Choosing Technology That Can Evolve With User Needs

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Choosing Technology That Can Evolve With User
Needs
A service-oriented approach to e-research,
e-scholarship, and advanced scholarly publication

• VALA 2006
• Melbourne, Australia
• February 2006

Sandy Payette Co-Director, Fedora
Project Researcher, Cornell Information Science
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Outline

• Connecting with Users
• What are the motivating contexts for libraries?
• e-research and e-scholarship
• Advanced digital libraries
• Scholarly publication
• How do we position for the future?
• Goals for the new order
• Enabling Technologies
• Research and development at Cornell
• Fedora Service Framework
• National Science Digital Library
• Pathways
• Moving Forward and Conclusions

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Connecting with Users

• How are user needs evolving?
• Do we understand expectations of younger
  generation?
• Are we hip? Can we see current trends?
• Behavior
• Technology
• Can we choose technology appropriately?

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Upcoming Generation of Scholars

• Age 10 - play
• Yahoo (music)
• Google (bios, animals)
• Neo pets (community)
• Powerpoint (expression)
• Age 20 social and study
• Blogging
• IM
• Google
• BitTorrent
• Craigslist

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How much should we worry now about choosing
technology for evolving user needs?

• A Lot!
• Recent questions by member of audience
• Do scholars really want new stuff or are we
  trying to hard to architect things that we think
  they want?
• Lets examine whats already going on and
  position for the future

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Scholarly and Scientific Communities
Documents ? Integrated Information Networks
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Early signs of change

• Grid computing in sciences
• Share computing resources
• Share services and distributed virtual file
  systems
• Examples
• Storage Resource Broker (SRB)
• Open Grid Services Infrastructure
• National Virtual Observatory (http//www.us-vo.org
  /)
• Humanities computing
• Hyperlinked historical documentary editions
• New Forms of Digital Scholarship
• Rossetti archive (http//www.rossettiarchive.org/)
  
• Valley of the Shadow (http//valley.vcdh.virginia.
  edu/)
• Perseus (www.perseus.tufts)

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New Contexts - user and technical
User Contexts
Technical Contexts
advanced digital library
service-oriented
e-scholarship
web 2.0
scholarly publication
semantic web
e-research
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First User contexts
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Key areas for connecting with users

• E-research
• E-scholarship
• Advanced digital library
• New models of scholarly communication

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e-research
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e-scholarship
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scholarly publication
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advanced digital library
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Technical contextsunderstanding key trends
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Relevant Technology Trends
SOA

• Service-oriented architecture
• Web 2.0
• Semantic Web

Web 2.0
RDF
OWL
OWL-S
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Service-oriented architectures (SOA)

• Characteristics of services
• Modular, atomic
• Well-defined interfaces
• Loosely coupled
• Like building blocks
• Standards for invoking operations (e.g.,
  SOAP/REST, XML)
• Benefits
• Flexibility
• Enable creation of higher-level services
• Enable customized end-user applications
• Re-use services in different contexts
• Evolution create new services as needed
• Orchestrate services to fulfill a process

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JISC/DEST Service Framework
From S. Wilson, K. Blinco and D. Rehak Service
Oriented Frameworkshttp//www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded
_documents/AltilabServiceOrientedFrameworks.pdf
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Simple ExampleWeb Service using SOAP
My Application
Request (XML)
Google Web Service
SOAP/HTTP
SOAP/HTTP
doSpellingSuggestion(payet)
payette
Response (XML)
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Looking ahead
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Web 2.0
http//www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2
005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
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Implications of Web 2.0

• Key themes
• Services (not packaged apps)
• Architecture of participation
• Remix/transform data sources
• Harness collective intelligence
• Emergent Behavior
• Upcoming generations of scholars will have a
  completely different paradigm and expectations
  regarding technology
• Collaborative classification (e.g., flickr)
• Power of collective intelligence (amazon)
• Alternative trust models (reputation ebay
  open-source)

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Semantic Web

• Resource Description Framework (RDF)
• data model for resources and relationships
  between them
• Ontologies
• OWL to describe information resources
• OWL-S to describe web services
• Rich, extensible description
• no fixed schema
• Relationships and graph-based models
• Knowledge inference
• Equivalence
• Transitivity A ? B B ? C A ? C

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Users and technology in action
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Goals for enabling users in the New Order

• Creation and publication of new forms of
  information units
• Services to better enable the processes of
  research and scholarship
• Knowledge environments that captures semantic and
  factual relationships among information units
• Promote information re-use and contextualization
• Facilitate collaborative activity and capture
  information that is created as a byproduct of it

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Support the new information unit

• Documents
• Text
• Data
• Simulations
• Images
• Video
• Computations
• Automated Analyses

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Key Projects at Cornell University

• Fedora Service Framework
• NSF Pathways (Cornell/LANL)
• National Science Digital Library (NSDL)

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The Fedora Project

• Fedora
• Flexible
• Extensible
• Digital
• Object
• Repository
• Architecture
• History
• Cornell Research (1997-)
• DARPA and NSF-funded research and reference
  implementation
• Distributed, Interoperable Repositories
  (experiments with CNRI)
• Open Source Project (2002-present)
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded
• Joint development by Cornell University and
  University of Virginia

SOA
RDF
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Fedora Digital Objects

• Flexible object model can support
• Documents, articles, journals
• Electronic Scholarly Texts
• Digital Images
• Complex multimedia publications
• Datasets
• Metadata
• Learning objects
• More
• Create networks of objects
• Define object relationships and other properties
  via RDF
• Collection/member part/whole etc.

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Network of Digital Objects in a Fedora Repository
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Fedora Service Framework (2005-07)
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eSciDoc(Max Planck Society and Fiz Karlsruhe)
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Pathways Project
SOA
OWL
OWL-S
A new system for scholarly communication
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Pathways motivating context

• Decompose and distribute traditional steps in
  scholarly publishing value chain1
• Registration claim precedence for a scholarly
  finding.
• Certification - establish validity of scholarly
  claim
• Awareness - discover and access claims and
  findings
• Archiving - preserves the scholarly record over
  time
• Rewarding - based on metrics derived from that
  system
• Add new services to the mix
• Workflow
• Collaborative functions (e.g., annotation,
  re-use)
• Data mining and analysis
• Preservation monitoring and migration

1. Roosendaal and Geurts 1997
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Pathways Vision Interoperable Information Model
Most things can be represented as a graph of
nodes and arcs.
Cornell University and Los Alamos Natl
Lab http//www.infosci.cornell.edu/pathways
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Service pathways (decomposed and distributed)
Cornell University and Los Alamos Natl
Lab http//www.infosci.cornell.edu/pathways
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Pathways ChallengesPhase 1

• Current situation
• Heterogeneous repository systems
• Heterogeneous object models (or no object model)
• Multiple protocols and service APIs
• Services lacking formal interface definitions
• Can these ever play nicely together?
• Need common abstractions
• Ontology-based Information model
• Ontology-based Service model

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Core-1 Ontology Article Example
Cornell University and Los Alamos Natl
Lab http//www.infosci.cornell.edu/pathways
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Building Block Repository Integration
Cornell University and Los Alamos Natl
Lab http//www.infosci.cornell.edu/pathways
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NSDL Core Integration
SOA
Web 2.0
RDF
Advanced Digital Libraries Beyond Search and
Access
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Information Flow in Traditional Library
In-Band
Out-of-Band
Knowledge
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Information Flow in the Digital Library
In-Band
Out-of-Band
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NSDL Data Repository How?

• Data as the asset
• Structured core data model
• Digital objects
• Relationships
• Augmented with unstructured and semi-structured
• Expose knowledge base via core service API
• NDR Technologies
• Fedora repository 2 million digital objects
• Kowari RDF triplestore 160 million triples
• Services both SOAP and REST

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Conclusions Practical steps, ongoing challenges
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Choosing technology to evolve with user needs
now

• Think in terms of flexible service frameworks
• Define fundamental services for libraries
• Repositories as web services
• Support for complex digital objects
• Local and remote content
• Mixed genre ? documents, data, images,
  everything
• Dynamic views
• XML expressions (esp. for ingest/export and
  migration)
• Model common entities with ontology-based
  metadata
• Hope for interoperability via semantics
• Relationships among objects are key

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Ongoing Challenges

• Low barrier to entry
• Simple protocols (e.g., like OAI)
• Light-weight (REST vs. SOAP?)
• Simple tools to create overlays
• Service matching (object-to-service)
• Ontologies to expose objects with formats and
  semantics
• OWL-S for semantic service description
• Matching-making algorithms
• Security and Trust
• Authentication and trust among repositories and
  services
• Interoperability of authorization policy
• Preservation
• Distributed and dynamic digital objects a
  challenging reality

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Thank You!Questions and Comments