Infrastructure
I was recently invited to join the JISC Resource Discovery Infrastructure Taskforce - the first meeting was yesterday. We had been given some background material, and a couple of people (Owen Stephens and Paul Miller) were asked to present ideas around this general area, but the main order of the day was to establish terms of reference and some guiding principles. I had fondly imagined that this would be a fairly rapid exercise - more or less a bureaucratic process before we got down to the nitty-gritty of what problems we needed to solve and how we were going to solve them.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. As the day progressed, I was fascinated to gradually realise that there was a real disconnect between different understandings of what was meant by the term infrastructure. I made a few attempts to pause proceedings while we sorted out a definition, and at the end of the meeting I suggested that a priority for the work which will go on before the next meeting ought to be to establish a reasonable working definition of this term.
Some other scoping issues were dealt with fairly quickly. For example, the infrastructure, what ever that is, would be national in scope, but would serve ‘local’ services. But I think the lack of a general and common understanding of the term ‘infrastructure’ became a real problem yesterday.
Now, I’m not one to insist on precise definitions. Some terms are very useful in spite of, or even because of the fact that they have no precise definition. I have no problem with using ‘Web 2.0′ for example, even in non-marketing contexts! My own problem was that I have some fairly clear ideas about what infrastructure is - or is not - but it turns out that these are not shared by everyone else. For example:
- I assume that infrastructure is not generally user-facing. In the sense that a national infrastructure supports local services which support users, I see the primary stakeholders in an infrastructure as being those people who are providing local services. They are the people who both know what users want (or they should do!) and who know what support they need at a national level to make that happen. However, others in the meeting assumed that users would be directly accessing ‘infrastructure services’ in a variety of ways.
- I imagine a successful infrastructure to be mostly invisible. This turns out to be the opposite view to some at the meeting, who (perfectly reasonably) want UK national infrastructure to be overtly ‘world-class’.
- I imagine a successful infrastructure to be rather boring. Even train-spotters don’t generally photograph the infrastructure, the track etc…. But some of the discussion yesterday was around innovation and not being afraid to take risks. I guess I see infrastructure as tending to be the product of a conservative development process.
Some at the meeting had notions of infrastructure as clear (to them) as mine (are to me), just different. Some I suspect did not have a clear idea in their mind to start with. These were probably the wiser ones in hindsight. I suspect by the end of the meeting, everyone’s ideas had shifted (mine were in free-fall).
Nonetheless, the discussion was really interesting - I enjoy having my preconceptions challenged - and I met some insightful people. I look forward to the next meeting,
In the meantime - help us out please! Infrastructure - what does it mean to you?
November 27th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Interesting to wonder if a purely *national* resource discovery infrastructure can be ‘world-class’ ….
November 27th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Yes. The infrastructure can be identified and recommended at a national level to serve local service provision in the UK. It can also be procured or developed at a national level. But increasingly, I think, we need to move from asking “is our infrastructure as good as or better than theirs?” to asking “are we pulling our weight in the development of global infrastructure?”.
Might be harder to sell to the tax-payer in a global recession however!
November 27th, 2008 at 10:59 am
[...] At the JISCCETIS08 conference session on Open Educational Content/Resources (OEC/OER), we had a really useful discussion about what “minimal tagging” might mean in terms of OEC today. It was part of my presentation on technical infrastructure for the JISC/HEA OEC Programme. By infrastructure, I think I mean Paul Walk’s soft definition of infrastructure [...]
November 27th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Infrastructure, Infra dig…
Yesterday I attended the first meeting of the new JISC Resource Discovery Infrastructure Taskforce. I enjoyed the day, and the Task Group is bringing together a great set of people who all had an incredible amount to contribute to the……
November 28th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Still reeling from the shock of realising how sidelined I’ve become
Not that I’m complaining too much. I realise my views don’t mesh with the (academic/library/jisc) mainstream very well any more.
It’s not clear from your description what the scope of ‘resource discovery’ is here? I’m guessing it’s in some way library-related (books and journals) rather than general resource discovery - not least because I can’t imagine we would presume to attempt to build an infrastructure more ‘world class’ than Google?
Whatever… doesn’t matter really… the infrastructure is the Web and the Web Architecture - full stop. End of story.
(PS. Not quite ‘end of story’ I’ll grant you, since there are minor issues to resolve like what the hell that means in practice - but it’s a better starting point than we’ve had for some time).
November 28th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Not sure the representation was mainstream - definitely some variety of views on the day. I’ve asked JISC about opening up the discussion - it’s difficult to comment specifically….
This meeting was really about terms of reference of the group responsible to make something happen.
Resource discovery did seem to mean everything!
Some clarification needed….
November 28th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
@andy the question of scope of ‘resource discovery’ was discussed on the day, and I think it is fair to say that the focus was towards the ‘library related’ - but I think it was clear we weren’t specifically talking about bibliographic resources.
I don’t agree (and again, this comes back to ‘what do you mean by infrastructure’) that Google (at least the search engine bit) is infrastructure. Google is a service that sits on top of an infrastructure - which is ‘the web’ (clearly this is shorthand, but I think understandable)
I argued in my presentation that ‘if we were starting from scratch’ we would build a ‘linked environment’ for our resources - but I also said that this wasn’t necessarily the web - which Paul challenged me on. I clarified in my blog post, that in terms of where we are today that means the web.
November 28th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Sorry - just had another thought.
If we agree that ‘the web/web architecture’ is the infrastructure, I don’t think that says enough about how we integrate library resources into it to be useful. When I think about the need for ‘infrastructure’ as regards discovery of ‘library related’ resources, the challenge for me is to work out the most successful way to exploit the web in this context.
To take an example I would say that OAI-PMH builds on web architecture - but it hasn’t (yet?) been successful in making it easy to discover resources which are exposed via OAI-PMH compliant interfaces.
November 30th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
@Owen I agree that my use of infrastructure in “not least because I can’t imagine we would presume to attempt to build an infrastructure more ‘world class’ than Google?” was unhelpful. I should have said something like, “a resource discovery service more ‘world class’ than Google”.
Re: your suggestion that “OAI-PMH builds on web architecture”… I basically disagree. I mean, it’s debatable, clearly - because we could probably have an argument about what “builds on the web architecture” means in practice - but 1) OAI-PMH isn’t RESTful in its approach and 2) the way it models resources and assigns URIs to those resources is, shall we say, confusing and unhelpful.
As I’ve argued before, approaching harvesting via sitemaps and content negotiation (to serve appropriate representations of the resources listed in the sitemaps) and making significantly more use of RSS/Atom would have been significantly more in line with the Web architecture and would have played to (rather than against) Google’s strengths.
December 1st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
@andy I don’t disagree with you generally, but I think this all illustrates why the discussions are difficult.
First of all differentiating between ’service’ and ‘infrastructure’ - not always clear
Secondly, even if we agree on ‘web’ infrastructure then this still doesn’t get down to brass tacks - we could all agree on this but go away with entirely different ideas of what it would look like.
The people in the room were from a variety of backgrounds, and could engage with different levels of detail. I don’t think it would have been useful to start talking about RESTful approaches, because it would not have been meaningful to many in the room. Once this group has had some of the basic discussions some of the detail will have to be approached by smaller/other groups I think.
I think there is a “Google in the (virtual) room”. I’m torn on this one - on the one hand I absolutely agree we need to find ways of ensuring the content we care about is surfaced via Google. On the other, I’m wary of building explicitly with this in mind. This is partly why I stressed the idea of a ‘linked environment’ in my talk, without being very explicit about it - because I believe that if we can embrace the idea of links as an integral part of how we present data, then some of that Google goodness will inevitably flow in our direction - but I think the strengths of using the linked environment go beyond Google - Google just exploits this.
Finally a sidebar on RSS. I’m not convinced that RSS actually did anything particularly right, except become popular. Well, this clearly isn’t true - RSS became popular for specific reasons - but there was a lot of stuff wrong as well - it is a miracle it ever took off! Clearly being transported over http was key, but apart from that? I suspect that it was as much a question of being the right thing at the right time as much as the detail of how it worked. In essence it succeeded because enough people saw it as solving a problem they had without getting in the way too much. While these are key lessons to learn, I’m not sure this moves us forward - I think we know these things, we just often fail to achieve them for one reason or another.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Hmmm, couple of comments:
1/. If we take ‘Google’ to mean global-class full text indexer and search engine, then I agree with Andy. At the moment, when I say Google, I mean Google!
2/. Doesn’t matter much to me how RSS got popular - it’s ubiquitous & worth exploiting. By RSS I pretty much mean all versions and I include Atom.
3/. Owen - I maintain my opposition to your abstracting the ‘linked’ information from the particular implementation which is the Web. That way lies Xanadu….
The Web works. RSS works. We could do so much more with these than we are in this sector.
December 1st, 2008 at 9:36 pm
I don’t want to drag this out, mainly because I think we agree much more than not.
1. Google is important, dominant, and good at what it does - we need to have an approach to Resource Discovery which accepts this, rather than tries to build something ‘better’. I’d argue that if we build our approach into the warp and weft of the web then the ability to exploit Google will start to emerge naturally, but if it doesn’t we still have to ensure Google can surface results from our resources.
2. I agree the reasons RSS works don’t matter particularly - in a sense this was partly my point. We need to exploit RSS/Atom because it is there, works and is popular. What we should avoid is looking at RSS as a model of what works, or as good use of web architecture, and then inventing something similar and thinking that will work.
3. OK, OK, I’ve already accepted this (in my blog post)! The reason I made the distinction was that I was trying to emphasise the importance of the hypertext approach to information, but I am persuaded I was making a too subtle, and not very useful, distinction between the the theoretical and the real world. As I said in my blog post any linked environment ‘would absolutely have to be the web’.
December 1st, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Oh and “The Web works. RSS works. We could do so much more with these than we are in this sector.”
Yes, Yes and Yes