JISC Standards: A Presentation To The JISC

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JISC StandardsA Presentation To The JISC
Date 15 June 2005 Location West Wing Committee
roomSt Thomas Hospital

• Brian Kelly
• UKOLN
• University of Bath
• Bath

Email B.Kelly_at_ukoln.ac.uk URL http//www.ukoln.ac.
uk/
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Contents

• This brief talk will cover
• Background to use of standards in JISC-funded
  activities
• Limitations of previous approaches
• Layered approach developed by QA Focus
• Doing the work
• Supporting the work
• Building on the work

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Background

• JISC development work
• Traditionally based on use of open standards to
• Support interoperability
• Maximise accessibility
• Avoid vendor lock-in
• Provide architectural integrity
• Help ensure long-term preservation
• History
• eLib Standards document (v1 1996, v2 1998)
• DNER Standards document (2001)
• which influenced
• NOF-digi Technical Standards
• ..

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Lessons Learnt

• Experiences of the QA Focus (and NOF-digi
  Technical Advisory Service) revealed problems
• Lack of knowledge of standards
• Lack of resources
• Immaturity of standards
• Failure for standards to take off
• Difficulties when building on existing work
• Uncertainty of what to do if standards not
  implemented correctly

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Need For Flexibility

• There is a need for flexibility in the standards
  infrastructure
• Learning the lessons from OSI networking
  protocols (the great networking standard of the
  1980s!)
• Today
• Conveyor belt of great new Web standards is
  slowing down
• Questions as to whether Web (for example) is
  becoming over-complex
• "Web service considered harmful"
• The lowercase semantic web / Microformats
• Lighter-weight alternatives being developed
• Responses from the commercial world

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Compliance Issues

• What does must mean?
• You must comply with HTML standards
• What if I don't?
• What if nobody does?
• What if I use PDF?
• You must clear rights on all resources you
  digitise
• You must provide properly audited accounts
• What if I don't?

There is a need to clarify the meaning of must
and for an understandable, realistic and
reasonable compliance regime
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The Context

• There will be a context to use of standards
• The intended use
• Innovative / research ? Mainstream
• Key middleware component ? Small-scale
  deliverable
• Organisational culture
• HE vs FE ? Teaching vs Research
• Service vs Development ?
• Available Funding Resources
• Significant funding training to make use of
  important new standards
• Minimal funding - current skills should be used

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The Standards 'Framework'

• xxx

OSS
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Scope Of The Standards Work

• The Standards Catalogue will
• Cover JISC's development programmes
• Cover other JISC-funded development work
• Cover JISC-funded services
• Cover JISC itself
• Be available for others (e.g. institutional work)
• Content areas will include
• Web ? File formats
• Metadata ? Resource discovery
• E-learning ? Addressing
• Alerting ? Authentication
• E-Research ?

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Implementation

• How might this approach be used in practice?

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Collating The Content

• We are using a Wiki to collect information about
  the standards
• Being used by a small groups of trusted
  individuals
• Avoids bottleneck for uploading and maintaining
  content
• Note the Wiki is used for creation maintenance
  of the data and will not be the final repository

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Publishing The Content

• The Standards Catalogue
• Needs to be available as a document which can be
  easily read
• Data should be reusable and interoperable
• JISC Framework environment
• For CIE
• Plans
• Version 1 available as document
• Data ported to CETIS's Framework software
• We are currently talking to CETIS about this
• Is it possible?
• What are the resources implications

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Quality Assurance Infrastructure

• Will projects and services implement standards as
  required? How will we know?
• Compliance checking
• External checkers Approach used in NOF-digi.
  But
• Concerns over big brother
• Does big brother have expertise?
• Alien to HE culture
• Standards not embedded into working practices
  (done because funders want it)
• Self-assessment
• Approach recommended by QA Focus (and should be
  done even if external checking)
• Need for projects/services to define their QA
  processes

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Support Infrastructure

• Need for a support infrastructure which covers
• Why the standards are needed?
• Pros and cons of deployment strategies
• Ways of ensuring standards are being implemented
  correctly
• We're looking to build on QA Focus work
• 80 briefing documents and 30 case studies
  published
• Licensed under Creative Commons
• UKOLN and AHDS will continue to publish new
  documents (new documents on Folksonomies,
  Persistent Identifiers, Wikis, etc. published
  recently)

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Building On The Work

• The JISC work will form the basis of similar work
  for the CIE (Common Information Environment)
• Working with MLA, BBC, BECTA,
• Pooling existing resources
• Identifying areas of agreement and diversity

Note that the CIE work will not aim to reconcile
differences, but to identify those areas
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Standards Catalogue Process

• There's a need for developing and enhancing the
  standards catalogue in order to
• Update with new standards
• Learn from feedback and experiences

Review
Standards
The Standards Catalogue can be integrated with
the JISC's 'Framework'
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Conclusions

• To conclude
• Approach to developing standards catalogue based
  on QA Focus's experiences, and its review by Jon
  Duke/Andy Jordan
• Acknowledges importance of context
• Allows for hard-line implementation (which is
  needed in some areas)
• Will be developed within a CIE context
• This will be an ongoing process