• Semantic Web
• semantic technologies
• Linked Data
• linked data
• linkable data
• Open Data

I’ve finally started drafting this briefing paper and unsurprisingly defining the above terms is proving to be a non-trivial task! Pinning down agreed definitions for Linked Data, linked data and linkable data is particularly problematic. And I’m not the only one having trouble. If you look up Semantic Web and Linked Data / linked data on wikipedia you will find entries flagged as having multiple issues. It does rather feel like we’re edging close to holy war territory here. But having said that I do enjoy a good holy war as long as I’m watching safely from the sidelines.

So what’s it all about? As far as I can make out much of the debate boils down to whether Linked Data must adhere to the four principles outlined in Tim Berners Lee’s Linked Data Design Issues, and in particular whether use of RDF and SPARQL is mandatory. Some argue that RDF is integral to Linked Data, other suggest that while it may be desirable, use of RDF is optional rather than mandatory. Some reserve the capitalized term Linked Data for data that is based on RDF and SPARQL, preferring lower case “linked data”, or “linkable data”, for data that uses other technologies.

The fact that the Linked Data Design Issues paper is a personal note by Tim Berners Lee, and is not formally endorsed by W3C also contributes to the ambiguity. The note states:

1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)
4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

I’ll refer to the steps above as rules, but they are expectations of behaviour. Breaking them does not destroy anything, but misses an opportunity to make data interconnected. This in turn limits the ways it can later be reused in unexpected ways. It is the unexpected re-use of information which is the value added by the web. (Berners Lee, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html)

In the course of trying to untangle some of the arguments both for and against the necessity of using RDF and SPARQL I’ve read a lot of very thoughtful blog posts which it may be useful to link to here for future reference. Clearly these are not the only, or indeed the most recent, posts that discuss this most topical of topics, these happen to be the ones I have read and which I believe present a balanced over view of the debate in such a way as to be of relevance to the JISC CETIS community.

Linked data vs. Web of data vs. …
- Andy Powell, Eduserv, July 2009

The first useful post I read on this particular aspect of the debate is Andy Powell’s from July 2009. This post resulted from the following question Andy raised on twitter;

is there an agreed name for an approach that adopts the 4 principles of #linkeddata minus the phrase, “using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)” ??

Andy was of the opinion that Linked Data “implies use of the RDF model - full stop” adding:

“it’s too late to re-appropriate the “Linked Data” label to mean anything other than “use http URIs and the RDF model”.”

However he is unable to provide a satisfactory answer to his own question, i.e. what do you call linked data that does not use the RDF model, and despite exploring alternative models he concludes by professing himself to be worried about this.

Andy returned to this theme in a more recent post in January 2010, Readability and linkability which ponders the relative emphasis given to readability and linkability by initiatives such as the JISC Information Environment. Andy’s general principles have not changed but he presents term machine readable data (MRD) as a potential answer to the question he originally asked in his earlier post.

Does Linked Data need RDF?
- Paul Miller, The Cloud of Data, July 2009

Paul Miller’s post is partially a response to Andy’s query. Paul begins by noting that while RDF is key to the Semantic Web and

“an obvious means of publishing — and consuming — Linked Data powerfully, flexibly, and interoperably.”

he is uneasy about conflating RDF with Linked Data and with assertions that

“‘Linked Data’ can only be Linked Data if expressed in RDF.”

Paul discusses the wording an status of Tim Berners Lee’s Linked Data Design Issues and suggest that it can be read either way. He then goes on to argue that by elevating RDF from the best mechanism for achieving Linked Data to the only permissible approach we risk barring a large group

“with data to share, a willingness to learn, and an enthusiasm to engage.”

Paul concludes by asking the question:

“What are we after? More Linked Data, or more RDF? I sincerely hope it’s the former.”

No data here – just Linked Concepts and Linked, open, semantic?
- Paul Walk, UKOLN, July & November 2009

Paul Walk has published two useful posts on this topic; the first summarising and commenting on the debate sparked by the two posts above, and the second following the Giant Global Graph session at the CETIS 2009 Conference. This latter post presents a very useful attempt at disambiguating the terms Open data , Linked Data and Semantic Web. Paul also tries to untangle the relationship between these three memes and helpfully notes:

• data can be open, while not being linked
• data can be linked, while not being open
• data which is both open and linked is increasingly viable
• the Semantic Web can only function with data which is both open and linked

So What Is It About Linked Data that Makes it Linked Data™?
- Tony Hirst, Open University, March 2010

Much more recently Tony Hirst published this post which begins with a version of the four Linked Data principles cut from wikipedia. This particular version makes no mention of either RDF or SPARQL. Tony goes on to present a very neat example of data linked using HTTP URI and Yahoo Pipes and asks

“So, the starter for ten: do we have an example of Linked Data™ here?”

Tony broadly believes the answer is yes and is of a similar opinion to Paul Miller that too rigid adherence to RDF and SPARQL

“will put a lot of folk who are really excited about the idea of trying to build services across distributed (linkable) datasets off…”

Perhaps more controversially Tony questions the necessity of universal unique URIs that resolve to content suggesting that:

“local identifiers can fulfil the same role if you can guarantee the context as in a Yahoo Pipe or a spreadsheet”

Tony signs off with:

“My name’s Tony Hirst, I like linking things together, but RDF and SPARQL just don’t cut it for me…”

Meshing up a JISC e-learning project timeline, or: It’s Linked Data on the Web, stupid
- Wilbert Kraan, JISC CETIS, March 2009

Back here at CETIS Wilbert Kraan has been experimenting with linked data meshups of JISC project data held in our PROD system. In contrast to the approach taken by Tony, Wilbert goes down the RDF and SPARQL route. Wilbert confesses that he originally believed that:

“SPARQL endpoints were these magic oracles that we could ask anything about anything.”

However his attempts to mesh up real data sets on the web highlighted the fact that SPARQL has no federated search facility.

“And that the most obvious way of querying across more than one dataset - pulling in datasets from outside via SPARQL’s FROM - is not allowed by many SPARQL endpoints. And that if they do allow FROM, they frequently cr*p out.”

Wilbert concludes that:

“The consequence is that exposing a data set as Linked Data is not so much a matter of installing a SPARQL endpoint, but of serving sensibly factored datasets in RDF with cool URLs, as outlined in Designing URI Sets for the UK Public Sector (pdf).”

And in response to a direct query regarding the necessity of RDF and SPARQL to Linked Data Wilbert answered

“SPARQL and RDF are a sine qua non of Linked Data, IMHO. You can keep the label, widen the definition out, and include other things, but then I’d have to find another label for what I’m interested in here.”

Which kind of brings us right back to the question that Andy Powell asked in July 2009!

So there you have it. A fascinating but currently inconclusive debate I believe. Apologies for the length of this post. Hopefully one day this will go on to accompany our “Semantic Web and Linked Data” briefing paper.

Appropriate for International Woman’s Day? discussion on devsci blog about proportion of women (~7%) at #dev8D

Over at the DevCSI MShaw notes:

The technology/web development industry is notoriously male-dominated, but even in this context the gender imbalance at Dev8D seemed disproportionate.

And asks:

Are we doing enough to attracted women to these kinds of events? What could we do to improve the gender balance? Do you even think it’s an issue?

I think it is in issue. I’m not entirely sure what we can do about it, but I certainly think it’s something we should consider closely.

There are a lot of complex and interconnected issues which I can’t possibly hope to untangle here. They include: are fewer women really attracted to careers in technology? If so why? Is it something to do with the discipline itself? Or is it more to do with the culture of technology industries? And I include educational technology here.

Obviously I do work in technology, I have done for some time and I am one of those women who did not attend dev8D. Why? Although I work in technology I do not consider myself to be a “techy”. I am most definitely not a programmer and have often joked in the past that I couldn’t implement a spec if my life depended on it. Having said that, I am not remotely afraid of technology and I enjoy talking and working with developers. I’ve run more than a few codebashes in my time for heaven’s sake! You don’t get much more techy than that. So while on the one hand I may consider myself “not techy enough” to play with the boys at Dev8D, on the other hand these are the same people I have enjoyed working with for the last ten years or so.

The logistics of the event also made it difficult for me to attend. Although I used to travel a lot I now have a small child to look after and a partner who works long shifts so arranging childcare for anything longer than a single over night stay is difficult if not impossible. Logistics and responsibilities can’t be ignored.

MShaw’s post also brought to mind a CRIG Unconference I attended a couple of years ago. The focus was repositories, a technology domain where I think women are reasonably well represented. However of the 40 or so people who attended there were only 4 women: me, Julie Allinson, as sociologist who was there to observe the event and the administrator, who took names at the door and handed out stickers and badges. Not very encouraging.

At the time there was something about the lack of women at the CRIG Unconference that concerned me. I used to spend a lot of time on the road participating in international standards meetings, where I was frequently the only woman in the room. This was such a common occurrence that eventually I scarcely noticed. So what what was it about the Unconference that bothered me? I’m still not sure. I hesitate to say it but there does seem to be something a bit blokey about the format of some of these developer events. Although to be fair, at the recent CETIS Future of Interoperability Standards event women were as poorly represented as at Dev8D and the Unconference.

I can’t help being reminded of my previous career as an archaeologist. Although I did most of my field work in Scotland I once worked on a survey project in the South Hauran desert in the north of Jordan near the Syrian border. We stayed in a tiny one horse town called Umm el-Qetain where we rented the top floor of a typical house from a Bedouin family. Our hosts were extraordinarily welcoming and offered us hospitality at every opportunity. What was interesting is that these traditional houses are normally quite strictly segregated with family rooms, women’s rooms and the men’s rooms. The only woman allowed in the men’s room was the eldest matriarch of the house and even then she appeared to observe certain conventions of behaviour. However the three women in our field crew were treated exactly as men. We were regularly invited into the men’s room for mint tea and pastries and none of the men ever commented on our unusual behavior. (However they did howl with laughter when they saw our male colleagues washing their own socks.)

I’m still sometimes reminded of sitting in the men’s room in Umm el Qetain when I attend certain technical events. Everyone is welcoming and hospitable to a fault but you can’t help being aware that you are the minority and that somehow you are “fitting in” or rather being slotted into a space that doesn’t quite fit.

I don’t think I’ve expressed this very clearly, primarily because I don’t have a clear idea of exactly what is going on here. Hmmmmm. If anyone can enlighten me please comment.

The VirtualDutch timeline of Anglo-Dutch relations. It’s built using MITs Simile software and it’s packed full of utterly fascinating detail. Amongst more familiar historical events it includes such gems as the following:

1120s: first appearance of name Fleming in Scotland,
post-1154: introduction of oxtail soup in England,
c. 1310: pirate John Crab moves to Aberdeen,
1457: first recording of golf in Scotland,
1576: calls for immigrants to be sent back in English parliament (plus ça change),
1585: cacao beans enter Europe for first time,
1587: first cultivation of sprouts in Europe,
1637: crash of tulipomania
1662: piracy legally forbidden
1673: first performance of The Dutch Lover
1685: first mention of Sauce hollandaise
1689: Dutch fire engines in England
1709: first raids on molly clubs in London
1712: frog as insult for the Dutch
1793: first description of Britain as treacherous
1824: Dutch translation of Waverley
1829: Mons Meg moved to Edinburgh

Brilliant! Of course this has completely derailed any “real” work I was going to do this afternoon

Phil Barker, Matt Jukes, Chris Awre and I composed the small group that discussed teaching and learning materials and these were our conclusions.

Constraints

Much of the discourse of the day did not sit comfortably with the teaching and learning domain. There was an implicit assumption that resources reside in repositories of some kind and are accompanied by quality-controlled metadata.

In reality teaching and learning materials are stored in many different places that can not be regarded as repositories “no matter how big the quotation marks”. These resources tend to be unmanaged and are not persistent.

Learning materials have relationships to many other entities e.g. the concept being learned, educational activities, course instance, individual people and social networks. These entities are poorly understood and modelled and are difficult to identify.

There is still a “craft” view of the process and practice of teaching and consequently there is some resistance to formalising the management of resources and activities.

There is no clearly identifiable lifecycle for teaching and learning materials and frequently no formal mechanism for their management.

Learning materials are “made public” but they are not “published” in the formal sense and metadata is often poor or non existent.

Use Cases

Composite objects - learning materials are frequently composite objects that may be ordered in one or more ways. Identifiers need to be able to identify the component parts, specify the order and potentially also to recompose and reorder them.

Open educational resources - once resources are released under an open license there are likely to be multiple different copies, formats and versions all over the place. How do you express relationship between these multiple entities?

Resource / course relationship - what is the relationship between learning materials and concepts such as educational activity or educational activity? It is notoriously difficult to assign an educational level to a learning resources but it is often much easier to assign an educational level to a course. Is it possible to extrapolate from the course to the resource?

Drivers

Institutions are beginning to recognise that learning materials are valuable for the core business of higher education, i.e. teaching and learning; and that it may be beneficial to manage them for quality and efficiency gains.

The OER movement may be a significant driver for futher work in this area.

What approaches are being used at present?

There is no clearly identifiable workflow behind the use of learning materials. The url of a learning resource tends to become its identifier and is dependant on where the resource is stored e.g. vle, repository, slideshare. Clearly however the url refers to a specific instantiation of a resource in a specific location.

There is very little in the way of established practice in terms of management and identification of teaching and learning materials. Everything in flux. In the terminology of the Repository Ecology report things are still a “mess.” A mess being:

“a complex issue that is not well formulated or defined”

Issues regarding sustainability and scalability

Do teaching and learning materials actually need to persist? There are usecases for persistence e.g. non-repudiation. Also teachers have to be confident that a resource will be there next time they need to use it.

Does it actually matter if resources are scattered all over the place with metadata that is poor to nonexistent?

And finally…
…if you know the answer to that last question please comment below!

And you know what? I think the debate has matured significantly. There was much greater acceptance that one size will never fit all, that there will always be multiple technologies to choose from, that choice of identifier scheme frequently depends on choice of technology platform (e.g. if you run DSpace you will use Handles) and that the technology is the easy part to solve. Previous identifier events tended to degenerate into holy wars but there was admirably little crusading evident last week. Although there was some flak flying around on the back channel.

I was slightly frustrated that, as usual, much of the debate focused implicitly on scholarly works and a particular form of “publication”. However there was much that was of relevance to the teaching and learning domain too. Here are some of the statement from the event that I would endorse:

Chris Awre, University of Hull

The emphasis on identifiers themselves can be distracting, it’s better to focus on the role and purpose of identifiers.

Identifying digital content at different phases of its lifecycle is key to the management of that content.

Identifiers need to have an associated meaning. An identifier is only an identifier if it is associated with a thing, otherwise it is just a string.

Identifiers need to disambiguate what they are identifying.

Henry Thompson, University of Edinburgh

Any naming schemes for sharing on the web are only as good as the services behind them.

Persistence of activity is critical, not persistence of technology. There are no purely technical solutions to vulnerabilities.

The only naming scheme of any technical sophistication is the Linean taxonomic scheme. (!)

Make it easy for ordinary users to mint good URIs.

Les Carr, University of Southampton

Persistence of URIs can be made difficult by institutions view of the web purely as a marketing tool.

Bas Cordewener, SURF Foundation

DOI is the only system that has a business model, but it can be expensive for repositories to implement.

Commercial influences should be kept at bay but we need to recognise that there are many different systems meeting different requirements.

Hugh Glaser, University of Southampton

Authority is established not bestowed.

Conclusion and JISC Interventions

The general conclusion of this event was that technology is not the problem, sufficient infrastructure already exists and one size will never fit all.

There was some debate regarding appropriate JISC interventions in this space but there was some consensus that JISC could usefully work with bodies such as UCISA, SCONUL and the Research Councils to provide advice on policy and business cases illustrating the appropriate use of identifiers. Case studies and demonstrators that situate solutions in context, articulate specific workflows and promote good practice in managing identifiers would also be of considerable value.

I’ll post a second piece shortly summarising the breakout group that focused specifically on identifier requirements within the teaching and learning domain.

The following is from the Ada Lovelace Day pledge announcement but I’m more than happy to repeat it here:

We had an amazing day last year, with over 1200 people writing about a woman in technology or science whom they admire. We got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!

But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech. We have the 72, we just need the 3000, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge at http://findingada.com/ and let all your friends know about it.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

To keep up to date with what is happening:

The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda

Thank you for your support!

Best,
Suw Charman-Anderson

Based on the discussions that took place throughout the event we have identified the following activities that could potentially be taken forward by JISC and CETIS.

1. Briefing paper
There is considerable ambiguity regarding the use of terminology in this space, particularly among those who are less familiar with the semantic technology domain. There was general agreement that it would be useful to attempt to disambiguate some of this terminology including: Semantic Web, semantic technologies, linked data, linkable data and open data with relevant examples where possible and to identify the role that different standards play in this domain.

Output
A short CETIS briefing paper targeted at the teaching and learning community and referencing the forthcoming JISC Linked Data Horizon Scan. This briefing paper could be supplemented by a Delicious page linking to a collection of relevant resources.

2. Business cases
Based on the outputs of the JISC SemTech project, the Linked Data Horizon Scan and other relevant resources, develop a series of business cases for institutional senior managers and information systems directors outlining the potential benefits of investing time and developing expertise in exposing semantic data.

Output
Business cases for senior managers and IS directors.

3. Tools and services
Develop tools, applications and services for consuming and manipulating existing linked data sources to show how they might benefit the domain of teaching and learning and to demonstrate how the business cases identified by Activity 2 might be addressed. E.g. a linked directory of teaching expertise as an exemplar of the sort of service that could be built from foaf and doap.

Output
Tools and services for consuming and manipulating existing linked data sources.

4. Affordances for curriculum design and course approval
Exploration of the affordances of linked data within institutions to facilitate a number of institutional processes including curriculum design and course description. Identify areas in the course approval process where open and or linkable data could be exploited. There may be potential to work with existing programmes and initiatives such as Curriculum Design and XCRI to start exploring affordances and barriers in this area and possibly to begin scoping requirements for XCRI phase 2.

5. Developer events
One or more technical events, possibly similar to Google’s summer of code, open to developers, and students, to produce implementations and resources relevant to education based on open and linked data. These activities could potentially be developed around existing JISC and Talis events.

Outputs
Demonstrators, proof of concept implementations, etc.

We would welcome feedback on these or indeed other activities so please post comments below. CETIS will continue to explore the domains of semantic technologies, open and linked date with a view to facilitating further working groups in this area. We’ll look forward to hearing from you!

CETIS have been liaising closely with the Jorum team in order to support the OER Programme’s requirements. One early requirement that has emerged is the need for bulk deposit and a request from some projects that this may be partially fulfilled by ingest of RSS feeds. Sounds simple enough but as with all such requirements the devil is in the detail. And in this case some of the details include which version or RSS to support, how to encode and handle licence information, what metadata to include, how to process said metadata, what is a realistic size for feeds?

In order to kick off a discussion on these and other issues Gareth Waller, Jorum’s Technical Manager (and DSpace wrangler extraordinaire) has written a short white paper titled Issues surrounding feed deposit into institutional repositories which presents the pros and cons of using syndicated feed formats to facilitate deposit into repositories such as JorumOpen. Gareth presents a succinct overview of syndicated feed formats and raises a number of questions relating to: item identification, item updates and deletions, missing items, polling periods, feed formats, metadata formats, local metadata application profiles, handling licences and whether to store links or download resources.

JISC, CETIS and Jorum would like to move towards the development of an agreed RSS profile for open educational resources so we are actively seeking comments from the community on the kind of issues Gareth raises in his paper. If you would like to comment or raise additional issues please post your comments here or on the Jorum Community Bay. You can download Gareth’s paper here or from the Community Bay.

This has already been reported on several other blogs but it’s too good not to share again. Looks like Google Scholar needs to work on its automatic metadata generation algorithm:

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

This curious incident was originally reported by Stephen Chrisomalis and subsequently picked up by Language Log. The comments on the latter post are particularly entertaining. Mark Liberman helpfully provides Google Scholar’s BibTex citation

@article{embuggerance2008linguistics,
title={{The linguistics of laughter}},
author={Embuggerance, E. and Feisty, H.},
journal={English Today},
volume={1},
number={04},
pages={47–47},
year={2008},
publisher={Cambridge Univ Press}
}

And goes on to suggest

“Perhaps we should continue the tradition of metonymic names for new linguistic natural kinds, and use embuggerance for cases where the automatic tagging of entities and relations goes astray.”

Over on Stephen Chrisomalis blog the comments have taken a rather different turn and degenerate into a rather thoughtful discussion of the relative merits of Google Scholar and JSTOR and automatic metadata generation vz human indexing. One commentor, Laughingrat, is appalled that any academic would even consider using Google scholar:

“…unless your college or university is extremely underfunded, the school library should have access to high-quality databases which contain records indexed by information professionals rather than unqualified hirelings or, worse, computers.”

Another commentor, Dale, puts forward a robust argument in favour of Google Scholar in particular and automatic metadata generation in general:

“Many in libraries and academia are keen to point out all of the warts in Google Scholar, but are less keen to be so critical of the databases for which they pay. That the MLA Bibliography, for example, is years behind in indexing scores of journals, and has incredibly poor coverage in many non-English languages (despite the International boast in its name) is a little known or explored fact in libraries. Other fee-based databases evince similar flaws (Library Literature, ironically, is one of the worst), but it isn’t nearly as much fun to pick on them as it is to shellac Google.”

The last words also has to go to Dale:

“What it comes down is machine indexing vs. human indexing. I cannot get the image of John Henry out of my mind when I think about this matchup. I think the human indexers can only win by extreme effort, and we all know what happened to poor John.”

Amen to that!

Now I’m no authority on tracking technologies but this reminded me of a very interesting article I read in the Guardian today How Belle de Jour’s secret ally Googlewhacked the press. This explains how a blogger known as Derren used some astute guesswork and a unique key combination of two terms associated nowhere else on the web to monitor whether anyone else was coming close to guessing the identity of the anonymous call girl Belle de Jour.

At the OER Technical Roundtable at last week’s CETIS Conference one of the actions participants prioritiesd was case studies and examples of different approaches to tracking. I’m not entirely sure that the above is the kind of case study the projects had in mind but it’s a pretty good real world example never the less! Just thought I’d mention it…..

Phil’s slides from the Elluminate session are available on Slideshare and no doubt there will be blog posts to follow.