraged to use open standards where applicable proprietary formats are also acceptable. CETIS advised projects on the type of information they should record about their resources but not how to go about recording it. There is no programme specific metadata application profile and no formal metadata standard or vocabularies have been recommended. The only mandatory metadata that projects were directed to record was the programme tag #ukoer. Projects were given free rein to use any dissemination platform they chose provided that the content is freely available and under an open licence. In addition, projects must also represent their resources in JorumOpen either by linking or through direct deposit. All resources represented in JorumOpen are freely available worldwide and released under Creative Commons licences.

During the course of the OER Pilot Programme CETIS have interviewed all 29 projects to record their technical choices and the issues that have surfaced. This information has been recorded in the CETIS PROD15 system and has been synthesised in a series of blog posts16. CETIS is also undertaking additional exploratory work to investigate different methods of aggregating and tracking resources produced by the OER Programme. The contrast between the two programmes is marked and the success or otherwise of the technical approach adopted by the OER Pilot Programme remains to be seen. The programme concludes in April 2010 and a formal programme level synthesis and evaluation is already underway.

References
1. Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, CETIS, http://www.cetis.org.uk
2. Exchange for Learning Programme, X4L, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/x4l.aspx
3. Re-purposing and Re-use of Digital University-level Content Programme, RePRODUCE, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningcapital/reproduce.aspx
4. Digital Repositories Programme, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitalrepositories2005.aspx
5. Repositories Preservation Programmes http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres.aspx
6. E-Learning Framework, http://www.elframework.org/
7. E-Framework, http://www.e-framework.org/
8. JISC Information Environment Technical Architecture http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment/iearchitecture.aspx
9. Digital Repositories Roadmap, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment/reproadmaprev.aspx
10. The Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR, http://www.opendoar.org/
11.Exclude Teaching and Learning Materials from the Open Access Repositories Debate. Discuss, http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/lmc/2008/10/27/exclude-teaching-and-learning-materials-from-the-open-access-repositories-debate-discuss/
12. RePRODUCE Programme Summary Report, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elreproduce/jisc_programme_summary_report_reproduce.doc
13. JISC Academy Open Educational Resources Pilot Progamme, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer.aspx
14. CETIS PROD, monitoring projects, software and standards, http://prod.cetis.org.uk/query.php?theme=UKOER
15. John’s JISC CETIS Blog, http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/johnr/category/ukoer/
16. OER Synthesis and Evaluation Project, http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/

….more what you’d call “guidelines”….

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Owen Stephen’s has written a helpful post which makes a very useful contribution to the debate regarding the interpretation of Tim Berners Lee’s Linked Data Design Issues. See my earlier post for a summary of the debate. With all these attempts to clarify the ambiguity I couldn’t help being reminded of the infamous Pirate Code from Pirates of the Caribbean:

“And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard!”

Sorry, couldn’t resist it ;)

Mary Lacy, the female shipwright

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Something a bit left field for Ada Lovelace Day this year as the woman I’ve chosen to write about was born 75 years before Ada herself, and I’m perhaps stretching the definition of “technology” a bit. Allow me to introduce Mary Lacy, the female shipwright, whose contemporary autobiography written in 1773 has recently been republished by the National Maritime Museum. Lacy is an astonishing woman by any standards. In her introduction to the autobiography Margaret Lincoln of the NMM writes:
The Female Shipwright

“In an age when women did not serve in the armed forces or train to become qualified shipwrights or set themselves up as speculative house builders, Lacy did all three.”

And what is even more remarkable is that she did it all independently while disguised as a man.

Lacy was born into a poor working class family in Kent in 1740. She grew up as a self confessed wayward child and was put into service by her parents in an attempt to curb her unruly behavior. At the age of nineteen, following an unhappy affair with a young man, she appropriated a suit of her father’s clothes, assumed the name William Chandler and ran away from home. On arriving penniless and hungry at Chatham Dockyard she joined the crew of the newly built HMS Sandwich, a 90 gun second-rate ship of the line. Lacy knew nothing of ships, and much to the amusement of the other men mistook the open gun ports for a large number of windows. Chandler was taken on as apprentice and servant to the ship’s carpenter, a volatile man who beat her and appropriated her wages. Lacy however didn’t hesitate to stand up for herself and when challenged took on one of the Admiral’s boys in a fight. She records that she came off with “flying colours” and that she and the boy “reconciled to each other as if we had been brothers”.

Lacy served aboard the Sandwich and later the Royal Sovereign from 1759 to around 1764, enduring the extraordinary hardships of life as a rating during the Seven Years War. During this time the Sandwich was stationed on blockade with Admiral Hawke’s fleet off Brest. The ship was returning from blockade duty when the French fleet broke from Brest resulting in the Battle of Quiberon Bay. Lacy writes of the engagement but adds that “…our ship had no share in the battle for we were at the time in Plymouth.”

Following the Quiberon engagement the Sandwich was ordered to the Bay of Biscay where Lacy notes:

“I must here observe, that a person who is a stranger to these great and boisterous seas, must think it impossible for a large ship to ride in them, but I slept many months on the ocean, where I have been tossed up and down at an amazing rate.”

Lacy experienced even more boisterous seas during a terrible two day hurricane which struck the English Channel in 1760. The Sandwich survived with seven men downed and sprung main and foremasts. However their sister ship Ramillies foundered with the loss of 675 men and only 25 survivors.

Life at sea soon took its toll on Lacy and by her early twenties the continual cold and wet brought on inflammatory rheumatism, a recurring condition that hospitalised Lacy several times.

In 1764 Lacy finally secured an apprenticeship as a shipwright at Portsmouth dockyard. Her trials were not over however. She appears to have been apprenticed to a series of irresponsible masters who once again appropriated her wages and neglected to provide her with the bare necessities.

“It may with very great truth be said that Mr A____’s house entertained a very bad set of people. I had not been long with him before he turned me over to another man to pay his debts; and when I worked that out, was again turned over to a third: so that shifted from one to the another I had neither clothes on my back nor shoes or stockings to my feet; notwithstanding which, I was frequently (even in the dead of winter) obliged to go the the dock-yard bare-footed.”

Lacy’s life was not without entertainment however. She had a veritable string of sweethearts of whom she writes candidly and unashamedly. She even notes with some pride that:

“As I was frequently walking out with some of them, the men of the yard concluded that I was a very amorous spark when in the company of young women.”

And indeed she was!

Lacy achieved her certificate as shipwright after seven years apprenticeship in 1770 enabling her to earn an independent wage. In 1771 however Portsmouth dockyard was ravaged by a terrible fire, as a result of which the shipwrights had to work “double tides”. The long hours and hard labour aggravated Lacy’s rheumatism to the point she could no longer work and was forced to seek retirement as a Superannuated Shipwright.

It seems inconceivable now that a woman could serve undetected in the close confines of a man-of-war for such a long period, however the Royal Navy was desperate for able bodied men at the time, whether willing to serve or no, so few questions would have been asked. In a chapter on Lacy, Suzanne Stark author of Female Tars also notes that, living in such close confines, ratings were accustomed to turn a blind eye on all kinds of goings on. When Lacy’s sex was eventually revealed by a female “false friend” her male colleagues are unperturbed and continue to treat her as the shipwright they know. It is also notable that when rheumatism finally made it impossible for Lacy to continue working at the dockyard she applied to the Admiralty for a pension under her own name. The application was granted and Lacy was paid a substantial pension of £20 per annum.

Lacy’s biography concludes with her marriage to one “Mr Slade” however historians have cast doubt on this event. Stark suggests that the marriage is a fiction to make Lacy appear more respectable to contemporary readers. Lincoln has found no record of Lacy’s alleged marriage however she has traced

“Mary Slade of King Street, Deptford, who we can take to have been Mary Lacy, moved into a new double fronted house in Deptford with Elizabeth Slade in 1777. This house was at the centre of a terrace which she built herself….The terrace survives in part at Nos 104 -108 and 116-118 Deptford High Street…It seems likely that she used her pension of £20 p.a. as security for a mortgage…She lived for another twenty years…after her death “Mary Slade” was described as a “spinster and shopkeeper”….it seems probable that Lacy took Elizabeth Slade’s surname to pass as her sister.”

A remarkable end for a remarkable woman.

Lacy wrote and published her biography at the age of 33 and her account of her life is inspirational, candid and refreshing. While she shows contrition for her youthful waywardness and acknowledges that she would have spared herself a life of hardship had she listened to her parents, she is unapologetic about the life she lived and path she chose. I believe Mary Lacy is easily worthy of commemoration on Ada Lovelace Day and who knows, perhaps Ada even read her biography herself!

Further information
Lacy, M., (2009), The Female Shipwright, National Maritime Museum.
Stark, S. J., (1996), Female Tars: women aboard ship in the age of sail, Constable.
And a podcast by Margaret Lincoln of the National Maritime Museum celebrating the republication of Lacy’s biography: The Story of Mary Lacy.

When is Linked Data not Linked Data? – A summary of the debate

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One of the activities identified during last December’s Semantic Technology Working Group meeting to be taken forward by CETIS was the production of a briefing paper that disambiguated some of the terminology for those that are less familiar with this domain. The following terms in particular were highlighted:

  • Semantic Web
  • semantic technologies
  • Linked Data
  • linked data
  • linkable data
  • Open Data

I’ve finally started drafting this briefing paper and unsurprisingly defining the above terms is proving to be a non-trivial task! Pinning down agreed definitions for Linked Data, linked data and linkable data is particularly problematic. And I’m not the only one having trouble. If you look up Semantic Web and Linked Data / linked data on wikipedia you will find entries flagged as having multiple issues. It does rather feel like we’re edging close to holy war territory here. But having said that I do enjoy a good holy war as long as I’m watching safely from the sidelines.

So what’s it all about? As far as I can make out much of the debate boils down to whether Linked Data must adhere to the four principles outlined in Tim Berners Lee’s Linked Data Design Issues, and in particular whether use of RDF and SPARQL is mandatory. Some argue that RDF is integral to Linked Data, other suggest that while it may be desirable, use of RDF is optional rather than mandatory. Some reserve the capitalized term Linked Data for data that is based on RDF and SPARQL, preferring lower case “linked data”, or “linkable data”, for data that uses other technologies.

The fact that the Linked Data Design Issues paper is a personal note by Tim Berners Lee, and is not formally endorsed by W3C also contributes to the ambiguity. The note states:

  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, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)
  4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

I’ll refer to the steps above as rules, but they are expectations of behaviour. Breaking them does not destroy anything, but misses an opportunity to make data interconnected. This in turn limits the ways it can later be reused in unexpected ways. It is the unexpected re-use of information which is the value added by the web. (Berners Lee, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html)

In the course of trying to untangle some of the arguments both for and against the necessity of using RDF and SPARQL I’ve read a lot of very thoughtful blog posts which it may be useful to link to here for future reference. Clearly these are not the only, or indeed the most recent, posts that discuss this most topical of topics, these happen to be the ones I have read and which I believe present a balanced over view of the debate in such a way as to be of relevance to the JISC CETIS community.

Linked data vs. Web of data vs. …
– Andy Powell, Eduserv, July 2009

The first useful post I read on this particular aspect of the debate is Andy Powell’s from July 2009. This post resulted from the following question Andy raised on twitter;

is there an agreed name for an approach that adopts the 4 principles of #linkeddata minus the phrase, “using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)” ??

Andy was of the opinion that Linked Data “implies use of the RDF model – full stop” adding:

“it’s too late to re-appropriate the “Linked Data” label to mean anything other than “use http URIs and the RDF model”.”

However he is unable to provide a satisfactory answer to his own question, i.e. what do you call linked data that does not use the RDF model, and despite exploring alternative models he concludes by professing himself to be worried about this.

Andy returned to this theme in a more recent post in January 2010, Readability and linkability which ponders the relative emphasis given to readability and linkability by initiatives such as the JISC Information Environment. Andy’s general principles have not changed but he presents term machine readable data (MRD) as a potential answer to the question he originally asked in his earlier post.

Does Linked Data need RDF?
– Paul Miller, The Cloud of Data, July 2009

Paul Miller’s post is partially a response to Andy’s query. Paul begins by noting that while RDF is key to the Semantic Web and

“an obvious means of publishing — and consuming — Linked Data powerfully, flexibly, and interoperably.”

he is uneasy about conflating RDF with Linked Data and with assertions that

“‘Linked Data’ can only be Linked Data if expressed in RDF.”

Paul discusses the wording an status of Tim Berners Lee’s Linked Data Design Issues and suggest that it can be read either way. He then goes on to argue that by elevating RDF from the best mechanism for achieving Linked Data to the only permissible approach we risk barring a large group

“with data to share, a willingness to learn, and an enthusiasm to engage.”

Paul concludes by asking the question:

“What are we after? More Linked Data, or more RDF? I sincerely hope it’s the former.”

No data here – just Linked Concepts and Linked, open, semantic?
– Paul Walk, UKOLN, July & November 2009

Paul Walk has published two useful posts on this topic; the first summarising and commenting on the debate sparked by the two posts above, and the second following the Giant Global Graph session at the CETIS 2009 Conference. This latter post presents a very useful attempt at disambiguating the terms Open data , Linked Data and Semantic Web. Paul also tries to untangle the relationship between these three memes and helpfully notes:

  • data can be open, while not being linked
  • data can be linked, while not being open
  • data which is both open and linked is increasingly viable
  • the Semantic Web can only function with data which is both open and linked

So What Is It About Linked Data that Makes it Linked Data™?
– Tony Hirst, Open University, March 2010

Much more recently Tony Hirst published this post which begins with a version of the four Linked Data principles cut from wikipedia. This particular version makes no mention of either RDF or SPARQL. Tony goes on to present a very neat example of data linked using HTTP URI and Yahoo Pipes and asks

“So, the starter for ten: do we have an example of Linked Data™ here?”

Tony broadly believes the answer is yes and is of a similar opinion to Paul Miller that too rigid adherence to RDF and SPARQL

“will put a lot of folk who are really excited about the idea of trying to build services across distributed (linkable) datasets off…”

Perhaps more controversially Tony questions the necessity of universal unique URIs that resolve to content suggesting that:

“local identifiers can fulfil the same role if you can guarantee the context as in a Yahoo Pipe or a spreadsheet”

Tony signs off with:

“My name’s Tony Hirst, I like linking things together, but RDF and SPARQL just don’t cut it for me…”

Meshing up a JISC e-learning project timeline, or: It’s Linked Data on the Web, stupid
– Wilbert Kraan, JISC CETIS, March 2009

Back here at CETIS Wilbert Kraan has been experimenting with linked data meshups of JISC project data held in our PROD system. In contrast to the approach taken by Tony, Wilbert goes down the RDF and SPARQL route. Wilbert confesses that he originally believed that:

“SPARQL endpoints were these magic oracles that we could ask anything about anything.”

However his attempts to mesh up real data sets on the web highlighted the fact that SPARQL has no federated search facility.

“And that the most obvious way of querying across more than one dataset – pulling in datasets from outside via SPARQL’s FROM – is not allowed by many SPARQL endpoints. And that if they do allow FROM, they frequently cr*p out.”

Wilbert concludes that:

“The consequence is that exposing a data set as Linked Data is not so much a matter of installing a SPARQL endpoint, but of serving sensibly factored datasets in RDF with cool URLs, as outlined in Designing URI Sets for the UK Public Sector (pdf).”

And in response to a direct query regarding the necessity of RDF and SPARQL to Linked Data Wilbert answered

“SPARQL and RDF are a sine qua non of Linked Data, IMHO. You can keep the label, widen the definition out, and include other things, but then I’d have to find another label for what I’m interested in here.”

Which kind of brings us right back to the question that Andy Powell asked in July 2009!

So there you have it. A fascinating but currently inconclusive debate I believe. Apologies for the length of this post. Hopefully one day this will go on to accompany our “Semantic Web and Linked Data” briefing paper.

Dev8D: where were the women? A response.

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I’m writing this in response to MShaw’s post on DevCSI asking why there were so few women at Dev8D. I’m answering over here rather than over there because this is something I’ve been pondering for a while. And, as my colleague John Robertson pointed out on twitter:

Appropriate for International Woman’s Day? discussion on devsci blog about proportion of women (~7%) at #dev8D

Over at the DevCSI MShaw notes:

The technology/web development industry is notoriously male-dominated, but even in this context the gender imbalance at Dev8D seemed disproportionate.

And asks:

Are we doing enough to attracted women to these kinds of events? What could we do to improve the gender balance? Do you even think it’s an issue?

I think it is in issue. I’m not entirely sure what we can do about it, but I certainly think it’s something we should consider closely.

There are a lot of complex and interconnected issues which I can’t possibly hope to untangle here. They include: are fewer women really attracted to careers in technology? If so why? Is it something to do with the discipline itself? Or is it more to do with the culture of technology industries? And I include educational technology here.

Obviously I do work in technology, I have done for some time and I am one of those women who did not attend dev8D. Why? Although I work in technology I do not consider myself to be a “techy”. I am most definitely not a programmer and have often joked in the past that I couldn’t implement a spec if my life depended on it. Having said that, I am not remotely afraid of technology and I enjoy talking and working with developers. I’ve run more than a few codebashes in my time for heaven’s sake! You don’t get much more techy than that. So while on the one hand I may consider myself “not techy enough” to play with the boys at Dev8D, on the other hand these are the same people I have enjoyed working with for the last ten years or so.

The logistics of the event also made it difficult for me to attend. Although I used to travel a lot I now have a small child to look after and a partner who works long shifts so arranging childcare for anything longer than a single over night stay is difficult if not impossible. Logistics and responsibilities can’t be ignored.

MShaw’s post also brought to mind a CRIG Unconference I attended a couple of years ago. The focus was repositories, a technology domain where I think women are reasonably well represented. However of the 40 or so people who attended there were only 4 women: me, Julie Allinson, as sociologist who was there to observe the event and the administrator, who took names at the door and handed out stickers and badges. Not very encouraging.

At the time there was something about the lack of women at the CRIG Unconference that concerned me. I used to spend a lot of time on the road participating in international standards meetings, where I was frequently the only woman in the room. This was such a common occurrence that eventually I scarcely noticed. So what what was it about the Unconference that bothered me? I’m still not sure. I hesitate to say it but there does seem to be something a bit blokey about the format of some of these developer events. Although to be fair, at the recent CETIS Future of Interoperability Standards event women were as poorly represented as at Dev8D and the Unconference.

I can’t help being reminded of my previous career as an archaeologist. Although I did most of my field work in Scotland I once worked on a survey project in the South Hauran desert in the north of Jordan near the Syrian border. We stayed in a tiny one horse town called Umm el-Qetain where we rented the top floor of a typical house from a Bedouin family. Our hosts were extraordinarily welcoming and offered us hospitality at every opportunity. What was interesting is that these traditional houses are normally quite strictly segregated with family rooms, women’s rooms and the men’s rooms. The only woman allowed in the men’s room was the eldest matriarch of the house and even then she appeared to observe certain conventions of behaviour. However the three women in our field crew were treated exactly as men. We were regularly invited into the men’s room for mint tea and pastries and none of the men ever commented on our unusual behavior. (However they did howl with laughter when they saw our male colleagues washing their own socks.)

I’m still sometimes reminded of sitting in the men’s room in Umm el Qetain when I attend certain technical events. Everyone is welcoming and hospitable to a fault but you can’t help being aware that you are the minority and that somehow you are “fitting in” or rather being slotted into a space that doesn’t quite fit.

I don’t think I’ve expressed this very clearly, primarily because I don’t have a clear idea of exactly what is going on here. Hmmmmm. If anyone can enlighten me please comment.