Both the title of the event (does the ‘and’ imply a distinction? why not repositories on the open web?) and the tag CETISROW may be taken as slightly provocative. Well, the tag is meant lightheartedly, of course, and yes there is a rich vein of work on how repositories can work as part of the web. Just looking back are previous CETIS events I would like to highlight these contributions to previous meetings:

• Lara Whitelaw presented on the PROWE Project, about using wikis and blogs as shared repositories to support part-time distance tutors in June 2006.
• David Davies spoke about RSS, Yahoo! Pipes and mashups in June 2007.
• Roger Greenhalgh, talking about the National Rural Knowledge Exchange, in the May 2008 meeting. And many of us remember his “what’s hot in pigs” intervention in an earlier meeting.
• Richard Davis talking about SNEEP (social network extensions for ePrints) at the same meeting

Most recently we’ve seen a natural intersection between the aims of Open Educational Resources initiatives and the use of hosting on web 2 and social sharing sites, so, for example, the technical requirements suggested for the UKOER programme said this under delivery platforms:

Projects are free to use any system or application as long as it is capable of delivering content freely on the open web. However all projects must also deposit their content in JorumOpen. In addition projects should use platforms that are capable of generating RSS/Atom feeds, particularly for collections of resources e.g. YouTube channels. Although this programme is not about technical development projects are encouraged to make the most of the functionality provided by their chosen delivery platforms.

We have followed this up with some work looking at the use of distribution platforms for UKOER resources which treats web 2 platforms and repository software as equally useful for that task.

So, there’s a longstanding recognition that repositories live on the open web, and that formal repositories aren’t the only platform suitable for the management and dissemination of learning materials. But I would missing something I think important if I left it at that. For some time I’ve had misgivings about the direction that conceptualising your resource management and dissemination as a repository leads. A while back a colleague noticed that a description of some proposed specification work, which originated from repository vendors, developers and project managers, talked about content being “hidden inside repositories”, which we thought revealing. Similarly, I’ve written before that repository-think leads to talk of interoperability between repositories and repository-related services (I’m sure I’ve written that before). Pretty soon one ends up with a focus on repositories and repository-specific standards per se and not on the original problem of resource management and dissemination. A better solution, if you want to disseminate your resource widely, is not to “hide them in repositories” in the first place. Also, in repository-world the focus is on metadata, rather than resource description: the encoding of descriptive data into fields can be great for machines, but I don’t think that we’ve done a great job of getting that encoding right for educational characteristics of resources, and that this has been at the expense of providing suitable information for people.

Of course not every educational resource is open, and so the open web isn’t an appropriate place for all collections. Also, once you start using some of the web 2.0 social sharing sites for resource management you begin to hit some problems (no option for creative commons licensing, assumptions that the uploader created/owns the resource, limitations on export formats, etc.)–though there are some exceptions. It is, however, my belief that all repository software could benefit from the examples shown by the best of the social sharing websites, and my hope that we will see that in action during this meeting.

Detail about the meeting (agenda, location, etc.) will be posted on the CETIS wiki.

Registration is open, through the CETIS events system.

MLR is being drafted as a multi-part standard and the role of part 1, the framework, is to provide the overall principles rules, and structures for how the other parts define data elements and how they should be used. One of the objectives is that MLR should be as compatible as possible with the LOM and the Dublin Core abstract model (and therefore with RDF though specific bindings are out of scope for this part).

CETIS have passed-on comments about previous drafts to the ISO committee through various channels. The most important channel for us for this draft is BSI, who get a vote in the ballot, and they are looking for comments by the end of February. We would like to put together an agreed position on behalf of those involved in UK F&HE , if you are interested in contributing to this please get in touch (email philb@icbl.hw.ac.uk) and I will pass on the details (update: there is a copy of the draft text on the ISOTC website). We are of course interested in views from outwith UK F&HE, but there might more appropriate routes for you to provide your feedback to BSI or your own national body.

Liddy Nevile is also asking for help in submitting comments from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. I would encourage people to help her with that.

Update: thanks to Erlend Øverby and Andy Heath, for showing me where a copy of this draft can be found.

Update 2: There has been some discussion on the CETIS-Metadata email list about this. Please consider joining in.

Like many standardization efforts, progress is slow and gradual so it’s difficult to know when it’s worth giving an update. But last week the RAMLET technical editor, Scott Lewis sent this message about the conceptual model:

This standard has taken a long time, but it is a complex standard that presents an ontology for resource aggregation and down-loadable files to help implement the ontology.

The good news is that virtually all of the technical work has been done for the standard and for a series of IEEE recommend practices that will be published after the standard is published. The working group expects to have a draft of the base standard for internal review by year’s end and a balloting draft submitted to IEEE in Q1 of 2010. The series of recommended practices that specify mappings for IMS CP, ATOM, METS, MPEG-21 DID, and OAI-PMH ORE will be published as soon as possible after the standard is published. Again, the technical work for these recommend practice has been done, and it is just a matter of converting that work to IEEE recommended practices after the base standard has been approved.

CETIS’s Wilbert Kraan is taking part in the RAMLET work, working on a proof of concept implementation using standard open source components.

The most successful repository initiatives do not engage with LT standards EDRENE report concludes #icoper

pointing me to what looks like a very interesting report which also concludes

Important needs expressed by content users include:

• Minimize number of repositories necessary to access
• …

Of these, the first bullet point clearly relates to interoperability of repositories, and indicates the importance of focusing on repository federations, including metadata harvesting and providing central indexes for searching for educational content.

Coincidentally I had just finished an email replying to someone who asked about repository aggregation in the context of Open Educational Resources because she is “Trying to get colleagues here to engage with the culture of sharing learning content. Some of them are aware that there are open educational learning resources out there but they don’t want to visit and search each repository.” My reply covered Google advanced search (with the option to limit by licence type), Google custom search engines for OERs, OER Commons, OpenCourseWare Consortium search, the Creative Commons Search, the Steeple podcast aggregator and the similar-in-concept Ensemble Feed finder.

I concluded: you’ll probably notice that everything I’ve written above relies on resources being on the open web (as full text and summarized in RSS feeds) but not necessarily in repositories. If there are any OER discovery services built on repository standards like OAI-PMH or SRU or the like then they are pretty modest in their success. Of course using a repository is a fine way of putting resources onto the web, but you might want to think about things like search engine optimization, making sure Google has access to the full text resource, making sure you have a site map, encouraging (lots of) links from other domains to resources (rather than metadata records), making sure you have a rich choice of RSS feeds and so on.

I have some scribbled notes on 4 or 5 things that people think are good about repositories by which may also be harmful, a focus on interoperability between repositories and repository-related services (when it is at the expense of being part of the open web) is on there.

Here’s the full description:

“As far as is possible projects will need to track the volume and use of the resources they make available”

At least that is what the call for projects for this programme said; the aim of this session is to help projects with this requirement. The rationale for tracking use from the funder’s perspective is clear: they want to know whether the resources being released with their money are useful to anyone apart from those who created them. Of course, as any who has tried to work with access statistics for a web site knows, we have to be cautious in interpreting such data. For example, how do we compare a simple “viewing” of a resource with someone taking the resource and embedding it in their own course site? Is it even possible to measure how often the latter happens? Another, perhaps more interesting, aspect of tracking use is what it tells us about what a resource is useful for. Being able to show how other people have used a resource might help someone considering using it themselves, but is there any way to capture this information.

As well as simple access logs and tools like Google analytics, tools similar to track-back on blog postings and the usage information provided by sites such as Flickr and Slide Share (i.e. counting the number of views on-site and number of embeds in other sites) are worth considering. Perhaps more contentious but also worth considering are the techniques such as re-direct URLs and web bugs.

We shall seek to clarify what tracking is required and pragmatically desirable and how it may be achieved. This session will be led by CETIS but we don’t pretend to know the answers to this problem, in fact we’re trying to learn from projects what is useful and achievable, so we will be relying on participants in the meeting to bring their own experiences and potential solutions. For this to work we would like to know in advance who has anything to say, so any project or individual with experience to share should contact Phil Barker philb@icbl.hw.ac.uk as soon as possible.

So what is this feed-deposit idea. The first thing to be aware of is that as far as I can make out a lot of the people who talk about this don’t necessarily have the same idea of “repository” and “deposit” as I do. For example the Nottingham Xpert rapid innovation project and the Ensemble feed aggregator are both populated by feeds (you can also disseminate material through iTunesU this way). But, (I think) these are all links-only collections, so I would call them a catalogues not repositories, and I would say that they work by metadata harvest(*) not deposit. However, they do show that you can do something with feeds which the people who think that RSS or Atom is about stuff like showing the last ten items published should take note of. The other thing to take note of is podcasting, by which I don’t mean sticking audio files on a web server and letting people find them, but I mean feeds that either carry or point to audio/video content so that applications and devices like phones and wireless-network enabled media players can automatically load that content. If you combine what Xpert and Ensemble are doing by way of getting information about entire collections with the way that podcasts let you automatically download content then you could populate a repository through feeds.

The trouble is, though, that once you get down to details there are several problems and several different ways of overcoming them.

For example, how do you go beyond having a feed for just the last 10 resources? Putting everything into one feed doesn’t scale. If your content is broken down into manageable sized collections (e.g. The OU’s OpenLearn courses and I guess many other OER projects) you could put everything from each collection into a feed and then have an OPML file to say where all the different feeds are (which works up to a point, especially if the feeds will be fairly static, until your OPML file gets too large). Or you could have an API that allowed the receiver of the feed to specify how they wanted to chunk up the data: OpenSearch should be useful here, it might be worth looking at YouTube as an example. Then there are similar choices to be made for how just about every piece of metadata and the content itself is expressed in the feed, starting with the choice of flavour(s) for RSS or ATOM feed.

But, feed-deposit is a potential solution, and it’s not good to try to start with a solution and then articulate the problem. The problem that needs addressing (by the repository that made the query I mentioned above) is how best to deposit 100s of items given (1) a local database which contains the necessary metadata (2) enough programming expertise to read that metadata from the database and republish or post to an API. The answer does not involve someone sat for a week copy-and-pasting into a web form that the repository provides as its only means of deposit.

There are several ways of dealling with that. So far a colleague who is in this position has had success depositing into Flickr, SlideShare and Scribd by repeated calls to their respective APIs for remote deposit—which you could call a depositer-push approach—but an alternative is that she put the resources somewhere, provides information to tell repositories where they are so any repository that listens can come and harvest them—which would be more like a repository-pull approach, and in which case Feed-deposit might be the solution.

[* Yes, I know about OAI-PMH, the comparison is interesting, but this is a long post already.]

Like it says on the front page it’s an attempt to define what information about a resource should be provided, why, for whom, and in what format, where:

“Who” includes project funders (HEFCE + JISC and Academy as their agents), project partner contributing resource, project manager, end users (teachers and students), aggregators—that is people who wish to build services on top of the collection.

“Why” includes resource management, selection and use as well as discovery through Google or otherwise, etc. etc.

“Format” includes free text for humans to read (which is incidentally what Google works from) and encoded text for machine operations (e.g. XML, RSS, HTML metatags, microformats, metadata embedded in other formats or held in the database of whatever content management system lies behind the host we are using).

You can read it on Scribd: Resource description requirements for EngSC OER project

[I should note that I work for the Engineering Subject Centre as well as CETIS and this work was not part of my CETIS work.]

It would be useful to know if other projects have produced anything similar. . .

Technical Guidelines–Services and Applications Inventory and Guidance:
Checklist and notes to support projects in selecting appropriate publication/distribution applications and services with some worked examples (or recommendations).
Output: set of wiki pages based on content type and identifying relevant platforms, formats, standards, ipr issues, etc.

I’ve made a start on this here, in a way which I hope will combine the three elements mentioned in the workpackage:

1. An inventory of host platforms by resource type. Which are platforms that are being used for which media or resource types?
2. A checklist of technical factors that projects should consider in their choice of platform
3. Further information and guidance for some of the host platforms. Essentially that’s the checklist filled in

In keeping with the nature of this phase of the UKOER programme as a pilot, we’re trying not to be prescriptive about the type of platform projects will use. Specifically, we’re not assuming that they will use standard repository software and are encouraging projects to explore and share any information about the suitability of web2.0 social sharing sites. At the moment the inventory is pretty biased to these web2.0 sites, but that’s just a reflection of where I think new information is required.

How you can help

Feedback
Any feedback on the direction of this work would be welcome. Are there any media types I’m not considering that I should? Are the factors being considered in the checklist the right ones? Is the level of detail sufficient? Where are the errors?

Information
I want to focus on the platforms that are actually being used, so it would be helpful to know which these are. Also, I know from talking to some of you that there is invaluable experience about using some of these services, for example some APIs are better documented than others, some offer better functionality than others, some have limitations that aren’t apparent until you try to use them seriously. It would be great to have this in-depth information, there is space in the entry for each platform for these “notes and comments”.

Contributions
The more entries are filled out the better, but there’s a limit on what I can do, so all contributions would be welcome. In particular, I know that iTunes/iTunesU is important for audio video / podcasting, but I don’t have access myself — it seems to require some sort of plug-in called “iTunes” — so if anyone can help with that I would be especially grateful.

Depending on how you feel, you help by emailing me (philb@icbl.hw.ac.uk), or by registering on the CETIS wiki and either using the article talk page (please sign your comments) or the article itself. Anything you write is likely to be distributed under a Creative Commons cc-by-nc licence.

Some people have looked at the metadata requirements for the UK OER programme and taken them as a prescription for which LOM or Dublin Core elements they should use. After all that’s what metadata is, isn’t it? But UK OER projects are also encouraged to use Web2.0 or social sharing platforms (Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare etc.) to make their resources available, and these sites don’t know anything about metadata, do they?

Well, in my previous post I tried to distinguish between resource description and metadata, where resource description is pretty much any information about anything, and metadata is the structured information about a resource (acknowledging that the distinction is not always made by everyone). I think that some of the “metadata” requirements given for OER in various discussions are actually better seen at first as resource description requirements.

The second problem with seeing the UK OER metadata requirements as a prescriptions for which elements to use is that, to me at least, it misses the point of what metadata does best. I think that the best view of metadata is that it shows the relationship between resources. “Resources” here means anything — information resources like the OERs, people, places, things, organizations, abstract concepts — so long as the thing can be identified. What metadata does is express or assert a relationship such as “this OER was created by this person”.

So looking at an image’s “canonical” page on Flickr, we see a resource description which has a link to the photo stream of the person who uploaded it (me) and from there there is a link to my profile page on Flickr. That’s done with metadata, but how do we get at it?

Well, in the HTML for the image page the link is rendered as

<a href="/photos/philbarker/"
   title="Link to phil barker's photostream"
   rel="dc:creator cc:attributionURL">
       <b>phil barker</b>
</a>

the rel=”dc:creator cc:attributionURL” tell a computer what the relationship between this page and the URL is, i.e. that the URL identifies the creator of the page and should be used for attribution. That’s not great because I’m not my photostream, in fact my photostream doesn’t even describe me.

Things are better on the photostream page though, it has in its HTML

<link rel="alternate"
  type="application/rss+xml"
  title="Flickr: phil barker's Photostream RSS feed"
  href="http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=56583935@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200">


which points any application that knows how to read HTML and RSS to the RSS feed for my photostream, where we see in the entry for that picture the following:

<author flickr:profile="http://www.flickr.com/people/philbarker/">nobody@flickr.com (phil barker)</author>

As well as the description of me (my name and not-my-email-address) there is the link to my profile page. Looking at the HTML for that profile page, not only does it generate a human readable rendering in a browser, but it includes the following


<div class="vcard">
    <span class="nickname">phil barker</span>
...
    <span class="RealName">/
        <span class="fn n">
           <span class="given-name">Phil</span>
           <span class="family-name">Barker</span>
        </span>
    </span>
...
</div>


That is a computer readable hCard microformat version of my contact information (coincidentally it’s the same underlying schema for person-data that is used in the LOM)

So there’s your Author metadata on Flickr. And I’ll note that all this happened without me ever thinking that I was “cataloguing”!

To generalise and idealise slightly, the resource pages (the canonical page for the image, the photostream page, my profile page) have embedded in them one or more of the following

• links which describe the relationship of the resources described on those pages to each other in a computer-readable manner
• links to alternative descriptions in machine readable metadata, e.g. an RSS or ATOM XML file for the resource described on the page
• embedded computer readable metadata, e.g. vCard person-data embedded in the hCard microformat.

See also Adam’s post Objects in this Mirror are Closer than they Appear: Linked Data and the Web of Concepts.

In our online support session for the UKOER programme, some of which John has summarized (1 2 3), instead of giving participants a definition of what metadata is we gave them a choice and asked them to vote on what they understood the word to mean.

The options were:
A: data about data
B: structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource.
C: pretty much any information about anything.
D: any of the above.

You might recognise option A as the etymological definition, B as the NISO’s definition, found in Understanding Metadata [pdf]. I was interested in how many people included C in what they understood when they used/heard the term metadata. This was prompted by comment, I forget from whom and in what context, that the idea of metadata defined in option B was fine in a specialized academic sense, but the the word was used more widely and so loosely that you could no longer rely on that being what people meant. In other words you could not assume that someone who said they had metadata would be able provide you with nicely structured machine readable XML/RDF/HTML-Meta tagged information.

Our sample of participants in the online session wasn’t scientifically chosen. Everyone had some connexion with the UK OER programme either working for a project or helping to manage or provide advice to the programme; there were approximately equal representation of managers and technical people (with some overlap, I guess), and one person had a library/information science background (that was my co-presenter, John!). The vote came out as
5 for A: Data about data;
14 for B: Structured information…;
0 for C: any information about anything;
10 for D: any of the above.

In retrospect it’s not surprising that no one voted for C, since the people in our audience who recognise that as a meaning are likely to have come across A and B as well.

Like someone said during the vote, you can tell B is the “right” answer because it is the longest and most formal looking option :-). For me, data about data is too restrictive in range and I think it would be helpful not to call option C/D metadata. I would rather use the term resource description to cover all options and reserve metadata for the structured information about a resource (which includes but is broader than data about data). So metadata tells a computer that 2009-09-11 is to be interpreted as a date in ISO8601 format and is the sort of structured information found in LOM and Dublin Core. Resource description may be metadata or may be free text for people to read. Computers such as those run by Google can do a pretty good job of processing information aimed at people; people (on the whole) aren’t very good at information aimed at computers.

I think that the best view of metadata is that it shows the relationship between resources. “Resources” here means anything that can be identified (if you cannot identify it you cannot show how things are related to it), including: information resources like the OERs, people, places, things, organizations, abstract concepts. What metadata does is express the assertion that this OER (for example) was created by this person. I’ll try to show how this allows the mixing up of metadata and resource description (in a good way) in my next post.