Planet Semantico

The first Mashed Libraries UK 2008 event is taking place at Birkbeck College in London on 27th November.

This Talking with Talis conversation is with Owen Stephens, Assistant Director: e-Strategy and Information Resources at Imperial College.  Owen is the driving force behind the organisation of the event and has been aided by the sponsorship of UKOLN.

Owen tells us how the idea for the day came to him, what is hopes are for the day and what attendees can expect.

To help with the organisation, Owen has set up a Ning Site Mashed Library where you can sign up for the event and get involved in the discussion about the format of the day.

This is a great idea and I am looking forward to attending with a couple of other Talisians.  We are also going to be making available a couple of Talis Platform Stores for use at the event.  I’ll be posting some info about this on the Ning in the near future.

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English Birkbeck College in London, Imperial College, London, Ning Site Mashed Library, Owen, Owen Stephens, United Kingdom

As reported by Bookseller.com, Amazon has launched it’s print on demand (POD) programme in the UK. From Amazon’s press release:

Using proprietary POD technology, Amazon can rapidly print and ship a single book in response to a customer’s order. Titles in the programme will effectively always be in-stock, allowing customers to benefit from Amazon’s shipping offers such as Prime (Amazon’s membership programme offering unlimited one-day delivery) and Free Super Saver Delivery, and publishers and authors to benefit from increased sales.

Amazon POD also provides a cost-effective way for publishers to offer titles for sale that might otherwise not be available to customers – out-of-print works, niche titles, custom books, foreign language editions and alternative formats such as large print. POD further benefits publishers by eliminating the risk of large print runs and the cost of maintaining inventory.

Leading publishers in the UK and around the world are working with Amazon.co.uk to offer their titles via its POD service, including Faber and Faber, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., HarperCollins UK, Cambridge University Press and Allen and Unwin Australia.

"Working with publishers, we hope to bring hundreds of thousands of books to Amazon.co.uk’s customers that might never have otherwise been available,” said Christopher North, Vice President of Media at Amazon.co.uk. “POD not only enables publishers to keep more titles in-stock at Amazon, but it also makes possible innovative new approaches to publishing.”

So you will now be able to get out of print books delivered to your door – at one time you could only get them from your library or by speculatively browsing around your local second-hand book store.  The world is a changing….

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English Allen, Amazon.co.uk, Cambridge University, Cambridge University Press, Christopher North, Faber and Faber, HarperCollins UK, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., POD technology, United Kingdom

OLE – The Open Library Environment Project has been around for about a year now, and I am guilty of not monitoring as closely as I would have liked to.  So the opportunity to listen to their recent webcast seemed a great way to get up to speed again. 

Following the instructions on the OLE Project site to replay the webcast, led me to one of the most unusual webcast playback experience I’ve had for a while.   To see the slides you have to click through to a service run by Adobe Acrobat, which provides a good representation of the webcast environment, complete with chat traffic in real time.  The problem then is that you have to use the telephone system to get the audio.  This is not a cheap exercise for those of us having to dial international – at least with Skype Out you can keep the costs down a bit.  Synchronising the listening with the viewing is then a bit of a challenge, especially if you have to pause and restart.

Anyway enough about the experience – what about the content?

What is clear is that the Mellon Funded Project has got a great deal of attention and significant partners from academic and national libraries.  They also have a challenging and worthy goal, which they are taking significant early steps towards:

“By the end of our project, we will have a design for a next-generation library system using Service Oriented Architecture. We also will have built a community of interest that can be tapped to help build the OLE framework.”

The webcast inevitably, especially in the QA section, swung between the low-level detail, the strategic approach, and things like privacy which are more the policy concern of potential implementing libraries than the project itself.

Having listened to it, it is clear that they are working on an assumption that implementing libraries would have to throw their current investment in commercial or open source systems away and build all this from scratch – this being based on experience with the current generation of systems not being capable of integrating easily, or not  dealing with electronic resources.  That is a heck of a large chunk to bite off, even if you pull in things like circulation and cataloguing from other projects.

Experience also calls me to strongly question the emphasis on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), that is if SOA is being used as generally understood as against a generic term for systems being connected via web-style calls.

A bit of background on that ‘experience’ I mention – There are [in general terms] two approaches to Web Services – tightly coupled SOA, and loosely coupled REST based services.  The difference being that a SOA developer/integrator trying to embed the service in to their application needs access to web service descriptions and other enterprise integration tools. Whereas in the RESTful world, integration calls can often be tested using a web browser, and integrators/developers need no more development tools than they currently use.

Both SOA & REST have their benefits and their, sometimes religious, proponents.  With our first use of SOAP (the underlying messaging protocol for SOA) back in the late 1990’s I have been using both of these competing approaches for some time.  Talis over that time has developed and rolled out and established a significant user community for a product known as Talis Keystone.  Keystone is a web service integration component designed to enable external enterprise services (Student Registries, Finance Systems, Student Portals, e-payment services, CRM systems, etc.) to easily and reliably integrate library system data and functionality into their workflow. 

Keystone is now in use in many Talis customer libraries, and with some from libraries with a system from another vendor, in the UK.  Successful integrations have been completed with products such as: Aggresso, Civica, Oracle, and SAP finance systems; Microsoft Sharepoint, uPortal, Moodle, and Blackboard learning and portal environments; and WorldPay e-payment services.  Integration with systems from other suppliers are already in the pipeline.

From day one, Talis Keystone has had the capability to support both SOA and RESTful integration. It maybe useful for projects such as OLE to reflect on the experience in rolling out these integrations, and the take-up of the REST and SOA options.   The vast majority of these integrations have taken the RESTful approach, with only one or two going for SOA.  There are many reasons for this, but they all fall under the heading of there being a much lower barrier to implementing REST than SOAP.  Pragmatically I am of the opinion that lack of SOA capability would not have prevented any of these integrations taking place, whereas if SOA was the the only choice many would not have been undertaken at all. 

I/We would be more than happy to share some of these experiences in implementing and rolling out a product that addresses many of the concerns of the OLE Project.

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English CRM, e-payment services, enterprise integration tools, external enterprise services, finance systems, Microsoft, open source systems, Oracle, SOA, telephone system, underlying messaging protocol, United Kingdom, web browser, web service integration component, Web Services, web-style calls

The Web of Data Practitioners Days are approaching - giving me the opportunity to do an advance interview with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web evangelist, Community Platform manager at Talis, Web of Things everything (I think). I’d just like to extract two or three points here - you can read the whole interview on our website. First something that’s noteworthy to me as it says something about the patterns of technological evolution in general:

Looking back a few years, I don’t think many people working on the Web could have predicted the remarkable rise of blogging, the revival of DHTML and ancient Internet Explorer tricks such as Ajax, online social networks, Wikis, the whole Web 2.0 thing. It’s worth noting that these developments have been consistent with Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a system in which people are the key component.

Shifting to the Semantic Web perspective, for a long time I have believed this approach is on track simply because it offers improvements to the Web for which there are no obvious alternative techniques. Personally, I was relatively late to realise what those improvements really were - moving from a Web of Documents to a more general Web of Data. Expressed like that, and looking at existing Web architecture, the Semantic Web is the path of least resistance.

Remember? AJAX, when it cropped up and caused a big buzz in 2005, was nothing new, it was just a new term for an old thing, i.e. the Internet Explorer tricks Danny mentions (see also A Brief History of AJAX: “Browser asynchronous hacks have been possible since 1996, when Internet Explorer introduced the IFRAME tag, passing through a number of techniques such as pixel gifs, Netscape layers, Microsoft Remote Scripting, Java/JavaScript gateways, stylesheet hacks, image/cookies, and most recently the XMLHttpRequest.”)

Sometimes it takes a while until someone (society, industry, what have you) starts to notice that this or that, something, could actually be useful. Sometimes technologies that everybody thinks are silly become a huge sucess - think text messages!

And sometimes you have a great (piece of) technology and it just never really catches on, and if that is the case, then mostly because some forces in the market (trusts, monopolies, corporations who force you to use their software/technology and at ridiculous price, people who would do anyhing they can to undo the natural laws of the digital world) won’t let it happen. What happend to Video 2000 and Betamax? Nixed by JVC’s licensing strategies for VHS. Just wanted to make this point before moving on to the next quote. Danny:

Regarding possible obstacles, there are many ways the Web could suffer, probably most dangerous being interventions from national governments or commercial interests, tilting the table on which we build these systems - such as software patents and threats to net neutrality. The Web works because it’s more or less the same to everyone, everywhere.

So if you think that the Web should continue to be the same to everyone, everywhere, if you would like to liaise with other people interested in the SemWeb and the Web of Data, but most importantly, if you do not know a whole lot about the SemWeb yet but would like to learn more, then please come and do attend the Web of Data Practitioners Days in Vienna, Oct 22-23.

It is going to start with a “Web of Data 101″, i.e. a low-threshold introduction given by Keith Alexander (Talis, UK) and Yves Raimond (Queen Mary University of London, UK) to Semantic Technology in the context of the Web. Here is the full program - please mind that there is a deadline for the registration also (6 Oct 2008!).

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English AJAX, ancient Internet Explorer, Danny Ayers, DHTML, Google, Internet Explorer, Java, Keith Alexander, Microsoft, Semantic Web, social networks, software patents, software/technology, Tim Berners-Lee, United Kingdom, University of London, Vienna, web architecture, Web creator, Web Debate, Web evangelist, Web perspective, Yves Raimond

(by Matthias Samwald)

I am packing my bags once again: The first VoCamp (hosted at Oxford University, UK) is about to start this week. So, what is a VoCamp supposed to be? The official definition reads like this: “A VoCamp is a series (hopefully) of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. The emphasis of the event(s) is not on creating the perfect ontology in a particular domain, but on creating vocabs that are good enough for people to start using for publishing data on the Web.”

I always thought that the lack widely established vocabularies/ontologies has been very damaging to the developent of the Semantic Web. The VoCamp initiative could help changing this situation for the better, so I really hope that this is the start of a long series of events.

My topics of main interest are: 1) Associative Tags; 2) Agreement, Disagreement, discourse; 3) Corporate Semantic Web, 4) “Are upper level ontologies/vocabularies not so bad after all?”, 5) “ Cleaner schemas and ontologies”. These interests are motivated partly by use-cases from the “KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki” EU project, and partly by developments in the area of biomedical research at DERI Galway and the W3C Interest Group for Health Care and Life Science. Details below.

__Associative Tags__

Tagging is one of the key components of the ‘Web 2.0′, and Semantic Web technologies will help to make tagging even more powerful. Schemas such as SCOT or MOAT have already been established, and make it possible to ‘tag’ not only with simple strings, but with entities. These entities (such as concepts described in SKOS) can be associated with clear semantics and can be further described with RDF statements, to describe hierarchies of entities, or to link entities to rich data sources such as DBpedia. This enables sophisticated data-integration and cross-data source queries that would not have been able with simple, string-based tags.

On the other hand, Semantic Web developers can learn from the simplicity that has made tagging so successful. Creating useful tags is very simple, and good user interfaces can further improve the simplicity of creating useful tag with feature such as autocompletion and tag recommendation. This simplicity should server as a role model for many Semantic Web applications.

Specifically, I am interested in what I call ‘associative tags’, bundles of tags/entities/concepts that can be used for the simple representation of facts. The primary intention of creating aTags is not the categorization of the document, but the representation of the key facts inside the document. Key facts in the biomedical domain might be, for example,

“Protein A interacts with protein B” (which can be represented with an aTag comprising of the three entities “Protein A”, “Molecular interaction” and “Protein B”) or

“Overexpression of protein A in tissue B is the cause of disease C” (an aTag comprising of the four entities “Overexpression”, “Protein A”, “Tissue B” and “Disease C”).

Once the aTags from these different sources are aggregated, it is possible to pose a query such as “show me molecules that are associated with molecules that are associated with disease C”, yielding “protein A” as an answer. Hierachies (in the form of rdfs:subClassOf and skos:narrower) can be used to expand queries based on background knowledge (e.g., that “disease D” is a subclass of “disease C”).

In many cases (especially with some ontologies in the biomedical domain), creating such associative tags can be much simpler than the creation of ‘real’ statements, i.e., relations between individuals and property restrictions of classes.

__Agreement, Disagreement, discourse__

Many people in the Semantic Web community are interested in the representation of argumentation structures on the web. For example: stating that one snippet of text contains statements that are in disagreement with another snippet of text, which is in agreement with yet another snippet of text. This can be of use for many knowledge domains, such as news articles, biomedical publications or reports submitted to a software bug tracker. Of special interest in this context are extensions of established schemas, especially SIOC. There is also another ontology called SWAN that is specifically tailored to the biomedical domain, and efforts to align SWAN with SIOC have started recently.

__Corporate Semantic Web__

As Semantic Web technologies are finally getting mature enough to allow industrial uptake, it is becoming clear that ontologies for describing organization structures and business processes are still lacking maturity. FOAF allows us to represent basic information about persons, organizations and their relationships, but lacks vocabulary for stating that one person is the boss of another person, that a project consists of several subtasks, et cetera. While there are some small projects that try to create such schemas/ontologies, a solution of widespread acceptance does not seem to be in sight at the moment.

__Are upper level ontologies/vocabularies not so bad after all?__

FOAF seemingly tried it a long time ago – foaf:Person is a subclass of, “http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Person”, foaf:Document “http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Document” and so on. Linking to external schemas/ontologies (or making use of their classes and properties directly) can definitly help in facilitating semantic interoperability. For a long time, many web developers were very skeptical about such ‘top-down’ approaches of data integration, but recently the recognition of the potential values of such resources seems to be increasing. In parallel, the recent 1-2 years brought us some very large upper ontologies that are available as linked data, such as:

• Wordnet 2.0, hosted by the W3C
• Yago/DBpedia
• OpenCyc (now with new URIs)
• UMBEL (derived from OpenCyc and others).

I think the practice of re-using and linking to such upper ontologies as should become popular (again). It helps in creating a highly interlinked Semantic Web, and helps to avoid re-inventing the wheel for each new schema/ontology. This linking should not be done post-hoc, but should be a central part of the early stages of vocabulary/ontology/data creation.

__Cleaner schemas and ontologies__

Working with established ontologies and schemas in ontology editors can be a chore. Most have dependencies on other ontologies, but don’t use owl:imports. Most use an awkward mix of OWL statements and RDF(S), resulting in ontologies that are OWL Full. Many require some OWL reasoning to make use of sameAs statements and inverse properties, but at the same time reasoning is complicated because the ontologies are OWL Full or even contain logical inconsistencies. Often enough, there seems to be no practical reason for the design choices that caused the trouble: some minor changes can turn a messy OWL Full ontology into an OWL lite or OWL DL ontology. At the moment, many different working groups have created local versions of schemas such as FOAF or Dublin Core that are valid OWL-DL to fix that problem.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Trying to adhere to OWL lite/DL and adding owl:imports statements can help building cleaner, modular and more sustainable ontologies, and does not require significant additional effort during the creation of ontologies. Maybe we can find a consensus that this would be a worthwhile goal, and develop plans towards reaching that goal.

English European Union, Matthias Samwald, Oxford University, Semantic Web technologies, United Kingdom, Web applications, Web community, web developers, Web technologies, Web/Web, Web__

I didn’t know about the Open Hypermedia protocol (OHP) until I read a blog post today by Dave Millard, a Lecturer of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. The OHP proposal was written in the 1996 by Hugh Davis, Andy Lewis and Antoine Rizk, and it was intended for the “communication between applications and hypermedia link services.”

OHP had inspired Dave Millard while he was pursuing his PhD studies, which he completed in 2001, but his recent involvement in a project called Synote - Annotating Media Resources gave him the opportunity to “return to some of those lost OH principles in the age of Web 2.0.”

Please read the account of this journey back on his blog - I would like to highlight in particular the conclusion, because he thinks that the failure of OHP offers some valuable lessons for the Semantic Web:

There’s a lesson here for the Semantic Web, another grand idea from the Hypertext and Web community that I have commented on before. The Semantic Web is a set of standards for representing and exchanging knowledge (as sets of RDF triples constrained by ontologies), like Open Hypermedia it is therefore about models, openness and interoperability. But also like Open Hypermedia many Semantic Web developers have fallen into the trap of forcing their model down into the system implementation and up into the UI.

So in the end perhaps Open Hypermedia does offer us a valuable lesson - not about the structures of hypertext - but about the need to abstract implementation and user experience away from the conceptual models that drive them.

This is a hard lesson - because you want users and developers to see your models, otherwise how can you convince them of their value. But it needs to be learned, otherwise the resulting systems will be far from convincing, and the machine-readable Web will continue to exist only as a collection of chaotic mashups.

Which takes us right into the interface debate and, e.g., the question whether data browsers are or are not too geeky. What do you think - what would be strategies to deliver the best to be achieved with a data model to the user, without turning the interface into a tricky contraption?

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English Andy Lewis, Antoine Rizk, Benjamin Nowack, Dave Millard, Hugh Davis, hypermedia link services, machine-readable Web, OHP, Open Hypermedia protocol, RDF, United Kingdom, University of Southampton, Web community, web developers, Web Going Insane

A couple days ago, Michael Hausenblas suggested I look at something called Ubiquity, and sent me a link. Because it came in the middle of editing the current version of Nodalities Magazine, I did what I often do with interesting concepts: I opened a new firefox tab and left it there for two days, hoping I would notice it before firefox crashed with all tabs on board. Well, since then, there has certainly been a lot of discussion about Ubiquity—both around the office and on the web. To introduce it, I can’t do much worse than pointing at their video and introduction page, and just say that it’s a Mozilla labs project and a Firefox plug-in.

However, what makes it interesting to me, is that it possibly introduces a new metaphor for interacting with web content—and, vicariously, linked data. The thought process behind it is that whenever we want to “do something” online, we are generally forced into round-about processes. Say, for example, I want to email a friend to tell him about a new restaurant I went to, maybe even invite him to meet me there for lunch. To accomplish this task, I’d typically open up three or four tabs in Firefox, and maybe open ICal and Mail application windows too: I’d google the restaurant, find its phone number and address from yell.com; map its address using maps.google.com or similar; I’d check which date I’m free; and finally email him the info, copying and pasting links and map images between multiple tabs, and—if I’m not using gmail’s web interface—into other applications as well. If you followed that last sentence, you’re doing well: it’s long, and complex (technically complex-compound, but we won’t get pedantic here), and it reflects the process.

Although it’s a beta, and many of its functions are very much less-than-polished, it offers a glimpse of a possible interaction future, with drastically more simple processes to complete tasks. What it creates is the ability to interact with content more directly, so you can select some content and start telling the application to DO stuff TO the content, by typing. So, i can select a physical address and type: “map this” into Ubiquity, and it’ll pull up google maps for that address (at the moment, it’s having trouble with some UK addresses because it’s using google.com and therefore not contextualising through the .co.uk which works better for addresses here). I can then use that information on the same screen. I can “yell florists in birmingham” and have a list of flower vendors in Birmingham from Yell.com (yellow pages service), which I can then drop into an email or whatever.

Very quickly, I ran into a conceptual problem with Ubiquity’s idea of natural-language interaction, however. Their strapline is: “An experiment into connecting the Web with language.” The idea being that you can “tell” the computer to “do something with/to this information” or “command” for something to happen, changing the basic interaction metaphor from a visual click/drag/drop/open-window process to a linguistic “I’m telling the computer what I want and it happens” framework. My immediate reaction was: “This isn’t linguistic, it’s command-line”, and was instantly transported to trying to learn Linux without a technical background, with all the frustration of a non-technical user trying to interact with software using a command-line.

You see, from my perspective as a linguist, I often feel frustrated with the computing community’s view of what language actually is. Without exploring propositionality, conceptual metaphor framework or anything else, it’s sufficient to say that language is both simpler and more complex than anything we’ve got software to emulate yet. What Ubiquity actually is, is a very simplified command-line which is “aware” of the information you’re already interacting with. From that perspective, it seems to work very well, with a more streamlined set of commands and more “natural language” feel to the words you actually type.

The upshot of this is that users have to learn a set of commands to interact with their applications, but that these commands are intended to be transparent in meaning. So, you “map this” or “help” or “add 1PM lunch with Dave”. After reading some of the reasoning behind this from one of the designers, Aza Raskin, I started to appreciate it more and more. The current contrasting model to this “Linguistic Command Line” is menus and windows. Menus and windows are inefficient, if you think about it. You have to select text, or images or whatever and physically move your curser to a menu somewhere in the extreme side of a window on your screen, finding and selecting the command from a drop-down list from which you need to remember the path to each command. The problem accelerates when you incorporate windows and applications into this. So if I were to incorporate some text from one window into another, linking to the original, and maybe dropping in a customised image too; I’d have to open multiple windows, executing menu commands or application-specific keyboard “short-cuts” at each stage.

But, I already know what I want to do with the stuff, right? Why not just activate a single keyboard shortcut and begin typing your instructions to the system: send link to <email>. Ubiquity allows this. In this framework, Firefox becomes a bit of a microcosm of the operating system (with tabs being windows, and sites and web-apps being desktop applications). As you type, it short-lists commands, so you don’t even type the full thing: typing “t r a n” ends up with the translate, so you can skip it and begin typing “to eng”, and it will offer you “translate text to English”.

Now, imagine having this ability with any form of Linked Data? Imagine if that bit of text were automatically recognised as a date, or co-ordinates, or person. Imagine selecting a picture of a restaurant and typing: “invite fred for lunch at 3PM on monday, enter”. The system could automatically know that the picture was of a restaurant (whose profile could include co-ordinates, contact info, and even a hypothetical automatic table-reservation system for invites from the web), that fred is your colleague (whose FoaF profile includes email or instant messenger preferences),  that lunch is an email subject and a social event, and that 3PM on Monday is a date (in your calendar and in Fred’s calendar once the message is sent) which corresponds with your name + su. All of that information is being used in several processes (Copy/paste, lookup restaurant profile, map location, lookup email or IM, create iCal event, create email or IM message, send)  but all you’re really doing is : “inviting fred for lunch at 3PM on Monday.”

This is incredibly intriguing, because it begins to show how some systems can begin to scale up to the immensity of the Web. We, as people, know what we want to accomplish, and if we could just tell our computers that, we’d be much happier. I think this could be a first step, and while I’m not completely convinced with the command-line metaphor, I can see this as a definite step, and a different perspective. My new copy of  Aza’s father’s book the Humane Interface, arrived this morning to supplement this, and I’ll be blogging more about that, if it’s ever returned to my desk.

Person Michael Hausenblas

Right click for SmartMenu shortcuts

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English Aza Raskin, birmingham, desktop applications, interface—into other applications, Linux, Michael Hausenblas, operating system, United Kingdom, web apps, web content—and

The next UK general election is probably only a couple of years away and there is a serious possibility that we could see a change of governing party. Against this background Ed Vaizey, Conservative MP for Wantage & Didcot and Shadow Minister for Culture is beginning to shape his thoughts and future policy with respect to libraries.

This podcast conversation, recorded in Ed Vaizey’s office in the Houses of Parliament, explores Ed’s thinking as to the way Government should influence library services provided by local authorities; is the MLA as an organisation the appropriate way to promote libraries at a national level; and even is the Department of Culture the right place for libraries to be represented.

With a guest appearance of Big Ben, chiming the hour, this is an interesting insight into the thoughts of a senior opposition politician on the future of libraries.

This conversation was recorded on Wednesday 10th July and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

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English Department of Culture, library services, MLA, United Kingdom

Sir Tim Berners-Lee first talked about the Semantic Web in the seminal Scientific American article back in 2001.  The first mention of it I can find on Panlibus was back in 2004, and anyone who has spent a few minutes talking about data with us at Talis will know we have been passionate about Semantic Web technologies ever since.  My colleague Paul Miller has interviewed Sir Tim on Talking with Talis. Our Platform is built using Semantic Web techniques and technologies.  

In the techno-geek community there is a significant division between those that get the Semantic Web, and can’t wait until it is a reality, and those that don’t get it and think it is science fiction that will never become usefully real.

The discussions between these groups often involve things such as RDF, Open Linked Data - all far too techie for a conversation with  the general public - or you would think so.

Now along comes Sir Tim on BBC Radio 4’s morning current affairs program Today.  Today pulls in a regular national audience of millions, the vast majority of whom you could in no way describe as techie. He delivered a classic description of the Semantic Web, in language which made it easy to follow - even the interviewer appeared to understand! - and the dreaded RDF was mentioned.

This eight minute conversation, which includes an introduction from the BBC’s science correspondent Tom Feilden, should become introductory listening for anyone wanting to find out more about the Semantic Web.   Because of the potential benefits to data rich environments such as libraries, it should be compulsory listening for librarians, who can then go on and listen to library people who get it such as Allan Cho and Ed Summers.  For those that want to dig even further, I can do no better than recommend Nodalities Magazine, and our sister blog Nodalities.

Back to Sir Tim’s interview.  Towards the end he is asked about what is happening with the Semantic Web in the UK.  He has a reputation for not wanting to advertise particular companies, but I must admit I was shouting out what about Garlik, what about True Knowledge, and what about Talis! - there I’ve done it for him.

Picture from hyoga on Flickr.

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English Allan Cho, BBC Radio, Ed Summers, Paul Miller, RDF, Semantic Web technologies, Tim Berners-Lee, Tom Feilden, United Kingdom, Web techniques, Web technologies

Alejandro Garza over on the Stupendous Amazing Library blog, extrapolates the fact that there is very little partnership between library system vendors to conclude that they are not interested in interoperation between their systems.  He is picking up on extracts from the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study as commented upon by the Disruptive Library Technology Jester.

Coming from a history of integration protocols, in the library world, where they were more a framework for agreement than a standard, it is easy to assume that the only way to get two systems to talk is for their suppliers to establish a partnership to get it to work.  My least favourite standard NCIP is a classic in this regard. 

As I commented on the Jester’s post, the questions for the study were:

… in the present tense. Answering with ‘our products will integrate, etc., etc.’, would have no doubt drawn equal scepticism, but for different reasons.

The answers you picked out are symptomatic of an industry in transition. Transition from products without exception based on architectures that never envisioned light-weight loosely-coupled integration. Transition to a REST based service oriented architecture where integration between library and non-library applications should be simple and based on simple and open standards.

The “Do you have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?” question in the survey demonstrates an attachment to traditional thinking towards integration. So far, with the traditional heavy-weight protocols we are used to in the library world, the only reliable way to get integration that works has been through a partnership between suppliers. Web 2.0 has demonstrated that with simple light-weight protocols, integration is possible without the need for commercial partnerships. There are many benefits that arise from partnerships, but they shouldn’t be a prerequisite for successful integration.

It is not all doom and gloom though. Initiatives such as the DLF’s ILS API defining simple REST base protocols that all vendors should be able to support, have started to gather momentum in the last few months. A momentum that appears to be supported both by vendors and open source groups.

Since I made that comment I attended a JISC and SCONUL Library Management Systems Study Consultation Event in London.  This event was a get together of stakeholders in the UK academic library community, which were joined by representatives from system vendors for the afternoon session.  For those with a sadistic streak in must have made an entertaining spectacle, watching six vendor representatives (Ex Libris, Infor, Innovative, OCLC, SirsiDynix & Talis) trying to squeeze their views in to 5 minute slots.  From most of those presentations and the discussion that followed, it is clear that the vendors are just as much stakeholders in this as the rest of the community.

I feel there is a refreshing openness in opinion and approach that is starting to spread through the conversations in the world of library systems.   This openness has been in high evidence in the recent Library 2.0 Gang conversations on ILS APIs and Bolt-on OPACs. 

It was a good meeting in London, I only hope that the organisers can keep the momentum going and build a community around the concerns of all the stakeholders, vendors included.  If the initiative started by the study falls back in to the traditional model of projects and reports that we are used to, it will be a massive waste of an opportunity.

Back to my original question - do we need partnerships to enable interoperability?  No we don’t.  With loosely-coupled integration, facilitated by web native light-weight open APIs, interoperability should ‘just happen’.  Vendors should, and are starting to be in the position to, say my systems are open for you to interoperate with - who ever you are, partnership in place or not.  This won’t happen over night, but we are already on a new path, with a healthy does of credit for the DLF’s leadership in giving us some direction.

Photo from Flickr by Just.Luc.

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English Alejandro Garza, API, integration protocols, library systems, light-weight protocols, London, non-library applications, SOA, Stupendous Amazing Library, United Kingdom

Vendors respond robustly to critical HE LMS report is the headline on the front of the latest issue of the CILIP Gazette.  What follows is the second in a two-part feature on the JISC/SCONUL study, which I have discussed in Panlibus previously, by Gazette contributor Tim Buckley Owen.

In preparation for this second article on the subject, Tim contacted the four vendors (Ex Libris, Innovative, SirsDynix, Talis) who between them provide over 90% of the UK higher education Library Systems, and asked them to comment on the report.

I would have linked to the article if it been available on line.  Unfortunately the Gazette’s web page only shows an out of date thumbnail of the latest issue.  So, here are some snippets from Tim’s article:

[the vendors] acknowledge that things need to change in university libraries, and are starting to develop new systems as a result - but it’s not always clear yet what those changes actually need to be.

‘We agree that the library management system, with its “traditional” scope and functionality, does not adequately address the expectations of end users,’ says Tamar Sadeh of ExLibris, which has developed its Primo discovery and delivery solution in response.  ‘If the LMS does not interoperate with other institutional systems and resources, it deserves to be bypassed and become irrelevant,’ agrees Talis’s Richard Wallis

‘There is no disagreement that users’ demand for information is morphing in new and exciting ways and that the library (and library systems) need to change to meet those needs,’ agrees Gene Shimshock of Innovative.  ‘However, interoperability is but a part of a rather complicated puzzle, a means to an end, and is not the sole factor in determining libraries’ relevancy.’

Stephen Abram of SirsiDynix shares this view.  ‘You can build all this stuff but you actually have to align it with the way the users are behaving… there is no one right answer right now - and that no one right answer is the challenge for librarians.’

So what’s the solution?  Open application programming interfaces (API), says SirsiDynix’s Abram, with the vendor providing the toolkit and the librarians choosing the tools to meet their clients variegated needs.

‘Can we as vendors create appropriate solutions?  No,’ he declares.  ‘Can our clients, in a collaboration environment, using our tools, create them?  Yes.’

Talis’s Wallis agrees that open systems are the way forward.  ‘The current monolithic model and a lack of web based APIs and standards has led to an effective vendor lock-in… a lack of real competition, thus a lack of innovation and inevitably frustrated customers.’

The study proposes that JISC & SCONUL are best placed to ensure that the libraries and vendors agree on priorities.  As Tim says:

- and vendors are hardly likely to disagree.

‘Any initiative that moves our understanding of the problems (and opportunities) for the library forward in a meaningful way is always welcomed,’ says Innovative’s Shimshock, citing his own company’s work on the emerging Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI).  ‘We would welcome the ability to engage at a consortial level with important and influential organizations such as JISC and SCONUL that can work with their constituent members,’ agrees ExLibris’s Sadeh.

But there are some caveats.  ‘Looking at the programmes of the recent JISC and upcoming SCONUL conferences the role of vendors seems to be viewed by organizers as sponsors of drinks receptions rather than active participants in the debate,’ declares Richard Wallis of Talis.  ‘Our hope is that representative bodies as JISC and SCONUL find a way to constructively and openly collaborate with all stakeholders.’

Libraries, bodies such as JISC & SCONUL, the system vendors, and I would include the open source community, are all important stakeholders in the way libraries and the technologies and services they use develop over the next few years.  It is for all these stakeholders to agree in a conversation of equals as to the way forward.  The old ways of either libraries broadcasting requirements, or vendors individually coming up with ‘the new way to do things’ in the hope that everyone will move to their systems, did not and even more will not move us forward.  What is needed is a requirements, solutions, innovation sharing, and visionary, but also focused on practicalities, conversation - let’s hope it emerges from burst of activity following the publishing of this study.

The vendors, the type of library, and their issues, are not limited to the UK HE community.  They are replicated on a global scale.  Libraries and other interested parties outside of the UK, should be watching this closely - it could well save time and repetition in their own conversations with the same stakeholders in their locations - hopefully leading to a global conversation.

Egotistical note:  Those of you with sharp eyes may have noticed a picture of yours truly on the front cover of this issue of the Gazette.  Through a happy coincidence of editorial deadlines, I am not only quoted in Tim’s headline article on page one, but I am also to be found on page two introducing the Library 2.0 Gang.  I suppose they will have to name this one the Wallis issue!

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English appropriate solutions, ExLibris, Gene Shimshock, institutional systems, library systems, Richard Wallis, SirsiDynix, Stephen Abram, Tamar Sadeh, Tim Buckley Owen, United Kingdom

Unlike traditional search engines, which crawl the Web gathering Web pages, Semantic Web search engines index RDF data stored on the Web and provide an interface to search through the crawled data. Below is a list of Semantic Web search engines that are currently under development.

Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE)

SWSE is a search engine for the RDF Web on the Web, and provides the equivalent services a search engine currently provides for the HTML Web. The system explores and indexes the Semantic Web and provides an easy-to-use interface through which users can find the information they are looking for. Because of the inherent semantics of RDF and other Semantic Web languages, the search and information retrieval capabilities of SWSE are potentially much more powerful than those of current search engines. SWSE indexes RDF data from many sources, including OWL, RDF and RSS files. RSS2 is converted to RDF and they will be adding GRDDL sources soon. Developed by DERI Ireland.

Sindice

Sindice is a lookup index for Semantic Web documents built on data intensive cluster computing techniques. Sindice indexes the Semantic Web and can tell you which sources mention a resource URI, IFP, or keyword, but it does not answer triple queries. Sindice currently indexes over 20 million RDF documents. Developed by DERI Ireland.

Watson

Allows you to search through ontologies and semantic documents using keywords. At the moment, you can enter a set of keywords (e.g. "cat dog old_lady"), and obtain a list of URIs of semantic documents in which the keywords appear as identifiers or in literals of classes, properties, and individuals. You can also use wildcards in the keywords (e.g., "ca? dog*"). Developed by KMi, UK.

Yahoo! Microsearch

Microsearch is Yahoo!'s stab at Semantic Web search and provides a richer search experience by combining traditional search results with metadata extracted from Web pages. Indexes RDF, RDFa and Microformats crawled from the Web. Microsearch will soon be adding support for GRDDL.

Falcons

Falcons is a keyword-based search engine for the Semantic Web, equipped with browsing capability. Falcons provides keyword-based search for URIs identifying objects and concepts (classes and properties) on the Semantic Web. Falcons also provides a summarization for each entity (object, class, property) for rapid understanding. Falcons currently indexes 7 million RDF documents and allows you to search through 34,566,728 objects. Developed by IWS China.

Swoogle

Searches through over 10,000 ontologies. 2.3 million RDF documents indexed, currently including those written in RDF/XML, N-Triples, N3(RDF) and some documents that embed RDF/XML fragments. Currently, it allows you to search through ontologies, instance data, and terms (i.e., URIs that have been defined as classes and properties). Not only that, it provides metadata for Semantic Web documents and supports browsing the Semantic Web. Swoogle also archives different versions of Semantic Web documents. Developed by the Ebiquity Group of UMBC.

Semantic Web Search

Powered by RDF Gateway, Intellidimension's proprietary platform for Semantic Web applications and agents. Developed by Intellidimension Inc.

Zitgist Search

The Zitgist Query Service simplifies the Semantic Data Web Query construction process with an end-user friendly interface. The user need not conceive of all relevant characteristics - appropriate options are presented based on the current shape of the query. Search results are displayed through an interface that enables further discovery of additional related data, information, and knowledge. Users describe characteristics of their search target, instead of relying entirely on content keywords.

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English data intensive cluster computing techniques, equivalent services, HTML, Intellidimension Inc, keyword-based search, keyword-based search engine, KMi, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, Metadata, RDF, RDF/XML, Resource Description Framework, richer search experience, search engine, search engines, search results, search target, Semantic Web, Technical Services, United Kingdom, Web applications, Web documents, Web gathering Web pages, Web languages, Web Query construction process, web search, Web Search Engine, Web Search Engine Roundup, Web search engines, XML, Yahoo, Zitgist Query Service

Net Neutrality is an international issue. In some countries it is addressed better than others. (In France, for example, I understand that the layers are separated, and my colleague in Paris attributes getting 24Mb/s net, a phone with free international dialing and digital TV for 30euros/month to the resulting competition.) In the US, there have been threats to the concept, and a wide discussion about what to do. That is why, though I have written and spoken on this many times, I blog about it now.

Twenty-seven years ago, the inventors of the Internet[1] designed an architecture[2] which was simple and general. Any computer could send a packet to any other computer. The network did not look inside packets. It is the cleanness of that design, and the strict independence of the layers, which allowed the Internet to grow and be useful. It allowed the hardware and transmission technology supporting the Internet to evolve through a thousandfold increase in speed, yet still run the same applications. It allowed new Internet applications to be introduced and to evolve independently.

When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. [3]. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data.

Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor.

It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing. We pay for connection to the Net as though it were a cloud which magically delivers our packets. We may pay for a higher or a lower quality of service. We may pay for a service which has the characteristics of being good for video, or quality audio. But we each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to me.

When I was a child, I was impressed by the fact that the installation fee for a telephone was everywhere the same in the UK, whether you lived in a city or on a mountain, just as the same stamp would get a letter to either place.

To actually design legislation which allows creative interconnections between different service providers, but ensures neutrality of the Net as a whole may be a difficult task. It is a very important one. The US should do it now, and, if it turns out to be the only way, be as draconian as to require financial isolation between IP providers and businesses in other layers.

The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true.

Let us protect the neutrality of the net.

1. Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and colleagues
2. TCP and IP
3. I did have to ask for port 80 for HTTP

Uncategorized Bob Kahn, Digital TV, France, HTTP, Internet application, Internet applications, ISP, neutral communications medium, operating system, Paris, particular hardware, transmission technology, United Kingdom, United States, Web Technology