Tony takes a look at the origins of the JISC IE, or more particularly its technical architecture, and asks a series of searching questions about its purpose and effectiveness. I think he does a good job of highlighting some of the difficulties inherent in trying to conceptualise an environment in which the supply of resources is necessarily distributed and the requirements of users are multifarious. He recognises that it was appreciated at an early stage that a ‘homogenous’ JISC IE was an impossibility. Tony also goes on to claim that:

…the IE as an architecture can never be complete, that it is only an abstract conceptual model.

[my emphasis]

I tend to agree that there is a risk that this abstract conceptual model be taken literally, and be used in what Tony terms a ‘prescriptive’ way. The use of the word ‘architecture’ in some JISC IE literature has, perhaps, not helped - Tony also makes the point that ‘architecture’ can be both prescriptive and descriptive. Turning to the diagram, I think that the inclusion of a named service instance (Athens) is interesting in that it highlights the tension between abstract model and architecture: the inclusion of Athens in the diagram in 2005 was entirely sensible - it was pretty much the only example of this type of component in use in the sector at the time (if the diagram were created tomorrow it might have the UK Access Management Federation here no doubt, for the same reasons). However, it does tend to push the impression of the diagram as a whole away from the abstract, towards the concrete.

So, on the face of it, I agree with Tony’s statement. However, I would point out that the conceptual model, symbolised by that now iconic diagram, has been remarkably effective in the way it has become the focal point for a great deal of debate, presentation of ideas, funding of R&D etc. over a number of years. It has proven itself to be remarkably versatile. For all the constraint which it has imposed, or been perceived to impose, it has nonetheless been a useful template allowing people to over-lay ideas, models, information flows and so on. It might be an interesting exercise to collect every available, published use of this diagram where some extra information or annotation has been super-imposed on the original ‘classic’ diagram - I believe I have seen dozens of examples of this usage.

While I think I understand what Tony means when he talks about the difficulties in describing an ‘essentially ephemeral concept’, I would argue that the JISC IE is anything but ephemeral. Firstly, the JISC IE is a long-running programme, comprising many projects. To get a flavour of the breadth and depth of this programme, take a look at the growing collection of outputs from the JISC IE funded projects which are being steadily added to the JISC Information Environment Repository. To an extent, the diagram has also served well as a simple organisational tool for funding. Many JISC IE ‘invitations to tender’ for project funding have carried this diagram, sometimes in annotated form, as a kind of map - giving bidders a top-level view of where their project might fit into the overall picture. In this sense, I think that something more than ‘consolation’ is being offered.

While I would argue that the JISC IE conceptual model has served us well for a number of years, it is true that it is starting to show its age. Events have overtaken it. In 2005, it was not at all clear how user-generated content, RESTful interfaces, the drive for open data would come to be such dominant features of the ways in which people consume, augment and create resources on the Web. The emphasis on portals in the ‘presentation layer’ is limiting, and in an emerging paradigm of the ‘mobile’ networking, more attention will need to be paid to the user and the devices they use to engage with distributed resources. But then again, it does show quite clearly a move towards a contemporary, distributed, service-oriented paradigm.

Turning to the reworked diagram which Tony offers at the end of his piece - I presume this is not offered too seriously as an alternative but is, rather, meant simply to show an ‘non-deterministic’ version. It is interesting that this version seems to miss what is, in my view, the most important issue with the original, in the way it simply copies the same depiction of the client desktop/browser.

As Tony Ross reports, Andy Powell has described his diagram as a ‘myth’, albeit a sometimes ‘helpful’ one. I know from conversations with Andy that he is cognisant of the ’side-effects’ of the ways in which his diagram has been used. It has, perhaps, ended up occupying an uncomfortable middle ground between model and metaphor. Perhaps so. But, and this is the most important thing, while this model might have been wrong, it has nonetheless been useful.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful”, attributed to George Box.

Tags: Andy Powell, ariadne, JISC IE, tony ross

“It was constant troubleshooting, testing, research, posting to the Google Apps forums and so on. Plus there’s the emotional strain of wondering whether you completely screwed up by moving everyone to Google Apps as our sole e-mail system. That’s what freaked me out: Did Google just make me look like an idiot?”

[via Gmail leaves Google Apps admins nervous on InfoWorld, my emphasis]

In the higher-education-institution (HEI) community I have seen a fair amount of debate recently about whether or not institutions should be looking to embrace the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and, in particular, making use of all remote those Web 2.0 services. Why run local services, when you can simply find a remote service to provide for your needs?

Perhaps this is a model for the future. But is the right model for the present? There is a growing, commonly-held belief that we are about to enter a global recession. Just the fact that the assumption is commonly held may be enough to make this a reality. Clearly there is a degree of economic uncertainty. Is this a good moment for HEIs to begin a brave experiment with outsourcing services to remote companies?

Now, Google are clearly not a fly-by-night company - their size now makes them a fairly safe bet. But the vast majority of Web 2.0 companies are a fraction of the size of Google. As it is, many Web 2.0 services appear to exist with no visible means of support, other than venture capital. I imagine that venture capital can become harder to find in a period of economic down-turn. Much Web 2.0 service delivery is supported through an advertising model, relying on a revenue stream coming from a small percentage of advertisements ‘clicked’ on. Again, perhaps people are less likely to respond to advertisements in a recession….?

Chris Adie, who spoke on ‘Managing the Risks of Web 2.0‘ at this year’s (excellent) Eduserv Foundation Symposium, made the related point that Web 2.0 services which rely on a global scale in terms of numbers of users and/or on social networks will become decreasingly useful if the number of users starts to drop. Essentially, the network effect works both ways….

Incidentally, Chris also pointed us to some Guidelines for Using External Web 2.0 Services supplied by Edinburgh University. and spoke authoritatively about the institution’s use of remote Web 2.0 services and the risks involved in this, especially in terms of compliance with the Data Protection Act. Interestingly, the ‘back-channel’ at the symposium, populated primarily perhaps by people likely to be passionate about new technology, tended to dismiss some of Chris’s points. I felt that some participants either didn’t realise, or didn’t care that Chris was describing risks to the institution.

Once we got past the recession at the end of the dot-com bubble in the first years of this century, the notion of an open-source operating system had reached a level of sufficient maturity for it to enter the mainstream. Web 2.0 services and SaaS as a viable, mainstream approach will likely reach similar levels of maturity in time. But perhaps now, more than ever, institutions need to make sober appraisals of their options for service delivery or procurement.

After all, no one wants to be made to look like an idiot!

Tags: Google, SaaS

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

This is standard blurb from the Creative Commons (CC) site. In the context of my blog this means - well, what exactly? Feel free to use anything you find here, for whatever purpose you like, so long as you credit me? What about material I include from elsewhere? What about other people’s comments on my posts? It seems to me that this just isn’t clear enough….

And another problem - I don’t necessarily want to apply the same license, indiscriminately, to all of my posts. I probably want credit/attribution for anything I write here, true, but I might feel differently about commercial re-use of the contents of different posts (although I’m probably deluding myself if I think that my blog has potential for commercial exploitation!).

In point of fact, I actually changed the license on my blog a while ago, to remove the non-commercial use clause from my Creative Commons 2.0 license. I guess this is pretty poor practice as it has, by implication, retrospectively changed the license I applied to past entries. So far, no one has complained….

Would it be better practice to attach a license to the text of each post, rather than to the blog as a whole? Is the ‘post’ closer to being a ‘work’ in CC terms? Even better, should I embed the license as a footnote to the content itself? Currently, my CC license declaration is simply an artefact of the user interface I host at http://blog.paulwalk.net/index.php - it doesn’t even appear in the RSS feed. If I licensed each post, rather than the blog as a whole, I could be selective about licensing content (perhaps maintaining a sensible default to avoid unnecessary work). And I could move to a different license later without feeling vaguely guilty. I guess I could include a statement making clear to people who want to post comments on my blog just how their comments are going to be licensed. Or even allow the them to select a license themselves….!

It occurred to me that someone might have developed a ‘Creative Commons License plugin’ for Wordpress, the blog engine used to manage this blog. In fact, I found two very easily, WpLicense and the Creative Commons Configurator. However, both of them apply the CC license in a system-wide manner, rather than to each individual post. This is an improvement over my current practice, as the license will show up in the blog’s public RSS feeds for example, but it’s not really what I have in mind. I’m pretty sure I could insert license statements in the necessary templates if it came to it, and maybe code up a plugin to allow me to select from a menu of licenses. However, it occurs to me that I don’t particularly want to use Wordpress as the ‘author’ tool (currently I use Ecto)

Whatever. I can’t help thinking that attaching a license to a blog feels a little like licensing the deployment of a content management system, rather than the content itself. Anyone care to comment?

Tags: cc, creative-commons, ecto, wordpress

Err - ’scuse me? I just joined a ‘network’ - I didn’t make any value judgement other than that which can be implied by my joining this network - and I don’t think I implied I was a fan. In this case I’m not too worried by this association as I generally appreciate the blog, but it could be otherwise.

Which brings me to the point (yet another thing I don’t like about FaceBook): It seems to work against any possibility of nuance or sophistication in inter-personal relationships. I can’t have a contact, or a business associate - it’s friendship or nothing.

Tags: blog-network, Facebook

The forum has a significant online presence, both in terms of the supporting infrastructure (blogs, transcripts etc.) as well as delegates’ own blog posts etc. - look for stuff tagged with ‘jif08‘.

Some of the highlights of the forum included:

The keynote speech from John Selby, Director (Education and Participation), HEFCE: John gave a really clear outline of some of the issues facing JISC in a changing economic climate. Speaking a little about ’socio-technical’ systems, he offered the view that JISC needs to focus on the nature of such systems, portraying them in terms of the following progression:

Innovation -> Implementation -> Sector change

John suggested that JISC tended to concentrate on communities rather than the sector, that communities could be exclusive and that managing technical and social change together is challenging. We should not take for granted that the buzz within the innovative JISC community is recognised or shared outside this community. He also reminded us that JISC is funded by ‘a tax on the sector’ - I have not heard this description used before.

John offered a stark warning when he described the last decade as a ‘golden era’ in terms of funding and security, and predicted that the next few years would not be so golden.

Finally, John admitted that HEFCE’s strategy is not clear enough, and that HEFCE needs to prioritise and clarify its role in terms of how it deals with the sector and with the Government.

More: transcript and link to presentation slides.

The ‘Identity - Starter for Ten’ session: I was asked to help facilitate this session and I’m very glad to have been involved. It was decided to use a technique known as the ‘gold-fish bowl’ to create a free-flowing ‘debate’, where only two people (out of a room of ~35) could speak at any one time, but the either (or both) of the speakers could be replaced at any moment by any of the other participants. We had a small set of rules to govern proceedings and my role was to ‘referee’ the session - which turned out to be very easy. So easy in fact, that I couldn’t help but join in briefly! The starting discussion was around notions of Identity and the management of this in an institutional context. I imagine that those well-versed in these issues probably didn’t learn anything particularly new, but what transpired was a series of arguments, made by some people with real expertise, which gave a pretty good introduction to this area to those who ‘lurked’ and learned. The feed-back I have received so far has been excellent - here is a short video of a self-described ‘lurker’ (sorry - I don’t know who you are!) explaining how he enjoyed the session (interviewed by Lawrie Phipps of JISC who also proposed the Goldfish Bowl approach in the first place).

More: the gold-fish bowl rules and a transcript.

The closing keynote from Jason DaPonte, Managing Editor, BBC Mobile Platforms: Jason gave an instructive speech about some of the issues the BBC is facing in its quest to ‘deepen the relationship between itself and its users’. He characterised the ‘mobile’ context as having the following characteristics:

• personal
• immediate
• location-aware

An application of this approach might be realised in plans to consider moving from the BBC’s ‘where I live’ paradigm to one of ‘where I am’. In my view, and this is informed by my recent acquisition of a location aware iPhone, this aspect of mobile service delivery is becoming rapidly very interesting.

In another part of his presentation, Jason made reference to a DEMOS report, Making the most of collaboration, which sounds very interesting - I have not yet had time to read it. This report examines the state-of-the-art of ‘public service co-design’ - Jason hinted that the higher education sector did not come out of this too well….

More: transcript and link to presentation slides.

Other good moments included being a part of the winning team at the competition (identifying European countries by map outline, and identifying movie posters) over dinner. My 3G iPhone may have been a contributing factor….

And I did enjoy showing an interactive 3D molecule viewer on the iPhone to Jim Downing and Simon Coles, eminent chemists both, and getting the reaction - ’so what’s the underlying data model?’. To which I could only respond, ‘I have no idea - but look how funky it is….’.

While a few aspects weren’t so good (a bizarre and nearly unusable WIFI service and uncomfortable accommodation) I think the forum was a great success overall - I learned plenty and was able to contribute.

Tags: jif08, JISC

I enjoyed the article, but one sentence in the middle caused me to reminisce about my own childhood, and my approach to ‘doing’ homework:

The experience with which my generation grew up, of absorbing oneself in a single book and allowing its themes to meander into the mind before forming considered judgments, is in danger of being eclipsed by the new, digital world order.

Now I judge myself to be more or less of the same generation as Catherine, but I have a quite different memory of doing homework. As I recall, I spent hours in my bedroom, with a text book or two for sure, but also with Radio Victory playing fairly continuously on my clock-radio. At pre-arranged times I would use my pocket torch to send messages in Morse code to the kid across the other side of the alley-way which ran behind my house. Here’s a sample:

- …. .. … / .– — ..- .-.. -.. / -… . / … — / — ..- -.-. …. / . .- … .. . .-. / .. ..-. / .– . / …. .- -.. / … — — . / -.- .. -. -.. / — ..-. / .–. — -.-. -.- . - / -.. . …- .. -.-. . / ..-. — .-. / … . -. -.. .. -. –. / … …. — .-. - / - . -..- - / — . … … .- –. . … / - — / . .- -.-. …. / — - …. . .-. / .. -. / .–. .-.. .- .. -. / . -. –. .-.. .. … ….

If you feel so inclined, you can translate this using this nifty Morse code translator.

My point is, of course, that continuous partial attention is not a generational phenomenon so much as it is related to age.

And furthermore, while the technology may be different, but thirty years ago I had a remote social network (with two nodes - I didn’t have many friends then, for some reason) which was maintained with a recognised, international standard deployed over a binary protocol using readily-available, commodity hardware.

Tags: morse-code

My intention was to suggest some starting principles and then explore how they held up in the face of real-world issues. Here is the slide where I outlined these principles:

I also asked the question: “do we actually need a new architecture?” - suggesting that there is already a ubiquitous & successful architecture supporting much/most/(all?) of the functionality we want from repositories. Taking a resource oriented approach also seems to offer all kinds of advantages. Applying this approach is certainly not a new idea - others have been here before. However, I suggest that the resource oriented approach and the service oriented approach can be most effective when used to complement each other. I think that there is still be place for the institutional repository as the collection of systems which surround what I call the source repository. I define the ’source repository’ as an (ideally) quite simple system which contains:

• the resources themselves, individually addressed with HTTP URIs
• simple, item-level metadata records
• site-map(s) to aid remote search engines
• public, HTTP interfaces
• feeds to notify remote agents of the deposit of new resources in the repository (RSS and/or Atom)

An ‘institutional’ or ’subject’ or ‘learning object’ repository contains one or more source repositories plus any systems needed to manage it in its particular context. These larger repositories might be very complex: the important point is that the logical component I call the source repository should be as simple as possible in it’s public facing interface: basically a bunch of resources, with an address space. So, a resource is given a Cool URI , and a (probably) simple metadata record is made available, also as a resource with a URI. I suggested that an ORE resource map could be used to relate metadata record to resource - from the point of view of the web or ORE, a metadata record is a resource just like, for example, a PDF of a scholarly paper. Elsewhere more, richer metadata might be created through mechanisms ranging from automatic metadata creation, to further human effort which might be in the nature of traditional cataloguing by trained and motivated individuals, or ‘crowd-sourced’ tagging by untrained but still motivated people.
Complexity is introduced, where necessary, in services developed to manage and exploit resources held in source repositories. Crucially, such activity does not happen unless there is a clear incentive for it, and then it happens close to the point of incentive. As an example, if a particular domain has a strong need to classify papers then someone might go to the trouble of harvesting, aggregating and text-mining the text of these papers with a view to extracting terms to use for classification. Or something similar might be achieved through the application of a team of professional cataloguers using an agreed vocabulary. However it is done, the new metadata thus created could be made available as a web resource where it could be used and combined with other resources as required.
I was asked to illustrate this with a few diagrams which provoked a fair amount of discussion.

The point was made, strongly, that it is subject repositories which have the content, rather than institutional repositories. Regardless of whether this is, or will continue to be true, I think the architectural principles hold up. The business drivers are, I guess, quite different!

I learned a lot from the workshop and had some of these ideas challenged quite robustly. I think they held up but the clarity of presentation could be improved - this is what I will be working on now.

Tags: JISC, ORE, repositories, resource-oriented, ukoln

The opportunistic developer prefers to use someone else’s service/component in the majority of cases. They will create their own software when necessary, and will choose to do so under certain circumstances, but they will accommodate a certain amount of compromise if it means they can get away with using something off-the-shelf. The opportunistic developer is still a developer, as opposed to a power user: they will still write code, just as little as they can get away with.

The proliferation of freely available web-services with simple APIs has created a happy-hunting-ground for the opportunistic developer - a few years ago they were inhibited by a lack of choice of available services to use. In addition to the usual concerns - stability, provenance, price… ease of use is becoming a more important differentiator.

In the JISC Information Environment, the norm has been to develop SOAP interfaces to services, almost by default. There are, no doubt, reasons why this has made sense in the past. However, if there is one thing which became abundantly clear at last week’s IE Demonstrator/CRIG event, it is that institutional repository developers do not want to have to use SOAP interfaces. Aside from the hard-core which is interested in pushing REST as the approach to use in repository-service interactions, the consensus was that the use of SOAP for public service interfaces, rather than being an enabling mechanism, is actually a barrier to adoption.

Whether RESTful or not, services are going to have to start having very good reasons for not offering very simple APIs over HTTP, if they are to attract the opportunistic developer.

Tags: iedmonstrator, JISC IE, opportunistic-developer, ReST, SOAP

Both MySpace and Facebook have recently launched initiatives to open up a little….but not too much.

MySpace has announced its Data Availability project with some major partner applications. Essentially, this will encourage the user to manage ‘profile’ information on MySpace, with a view to surfacing this information in other, partner applications (initially Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter. It will also allow users to share some data such as photos which they have added to the MySpace site. Facebook has a similar initiative called Facebook Connect, initially in partnership with Digg. In both cases, a set of usage policies will be imposed such that the user retains control over what is shared, with the power to revoke the sharing agreement. I’m really encouraged to note that in the case of MySpace’s Data Availability, the mechanism adopted to solve the inter-authentication/authorisation issues between these systems is an implementation of OAuth.

Amit Kapur (MySpace’s Chief Operating Officer) says that Data Availability is:

“…founded first and foremost on allowing users to have comprehensive control over their content and data.”

Dave Morin of Facebook believes that:

“…the next evolution of data portability is [...] about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.”

The extent to which users ‘have control’ over their content and data even while it has been completely locked up within the MySpace and Facebook applications has been argued about extensively. The relationships between these sites, their users, and their users’ data have evolved over the last year or two, as users have become a little more savvy. Pressure from groups such as DataPortability appears to have had an effect, with MySpace also signing up to this recently.

So, it seems as though the walled gardens are opening up, getting ready to participate in the wider web. Or are they?

In a web of distributed social networks, the most likely way in which users might manage their participation would seem (right now) to be through a single entry point. Essentially, if the web of social networks is going to allow ’single-sign-on for the user, and allow a re-use of profile information, and even content across multiple applications, then one model is to give the user a ‘gateway’ service, where they sign-on and manage their ‘account’. Both Facebook and MySpace are going to battle hard to be that gateway service for the masses. Both have accepted that they can no longer remain as a completely walled garden - they must open up, just a little, to avoid being eventually marginalised. But now that they are not totally closed, they may find it difficult to retain control. They may find others are waiting to seize the initiative. Enter Google, and its Friend Connect service.

Friend Connect is different to the previous initiatives from Facebook and MySpace. Google’s new offering is designed to provide a ‘middleware’ services, sitting between the big social networks, and sundry web applications which might want to exploit the new openings in these services. It also utilises components which have been developed with the OpenSocial API. Friend Connect is, I think, a very significant development, because it shows how more distributed social networks might work. It is significant also in a particular detail - notice how Friend Connect can become a social network of sorts simply by integrating existing social networks. Suddenly, the huge headstart enjoyed by Facebook and MySpace doesn’t look so unassailable. This is, presumably, the real reason why Facebook have taken steps to block Friend Connect.

I suggest that because they have been walled gardens for so long, neither Facebook nor MySpace really know how to succeed as middleware. They have always been the destination - never really a component in someone’s workflow. By contrast, Google has always offered services which the user employs en route to a different destination. Google understands this kind of arrangement fundamentally. Expect to see increasingly desperate measures from MySpace and Facebook to retain control while Google quietly grows its Friend Connect service.

Tags: data-availability, Facebook, friend-connect, Google, myspace, oauth, personal-profile-portability, ppp

Primarily, I want to be able to keep the calendars on my iPhone and my MacBook in sync. Ideally, I want all of this to be synchronised with the ‘work’ calendar on the Oracle system. Prior to owning the iPhone, I was a long-time Palm user and had configured my Palm to synchronise with the Oracle system via SyncML using the excellent tools from Synthesis. The Palm became the conduit between my MacBook and the Oracle system which while not ideal, was a manageable solution. But I bought the iPhone partly to replace the Palm as a PDA, and having to carry the Palm around to act as a conduit between various calendar systems is not ideal.

The most likely medium-term solution to this will be a promised iPhone SyncML client from Synthesis, which might be available sometime this year once Apple sort out their ‘official’ application supply chain arrangements.

In the meantime, today I decided to see how far I could get using the iCalendar file format for calendar data exchange. The Oracle server does not expose iCalendar files except through SyncML, but it does allow them to be exported and imported via the client. I wondered if the ‘clunky’ process of exporting the work calendar every morning and importing this file into iCal might still be less painful than using a Palm as a syncing device. So I imported the iCalendar file into a new calendar in the iCal application, and experimented with a few things.

When I had finished, I decided to delete local copy of the entire calendar, and it was here that I encountered the dialogue box telling me that doing so would send a notification that this ‘event’ had been deleted. There were two buttons, ‘Cancel’ and ‘Delete and Notify’. I wanted to ‘delete’ but I didn’t want to notify anyone…. I ‘cancelled’. Trying to delete a single ‘event’ in the calendar gave the same message: I clicked ‘Delete and Notify’ to see what would happen. A ‘new email’ window popped up, with my email address pre-filled, and the body of the message explaining that this event had been cancelled.

Now I have real trust in Mac OSX. It’s not always perfect, but it’s rarely bizarre and annoying like some other popular operating system user interfaces I could mention. So I went ahead and deleted the entire local copy of the calendar, pressing the ‘Delete and Notify’ button….. By the time I had reacted sufficiently to get the network cable unplugged (I wasted precious seconds trying to cancel the process and then disabling the WIFI device before remembering I was connected with an ethernet cable) about 70 email messages had been sent to various colleagues. By the time I regained control of my laptop, around 400 messages had been queued up to be sent….

After a little investigation, it transpires that the previous version (Tiger) of Mac OSX’s iCal had three buttons for this dialogue, the other button allowing you to delete without notifying. So this is just a strange oversight perhaps. But it is easy to find forum threads where people have complained about this. It’s enough of a problem that John Maisey has released iCal Reply Checker - a utility which simply addresses this problem. It works fine - although it is a little disconcerting that the buttons haven’t changed their labels, only their effect.

Come on Apple - sort it out!

Tags: Apple, ical, icalendar, iPhone, macosx, palm, syncml, synthesis