The Discovery Landscape in Crystallography

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http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/
A centre of expertise in digital information
management
The Discovery Landscape in Crystallography
Monica Duke m.duke_at_ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN, University
of Bath, UK eBank UK project
eBank/R4L/Spectra workshop, London, UK 20th
October 2006
UKOLN is supported by
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Overview

• How is the discovery landscape shaping up in
  crystallography?
• What are the potential problems for discovery?
• Where do digital library technologies fit into
  the infrastructure?
• Questions, questions

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Where are we now? How did we get here?
Agreed formats Datalinks to journal articles
Email 11 communication
PRE-WEB
WEB
SEMANTIC WEB?

• Small number
• Tightly-managed
• Trusted

• Independent
• Distributed

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Dimensions of repositories or services

• Management
• individual initiative
• institutional
• professional society
• Procedures
• Level of control
• Policies
• Formality
• Documentation
• Comprehensive

• Coverage
• subject
• national
• International
• Protocols

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Discovery Dilemmas

• Services for human consumption
• Differences in web interface and searching
  capabilities
• With increase in numbers, user cannot search each
  individually
• Incomplete support for automated information
  exchange/agents

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Digital Library Infrastructures technologies
Data providers
Harvesting based on OAI-PMH
Service providers
http//www.openarchives.org/
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The OAI-PMH

• OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
• simple protocol for sharing metadata records
  between applications
• currently at version 2.0
• based on HTTP, XML, XML Schema and XML namespaces
• allows a harvester to ask a remote repository for
  some or all of its metadata records
• where some is based on date-stamps, sets,
  metadata formats

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Metadata in the eBank UK project

• Simple Dublin Core www.dublincore.org
• Intended for resource discovery
• Compatible with OAI-PMH
• Qualified to specify vocabularies
• Refinements aid interpretation of element value
• E.g. ltdcsubject xmllang"en"gtseafoodlt/dcsubject
  gt

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Metadata terms

• Creator
• Rights
• Date
• Type
• Identifier

• Subject
• InChI
• ChemicalFormula
• ltdcsubject xsitype"ebanktermsCompoundClass"gtOr
  ganiclt/dcsubjectgt

Specified using XML schema and documented using
an Application Profile http//www.rdn.ac.uk/oai/eb
ank/20060310/ebank_dc.xsd http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/p
rojects/ebank-uk/schemas/profile/
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OAI-PMH unsolved problems

• Partial solution infrastructure needs to
  encompass other technical solutions
• Immature experience of service provider models
• Selection identification of repositories of
  interest and subset of content therein
• Duplication of resources
• Metadata quality what makes good metadata and
  how to generate (consistently)

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Questions, questions

• How can these resources be joined up to offer
  useful services to users?
• What is the role of OAI-PMH?
• What other interfaces need to be considered?
• Who are the communities of users of
  crystallography data?
• How can they be defined and described?
• What is a useful service?

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Questions, questions

• Do users have overlapping (information) needs,
  interest in common (subsets of) sources?
• How can information needs be identified and
  described?
• What sorts of solutions are appropriate?
• What are the interface design implications?
• What discovery tools are already being used?
• Can tools/services be adapted, do we need new
  ones?
• What is the role of publishers?