Category Archives: Standards

RSS for deposit, Jorum and UKOER: part 2 commentary

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Following on from part 1 which reviewed Jorum’s requirements for RSS-based deposit, this section synthesises the comments and feedback emerging in response to it.

Community views

In response to the requirements and position papers a number of feeds where submitted for testing and there has been some thoughtful reflection on the issues in the blogs and by email. This is a brief summary of responses to the key issues:

Issues around generating the RSS

Although most platforms in use can easily create RSS feeds and some can create a feed from any search result, it has become clear that, the RSS profile that is created is frequently fixed and does not match the profile requested by Jorum (which is very similar to the profile suggested by OCWC).

Irrespective of repository software of other OER management ‘platforms’ in use, adjusting the RSS output profile has proved to be a non-trivial task. Emerging issues in adjusting the RSS outputs include:

  • Users of commercial platforms may have to rely on the company’s developers and development schedule.
  • Open source platforms may require additional local coding or at the least will require adjusting an XLST.
  • It is likely that the RSS output of web 2.0 platforms will simply not be editable.

In all three cases there may also be possible solutions that utilise independent tools, such as Yahoo Pipes, to process the feed after production or create a feed from another interface. However, such an approach to adjust the RSS profile is either still reliant on the information present in the original source feed or is dependent on adding standard profile information or extracting additional information and creating a new feed. See for example http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/really-not-so-simple-syndication/.

Xml validity

Xpert note that of the 60 feeds they harvest, 5 aren’t valid xml and 20 aren’t valid RSS (see comment on Lorna’s post). It is worth noting that aggregators can and do deal with poorly formed data, however, in the timescale of the programme the kind of manual effort involved in dealing with poorly formed feeds (and the quality of the item metadata they would generate) is not likely to be supportable.

Conclusion

With the exception of some web 2.0 platforms and (potentially) some commercial repositories a revised or reprocessed RSS feed to meet Jorum’s requirements is, in theory, a possibility. However, few projects currently produce RSS meeting Jorum’s required RSS profile. From the project trials thus far, one project has so far been able to conform sufficiently to permit successful harvest. In the context of UKOER, adjusting the RSS profile requires the right congruence of platform(s), skills, and time within the project team. Hence it is unlikely that this solution will work for all projects who need a bulk upload option. In terms of the longer term feasibility of using RSS to facilitate bulk deposit, this which may change over time, particularly if the OCWC profile is adopted more widely.

Issues around metadata

The following issues were noted about the feed content:

  1. There is tentative agreement that it would be good if RSS feeds used a DC namespace where possible and ideally supporting the OCWC profile.
  2. The addition of custom elements (for example for the purposes of tracking OER currency) is not regarded as a good idea.
  3. It cannot be taken for granted that the item identifier in a feed is the same as the identifier of the OER within the platform.
  4. It cannot currently be assumed that the item identifier in a feed is either unique or persistent. This is a critical issue for processing the feed.
  5. There may be multiple feed identifiers for a given OER.
  6. Feeds may contain more than one namespace and / or feed formatting
  7. In a number of repository platforms the identifier supplied frequently points to the splash page rather than the OER itself. This is an issue if the resource itself is to be harvested.
  8. Few feeds have rights information for the items or for the feed itself. Including this information is regarded as good practice.
    1. Feeds that use one of the variants of Creative Commons encoding may allow aggregators and Jorum to provide enhanced services.
    2. Projects should clearly license their feeds and underlying items.
    3. In the last resort projects should state clearly on their site or by telling Jorum what rights and licensing exists in connection to their feeds.
  9. Metadata quality (including completeness) in feeds is variable.

Issues around processing the RSS

There are a number of issues about feed size, currency, updating, identifiers and OER deletion but these depend on whether the service is collecting information to help point to current OERs (like an aggregator) or whether it is seeking to provide a central collection of OERs (a library – even if some of those OERs are actually elsewhere). These distinctions are not clearly made in much of the discussion.

Feed classification:

Pushing everything into one classification seems to negate the classification work done by projects and many projects will be producing OERs with more than one JACS code. This could be addressed by having multiple feeds per platform (either from the platform or by subsequently dividing the feed) but there are potential duplication management issues with multiple feeds.

Feed setup

News feeds are the most common use of RSS or Atom, they typically are limited to a fixed number of most recent items (this does not preclude multiple subject based feeds from a repository as mentioned above). They can, however, contain the entire contents of the repository or all the results for the search term.

If the feed contains the entire contents of the repository (or search) it inevitably becomes very large. Large feeds tend to time out in browsers and can be difficult to ingest (as outlined in Xpert’s paper). However, many aggregator services prefer this approach as it provides a straightforward way to maintain currency, avoid duplication, and not have to consider partial deletion. This is because each time the feeds are polled/ gathered the previous index created by the aggregator is deleted. Only the content currently in the feed is indexed.

Magazine type feeds are the most common form of RSS and are more likely to be the default feed produced by repositories or other platforms ; they are usually small. However, to build an aggregation service or collection based upon them would require items from feeds to be stored in an incrementally built index (i.e. new items from feeds are added to a persistent index that retains their information even after they are no longer present in the feed). This works if there are unique and persistent identifiers for feed items or OERs included in the feed record and OERS do not end up with multiple feed identifiers.

OER currency

I’d suggest that the discussion about how to tell if a given OER has updated is a management and policy question to do with versioning and should be out of scope for this discussion. If a uri/url is provided for an OER, I think subsequent versions of the OER should have different urls as they are different things! There is a difference between an academic’s view of an OER as constantly in flux and a digital asset management perspective which needs a clear notion of the persistence or fixity of an released OER.

Feed currency

The discussion of how often feeds should be polled to check for new items is something which has to be agreed. It will impact on a number of issues and is affected by the type of feeds being consumed (magazine feeds will need to be polled more frequently) and will impact on the performance of the index.

Upload

Jorum have currently indicated that uploading OERs via RSS is out of scope. Upload would probably require some form of persistent and locally unique identifier for each OER to be included in the feed.

Deletion

There are wider questions in connection to deletion from Jorum, but in the context of RSS link deposit, deletion is only an issue if Jorum opts for some form of incremental built index. RSS is not designed to manage the deletion of items.

Overview of combinations of RSS options

I’ve created this table to try to pull together some of the interdependent issues relating to feed processing.

  A B C D E F
  Feed of all OERS Feed of all OERS Subject feed of OERS Subject feed of OERS Magazine feed of OERS Magazine feed of OERS
Feed size Very Big Very Big ‘Medium’ ‘Medium’ Small Small
Update Replace Incremental addition Update Incremental addition Incremental addition Update
Coverage Whole current collection Whole cumulative collection Current subject collection Cumulative subject collection Whole collection (gradually) Transient snapshot of collection
Deletion occurs as a feed is replaced does not occur automatically occurs as a feed is replaced does not occur automatically does not occur automatically occurs as a feed is replaced
OER Deduplication? Not significant Issue Minor issue Issue Issue Not significant

Other options

OAI-PMH

As a precursor, JorumOpen does not currently act as an OAI harvester so this is a somewhat moot point (Note: the software required for OAI-PMH consumption is distinct from the software needed for harvesting).

Within the programme not all OER producers are using repositories and of those that are not all repositories have OAI-PMH enabled. So, although there is some established practice of harvesting metadata via OAI-PMH it would be at best a partial solution.
There are pieces of software which can add support for OAI-PMH export but adapting and implementing them creates an additional development task for projects.

OAI-PMH harvesting has some built in support for resumption (incremental harvesting of metadata from large repositories) and has some support for record deletion but this is not always well supported.
OAI-PMH harvesting services have a mixed record – a key point of note is that they invariably need time to set up.
OAI-PMH harvesting will face many similar issues to RSS harvesting – in that identifiers will point to splash pages and that resources themselves are not harvested.

SRU

As a precursor: JorumOpen does not support SRU based harvesting so this is another moot point.
Considering SRU would require this functionality in both contributing repositories other platforms and into Jorum. It is, however, not yet widely supported or used. Though some commercial repositories do implement it and there are open source clients to bolt-on to repositories or other platforms. This is requires developer time and is likely to be a partial solution only.

Deposit API?

The current deposit tool is based on third party software MRCUTE which runs through Moodle – as such it cannot easily be adapted by Jorum to provide an API.
Jorum are however, exploring the addition of a SWORD deposit endpoint. Suitable SWORD deposit tools would need to be identified (ie those that can handle the right metadata and cope with something that isn’t a research paper – given the research focus of SWORD tool development these are likely to be some of the less-developed tools ).

RSS for deposit, Jorum and UKOER: part 1 review

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Over the past few months CETIS and Jorum have been discussing approaches to bulk deposit to support the projects in the UKOER programme as they deposit or represent their OERs in Jorum. Based on feedback from projects gathered through our technical reviews of projects, we’ve investigated approaches which might work for the programme.

One option we have investigated is the use of RSS. Gareth Waller from Jorum produced a set of feed requirements and a discussion paper suggesting possible issues with the use of RSS. A number of projects have trialled their feeds and provided feedback on Lorna’s blog post introducing Gareth’s paper and outling the issues. The Xpert project has also produced a briefing paper looking at issues around RSS –based deposit. (Considerations and evaluations of the development of distributed repositories when using RSS aggregation as a submission protocol. By Pat Lockley, The University of Nottingham http://webapps.nottingham.ac.uk/elgg/xpert/files/-1/803/xpert+metadata+final.pdf )

Many thanks to Gareth and Laura from Jorum and everyone else who’s contributed to the discussion thus far. This post is a summary of that discussion and comment about other options suggested.

Please note this conversation is shaped by the constraints of the programme. The discussion below focuses on the relation of a single OER project producing a feed or feeds of resources to contribute to Jorum. Issues of how Jorum addresses and combines data feeds from different projects and provides standardised data are a separate discussion.

RSS

Suitability

Although submission to a repository isn’t the primary purpose of RSS, it does have functionality and features that may make it suitable for such a purpose. The investigation of RSS as an option for submitting content to Jorum began with the observations:

Jorum’s requirements

Jorum produced an outline of their minimum requirements for feed-based ingest and a briefing paper summarizing their current take on issues around RSS for deposit.

Feed format and content

Jorum‘s current requirements are:

  1. RSS version 2.0 feed
  2. At least one element belonging to one of the following namespace directly under the channel element. Metadata for all items must be represented in elements belonging to this namespace.
    1. http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imsmd_v1p2
    2. http://ltsc.ieee.org/xsd/LOM
    3. http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
  3. Licence information on each item (in the relevant metadata element). This must contain a v2 Eng & Wales CC licence url e.g.
    1. DC : rights e.g. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence – see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
    2. IMSMD : rights/description/langstring
    3. LOM: rights/description/string”

Feed processing

Jorum currently processes the feed as follows:

  1. “The feed is *not* continually polled for new content. […] The current functionality simply reads the feed when it is deposited and all the items are created in DSpace. It’s a snapshot in time of that RSS feed. If you add in the same feed again, it will store duplicates.
  2. The physical data of a resource in the feed is not stored in JorumOpen. A link is simply created pointing to the resource as indicated by the RSS feed (the “link” element).”
  3. “The feed MUST be valid XML – if the XML coming back isn’t valid in the first place then we cannot process it (neither can any validator, XML reader etc). ”
  4. “Items within a feed are not auto classified within Jorum. In other words, every item in a feed is stored within a single collection as chosen by the admin user i.e. a top level JACS or LearnDirect classification. Having individual feed for each classification such as the OpenLearn model would ensure that items are classified correctly as these feeds can be deposited separately.”

Possible issues about the use of feeds

In his paper Gareth raises a number of issues and questions including the following:

  1. RSS items need to contain the unique id of the OER
  2. It’s not yet clear how to tell from the feed if an OER has changed or been deleted
  3. Feeds should not contain the whole repository contents
  4. There is the possibility that OERs might fall between arbitrary limits for feed creation (50 most recent items polled everyday misses resources above this number)
  5. The richness of metadata which exists within the platform creating the RSS may be restricted to using subset of the fields they have available by the feed creation process or feed consumption process.
  6. Feed deposit needs to make assumptions about licensing
  7. Current exploration of feed deposit relates only to harvesting metadata, not to harvesting resources.

Part 2 of this post will look at the community responses to this proposal and look at emerging issues.

Notes from the web: Making Standards that Work and a Sordid History of Learning Object Repositories

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A few quick items of interest form the web this week. Two offer a perspective of the process of making standards (looking at OAI-PMH); another is an interview with Brian Lamb reviewing the history of Learning Object Repositories.

Talking to DC [Washington] (Adam Bosworth, Adam Bosworth’s Weblog)

In a post based on his experiences with standards development, Adam outlines seven guidelines for good standards development
http://adambosworth.net/2009/10/29/talking-to-dc/

  1. Keep the standard as simple and stupid as possible.
  2. The data being exchanged should be human readable and easy to understand.
  3. Standards work best when they are focused.
  4. Standards should have precise encodings.
  5. Always have real implementations that are actually being used as part of design of any standard.
  6. Put in hysteresis for the unexpected.
  7. Make the spec itself free, public on the web, and include lots of simple examples on the web site.

Making Standards that Work (Dorothea Salo, The Book of Trogool)

http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2009/11/making_standards_that_work.php
Relfecting on Adam’s post, Dorothea relates some of those principles to her own experience and view of standards development in particular commenting on OAI-PMH.
OAI-PMH is an interesting example because it’s so widely used and, as Dorothea says, so simple. When it works, it works well (even if we might now like to change some of it to be more web friendly). However, metadata sharing works best in defined communities. When OAI-PMH doesn’t work, it’s a mess as frequently it’s the data harvesters who notice but who are dependent on the data providers (and potentially also their technical support) to change anything. Interestingly the OAI-PMH Static repository specification pushed some of the emphasis back onto the data provider – as their base information in xml had to be valid xml before it would be mediated by a gateway (but SRs are a whole other story with lots of potential but their own problems.)

The Sordid History of Learning Object Repositories or, a chat with Brian Lamb (Jim Groom, bavatuesdays)

One of the interesting things about the UKOER programme is how much freedom projects have to choose how they are going to store, describe, manage, and share their resources. They are using a wide variety of approaches, which include repositories, content management systems, and web pages of rss feeds. They’re also using a wide variety of ways to descibe stuff. All of the approaches though are some way from the sort of educational world which the original learning object repositories envisaged and which Brian Lamb reflects on here:
http://bavatuesdays.com/the-sordid-history-of-learning-object-repositories-or-a-chat-with-brian-lamb/. I still think repositories have a lot to offer the management of learning materials but they’re not the only option, are better as part of a wider suite of tools, are really hope they aren’t going to ask users about semantic density. To my mind Brian’s relfections highlight a number of reasons why the UKOER programme is implementation nuetral.

I’ve also realised that I’ve not yet pointed to a related resource from CC Talks about OERs A chat with Stephen Downes on OER http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17860 I was also going to talk about Pete Johnston’s latest installment about Simple Dublin Core but that’ll have to wait for another day (http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/11/simple-dc-revisited.html)

Notes from the web: metadata related reports

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There have been two reports relating to metadata released recently that I’ve been meaning to read and blog about: OCLC’s What We’ve Learned from the RLG Partners Metadata Creation Workflows Survey and DLF’s Future Directions in Metadata Remediation for Metadata Aggregators. However, I’m not going to get a chance to do more than skim these for a while – so while they’re fresh here’s the links.

What We’ve Learned from the RLG Partners Metadata Creation Workflows Survey

http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2009-04.pdf
There’s an interesting comparasion of tools and people used to create MARC and non-MARC materials.
Of particular interest is how little libraries seem to involved in ‘educational’ metadata – 8 out of 78 respondents are invovled in creating metadata for learning objects. Now I know there’s a world of difference between learning materials with educational metadata and learning object metadata but looking at the metadata standards being used, educational description still seems to be out of scope. It is also of note how little of the respondents metadata is currently being pushed to/ used by newer forms of exposure – web2.0 tools and SRU.

Future Directions in Metadata Remediation for Metadata Aggregators

http://www.diglib.org/pubs/dlf110.pdf
Many repository and digital library services operate on the premise that exposing their metadata will enable information about thier content to be made available in larger resource discovvery services that aggregate metadata from many sources. Such services provide a valuable service but often have well documented problems with variation in the metadata which they harvest. Whether the metadata is of poor quality or simply designed to support local needs without consideration of a wider context, aggregated metadata needs to be cleaned and otherwise processed to provide a better discovery service. This report examines key services/ features that a aggregated search service would hope to provide and for each documents how metadata supports that service, what tools exist to ‘fix’ harvested metadata, what tools are desired and provides a bibliography and comments. As such this report should represent an overview state of the art (and I really need to read it soon…).

Microsoft: OfficeSWORD plugin and beta of research-output repository platform

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Last week Savas Parastatidis blogged about two repository-related outputs  from Microsoft Research that have just reached beta – one of which, OfficeSWORD, is open source and the other, their research-output repository, is free for non-commercial use.

Please note the following is not based on using these applications, but on what they describe themselves as doing – trying to use these is something I’ll explore when the opportunity arises.

OfficeSWORD

This is a downloadable plugin for Office2007 to support submission via SWORD to a repository. It currently supports deposit from Word2007 and PowerPoint2007.

It still appears very much in beta and is not yet extensively tested/ documented, but the code is available as open source at Codeplex  http://www.codeplex.com/OfficeSWORD.

It will be interesting to see how this plugin develops  but even as it stands,  it is another example of the growing number of projects developing desktop deposit tools.

I’m not yet in a position to compare the  functionality of this too with other desktop deposit tools but… I can’t help thinking this particular tool has the potential to be very useful to repository managers wanting to enable desktop deposit by academics. As the project originates  from Microsoft Research, and is integrated into the desktop applications used to create many simple digital assets it could be much easier to sell to staff who aren’t interested in installing and learning yet another programme.

Research-output repository codename ‘famulus’

this is a first beta release so I’m not sure how much of the below functionality is included yet. UPDATE: savas has commented below that all of the listed functionality is in this release. He also points out what they’re working on next.

“MSR’s Research Output Repository Platform (codename “Famulus”) aims to provide the necessary building blocks, tools, and services for developers who are tasked with creating and maintaining an organization’s repository ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides an easy-to-install and maintain experience for those who want to quickly set up a research output repository for their project, team, or organization. The platform is based on Microsoft’s technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1)  […] New applications on top of the platform can be developed using any .NET language and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 environment. The platform focuses on the management of research assets—such as people, papers, lectures, workflows, data, and tags — as well as the semantic relationships between them. Support for various services such as full-text search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export, SWORD, AtomPub, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the distribution.” http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/48e60ac1-a95a-4163-a23d-28a914007743/Details.aspx .

Everything I’d heard thus far about Microsoft’s initiative in this area (of which these are only 2) had focused on scholarly articles, publishing journals, and research data. Seeing lectures on this list of supported assets is a welcome surprise that begins many more questions than it answers.

More details

More about both of these can be found on Savas’ blog and in a podcast interview by Tallis. I’ll listen to the podcast soon-ish and add anything more about lectures or other learning materials as a comment.

Tallis podcast http://blogs.talis.com/xiphos/2008/10/15/savas-parastatidis-and-alex-wade-talk-with-talis-about-microsoft-research-famulus-scholarly-communication-and-semantic-computing/ or http://tinyurl.com/528dm3

OfficeSWORD

SWORD plugin for Word2007

http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/10/07/86c8cc56-d3e4-49d9-985f-2cfd011f6d54.aspx

SWORD plugin binary release

http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/10/10/adabe247-f9f7-4328-9298-99fe9ef0727f.aspx

Famulus

http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/10/08/0a59c3e1-0fb7-4c11-9dcc-89db3c8db17d.aspx

Areas of change in repositories and digital libraries

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What are the key changes going on in the world of digital libraries, repositories, and academic life? Over the summer I’ve been thinking a little on some of this – in part been prompted by my aforementioned change in job and in part because I’ve been on holiday and it’s afforded a few moments of reflection. I think these are a number of areas where current practice is beginning to change or be challenged. They certainly aren’t all new, but for one reason or another they’ve popped up on my radar over the past few months.

This is neither an exhaustive list, nor authoritative, but I’ve put some thought into what I think is changing how we manage, find, and use digital stuff and may as well share it. Time permitting I will turn some of these into fuller posts which point to some clear examples and have a bit more discussion, but as a first pass…

  1. What, Who, Where, When, Why?
    • Metadata is changing and so must our perceptions and tools. We’ve had non-bibliographic metadata for a while; but increasing tools and users want and can use other forms of metadata. “What is this about and who is it by?” are still key questions but “What is this for?”, “What do you think of this?” “Is this still the same object as it was three years ago?” “What has been done to this object since it’s been in the system?” “Where is this?” “Who owns this?” are all now questions being asked of digital resources. Tools and users are looking for as much information as they can get their hands on. Sometimes this information stands in the object’s stead (like the ‘traditional’ catalogue), but increasingly it’s information that sits alongside the object and provides connections (to other objects or for tools).
  2. Universities (and other organisations)  and are beginning to have the opportunity to join up the different systems and data they hold.
    • Conversations about data duplication are not new and often the problems besetting institutional connectivity are cultural rather than technical, but there does seem to be some sense change.  Technical change and new connections may not always be on the scale of Cardiff’s engagement with SOA, but maybe linking student or staff registration services with library/ e-resource user management is a little closer, and when the technical systems are in place perhaps we’ll get better at data management.
  3. As more institutions begin to consider what they do with their scientific datasets, digital curation is becoming a real challenge/ practice.
    • Datasets are unforgiving and as more institutions begin to consider how they will manage the data they produce and as more funders expect good data management better practice is being forced onto the agenda. For example UK Research Funders’ Policies for the Management of Information Outputs. Interestingly enough at what might be considered the other end of the spectrum there has also been some JISC-funded work into the curation of learning materials (which are often regarded as ephemeral).
    • Reuse of datasets as more institutions develop VREs may increase the demand for/ on local dataset storage
  4. Resource-oriented views of the world are growing in prominence.
    • this has been discussed extensively elsewhere but there does seem to be a trend to making repository and digital library resources more web-friendly. This shift is most evidenced in OAI-ORE.
  5. Annotation is here to stay
    • We’re getting used to annotations whether we use tools built into systems or external tools. When we chose between 10 relevant items what Joe in Newcastle thought about the article, image, or food processor does influence our behaviour, and that of the users of our services. More importantly we need to make sure that it’s easy for users to ‘annotate’ our stuff in external services – repositories and digital libraries need add this article to my del.icio.us or digg buttons as much as any other online resource.
  6. Mainstream web protocols are seeing more use in the library community
    • more and more repositories now come with refinable RSS feeds for new items.  Atom is seeing a lot of use as part of a deposit API (SWORD) or as a binding for OAI-ORE. These are some examples of mainstream web protocols increasingly used by libraries. This means the protocol development doesn’t depend on community development or maintenance and that, alongside the specific library tools, there’s a greater chance you can take what you produce and mash it into whatever new tool appears in the wider web community. [The importance of this may lurk behind some of ORE’s current discussions about to implement ORE-resource maps in ATOM. ]
  7. CRIG motto “the coolest thing to do with you data will be thought of by someone else”
    • People are going to want to metadata and resources you create or manage in ways you don’t anticipate and, if you let them,  some of what they think of will be good. Of course not everything should be freely reusable and not everything people do with it is going to be good but, in the context of publicly-funded instituions freeing up metadata and content should be our default starting point.
  8. Institutional-related content is not going to only be held in the institutions
    • Stuff connected to institutions is increasingly going to be all over the place –  academics deposit in subject repositories or slideshare and content produced about institutional life ends up on blogs and flickr. Institutions could try to control what happens but there is a greater opportunity for them to both collect resources from their community (a list of academics on slideshare; an aggregated feed of departmental delicious or connotea tags) and make sure their resources are pushed out to other services too (publicising branded resources, offering training on web2.0 tools,  making sure institutional repository content is also push to relevant subject repositories).
  9. Branding, publicity, goodwill
    • 7 and 8 create a lot of this; and I think as a community we’re beginning to understand this (for example: Library of Congress on Flickr, the various Opencourseware initiatives).I’m not saying it’s always going to make ‘commerical’ sense but sometimes it will and we’re getting better at remembering how much of our ‘income’ is public funding.
  10. Services should talk to each other…
    • Many of the web tools and services that people use are beginning to offer the possibility of much greater connectivity. This ranges from connected, portable, or shared authentication/ identity (such as linking hotmail accounts; OpenId developments) to api-based access to content (such as: twitter/ ebay/ del.icio.us etc in netvibes, flickr photos pulled into animoto). I think there is a growing expectation that content and services should not be locked into one particular platform or interface.
  11. Good metadata matters..
    • I’ve less direct evidence for this but I think that more we want to engage with all of the above, the more we need good metadata and more of it. The more tools and services scale the more that greater metadata quality is required (though see 1. this does not necessarily mean we should spend more time cataloguing). The clearest presentation I’ve seen of this in practice was in connection to IVIMEDS.