Posts Tagged ‘JISC’

An agile approach to the development of Dublin Core Application Profiles

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I have been asked to provide a position paper for next week’s Future of Interoperability Standards meeting hosted by CETIS. This blog post is one I have been meaning to write for ages so I’m offering it as a position paper of sorts.

UKOLN has been charged by JISC with the task of supporting the development of Dublin Core Application Profiles (DCAPs) in a number of areas. While I have not (so far) had much direct involvement in this work I have developed, over the last year or so, a real interest in the process of developing these.

The development of DCAPs is governed through the application of the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles. In this document, the concept of the application profile is explained thus:

The term profile is widely used to refer to a document that describes how standards or specifications are deployed to support the requirements of a particular application, function, community, or context. In the metadata community, the term application profile has been applied to describe the tailoring of standards for specific applications.

The requirements for an application profile to be legitimately termed a Dublin Core Application Profile are defined within the Singapore Framework. In brief, a DCAP is a “packet of documentation” which includes the following elements:

  • Functional requirements (mandatory)
  • Domain model (mandatory)
  • Description Set Profile (DSP) (mandatory)
  • Usage guidelines (optional)
  • Encoding syntax guidelines (optional)

This seems mostly sensible although I have not been party to much of the discussion around the Singapore Framework and so I have never entirely appreciated the purpose of or need for the Description Set Profile (DSP). In passing I will note that it seems to me that the DSP could be optional rather than mandatory, and that the Usage Guidelines should be mandatory rather than optional.

According to the Singapore Framework web page, “there are no stable, published examples of full-blown application profiles that conform to these guidelines”. With one exception, Scholarly Works Application profile (SWAP), it is difficult to find any examples of DCAPs which are close to being realised. SWAP was developed for the most part at UKOLN so I have an interest in seeing it adopted; however to date we have seen no actual usage of this DCAP.

I come from a background of software and service development, rather than standards development. For this reason, the development of application profiles is more appealing to me than is standards development per se, as I expect to be able to apply my experience and skills more readily to work which is aimed at supporting “specific applications”. It is natural for me to measure success in terms of usage. This means that I take usability seriously, and tend to focus on users and their responses.

Early in 2009 I began to notice a few things about how DCAPs such as SWAP were expected to be developed. It seemed to me that usability was not a stated priority. As, I think, a consequence of this, there is little attention given to testing the usability of DCAPs within a context involving users and applications. It does seem that DCAPs are expected to be tested for conformance to the standard, for internal cohesion and logic in terms of the underlying information model, and even for theoretical satisfaction of functional requirements, but if the DCAP has not been tested for usability before it gets to this point then it is at high risk of failure. It was also apparent to me that users, even experts in the domain for which the DCAP was intended, might struggle to be able to appreciate, test or criticise the DCAP documented according to the Singapore Framework, unless they had relatively rare information management knowledge and understanding.

At UKOLN, I got together with some colleagues and proposed that we consider a more Agile approach to the development process. I use the term Agile in the sense in which it has been applied to software development in recent years. A key feature of Agile development is that it allows the development of not only the solution, but also the requirements, in a highly iterative process. Agile development tends to favour working solutions over future capabilities and encourages near-continuous engagement with users during the development process, responding to changes in functional requirements as both the developer and the user increase their understanding of the problem space. I wondered if we couldn’t devise some tools and techniques which would allow the early development stages of DCAP development to be done iteratively, with close engagement from prospective end-users. The following is a description of what we have developed so far.

An Agile approach

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In order to focus on usability in the development of DCAPs, we realised that we would need to introduce a methodology which would allow us to frequently test what had been developed so far against user-requirements and understanding. Borrowing again from software development, we decided to adopt a rapid prototyping method, where we would give prospective end-users the means to quickly assemble information models which made sense to them in the context of their requirements. Some of our early experiments were in the domain of scholarly works because we have a particular interest there. Our method therefore relies on being able to assemble small groups of prospective users to participate actively in the development process.

We have observed an issue with users’ engagement with application profiles. Application profiles are, essentially, intangible – users cannot interact with them directly. For many users, this presents a very real barrier to engagement. Even if formal documentation such as Description Set Profiles (DSP) is developed during the development iterations, it tales a certain kind of user with a particular interest to engage with these. Many users need to see the sort of system interface which they will ultimately be using in order to contribute feedback on the development of an AP. We have developed two approaches to making DCAPs tangible, paper-protoyping and a flexible user interface tool for information modelling.

In early stages of requirements gathering, a paper-prototyping approach has shown real promise as an accessible method for eliciting requirements from groups of users. This has the advantage of being potentially very free-form, such that the developer’s unconscious influence on users’ contributions is reduced. Users are encouraged, collectively, to develop their own understanding and to model it. You can read about this in more detail in Emma Tonkin’s paper: Multilayered Paper Prototyping for User Concept Modelling: Supporting the Development of Application Profiles.

One limitation of paper prototyping comes from this very free-formedness: it is difficult to correlate the outcomes of a free-form modelling exercise with the outcomes of other similar exercises. For this reason, we have developed a second stage development tool which uses software to structure and, crucially, record, users’ engagement with the developing application profile.

Our software for allowing users to experiment with modelling their domain is MrVobi. Below you can view a short video of it being demonstrated on an interactive whiteboard:


Users are encouraged to use this tool to create and restructure entities and attributes through a user-friendly and intuitive interface. The user interface is is connected to a web service which records every decision, and which can hold and serve up pre-recorded models so that users can start from an advanced position in a given session.

As we move users from the free-formed to the more structured interfaces, we can start to gain an important benefit. By recording the decisions that individuals make about the information model, we can aggregate these so that, theoretically, we can start to assign a level of confidence to the decisions which are eventually made about the application profile. For example, we can say something like “this attribute belongs with this other in this entity, and 71% of our test users from this domain agree with this”.

As an application profile becomes more developed, it can be presented to users for testing through this same interface. This means, importantly, that an application profile can be treated as something more dynamic. As a domain changes over time, with shifting aspirations, challenges and issues, so the application profile can be re-assessed in terms of its usability in a changing context.

A concern which we identified early in the development of these processes and tools was the fact that the tools influence the testing process: when a user gives feedback, they are to some extent commenting on the artificial interface as well as the application profile. The paper-prototyping patly mitigates this, as does the simple fact that we don’t rely on a single interface. Within the very real constraints of users’ patience and available time, the general approach is to introduce as many types of interface as the user can bear so that biases based on the idiosyncrasies of specific tools are gradually cancelled out.

To bring this back to the Singapore Framework: we believe that we are evolving an effective process to develop several parts of the ‘package’ – the functional requirements, the domain model, and the usage-guidelines. We believe that if these are developed with frequent recourse to user-testing, then the resulting DCAP will be more robust, and more likely to be adopted. We think that we can build into the process an aspect of evidence gathering to allow to make assertions about the resulting DCAP which are based on a certain degree of confidence.

This is very much a work in progress. We have experimented with the paper-prototyping approach with a number of different groups, and in more than one domain, with some very interesting results. We ran an interactive workshop at last year’s International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications using the MrVobi software which was very well received (this was informed by a presentation which is also a useful overview). We have received strong encouragement from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative to continue to develop this approach and are now considering how how we might take this work forward in 2010. Any comments are welcome.

Note

This work has been been the result of collaboration within UKOLN. Special mention should be made of Emma Tonkin’s efforts which have been crucial in a number of aspects of this work. Others at UKOLN who have contributed are Andy Hewson, Talat Chaudhri, Mark Dewey, Stephanie Taylor, Julian Cheal and Tom Richards.

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Posted in Information Management, Metadata | 1 Comment »

Making developers happy

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Since I joined UKOLN two years ago, I have frequently claimed that we (JISC, the sector, our community) don’t do enough to support and listen to developers. Well, I’m just back from The Developers Happiness Days (dev8D) in London and I can certainly no longer say this. A solid week of developer happiness! A week of ideas generated, geeks networking with users, competitive and yet collaborative development, knowledge being exchanged…. followed by fun and, yes, a bit of drinking.

dev8d-developers.jpg

The brain-child of David Flanders and Ben O’Steen, with support and ideas from several others and funding from the JISC, dev8D has been a fantastic success, and has managed the difficult task of appealing to, and being successful for, a range of people with varying levels of experience and technical chops. The inexperienced developer looking to be exposed to new ideas and to the wisdom of more experienced folk was well served. Julian Cheal of UKOLN fitted this description and he embraced the opportunities dev8D presented to him, engaging at all levels with the event to the extent that he was rewarded with both a prize for his helpfulness and a special mention at the awards dinner for ‘best newcomer’. But the older hands were fully engaged nonetheless – presenting on their areas of expertise in ‘lightning talks’ in the true barcamp style which geeks have embraced as their own way of conducting conference sessions. It was great to see so many familiar faces together at one event, being unashamedly techie, exchanging ideas and help.

Although, like some others, I was forced to miss some of the event due to a deadline for bids to a JISC call falling on the Wednesday, I still managed to sit in on some sessions, and I learned plenty, especially in a talk on agile development about which I’ll blog more, separately.

One of the things which stood out at dev8D was the way in which users (or UberUsers) were invited to engage with developers. There’s an important, non-obvious distinction here. Users were invited to come into the developers’ environment. Brave users, you might say! Normally, developers are invited into the users’ environment…. for just long enough to explain to them what the users require. Users would often rather not have to deal with developers all that much. To step into an environment of happy, busy developers must have been an eye-opening experience for those users who were brave enough, and open-minded enough to try it. Although I wasn’t on the ‘dragons den’ panel looking at the prototypes being developed in the Developer Decathlon, it was remarked to me several times that the quality of submissions was better than in previous events – and that this was attributed to the fact that users had been involved in the prototyping process. I’m one of the judges who’ll be marking these submissions and I’m really looking forward to seeing what was produced.

With these events, there are little things which can make a difference. The use of Wordle to produce personalised name badges for each delegate was inspired, as was the use of happiness tokens to reward help or ideas. The Twitter back-channel was used to tremendous effect – the ‘#dev8D’ tag made the top ten Twitter ‘trends’ worldwide. Sam Easterby Smith even built a Twitter-powered developer-happiness meter!

I’d like to go on record thanking David Flanders in particular for driving this event – the guy must be utterly exhausted after working 18 hour days for a week. I think we should also recognise the vision of those in the JISC (and especially Rachel Bruce) who were prepared to back what must have looked like a risky proposition. There was value in the event itself – the networking, and the capacity building which went with this and I have good reason to believe there will be value in the prototypes and ideas generated as a result. But, perhaps most importantly, the sector has just shown the world that it values its developers, and is prepared to invest in them, and even spend a little to make them happy. I believe this will have been a wise investment. As I said on Twitter, there’s a community developing which I’m proud to be associated with.

If you want to know more, the tag ‘dev8D’ has been used extensively in various systems. Some examples:


Image by Dave Pattern (http://www.flickr.com/photos/davepattern/3274205523/sizes/m/)

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JISC Innovation Forum 2008

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

I was invited to my first JISC Innovation Forum which took place over Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, and was held in Keele University. Apart from a smattering of light duties – a couple of meetings, helping to ‘referee’ a session (more later) and taking turns to staff the joint UKOLN / CETIS / OSS Watch / TechWatch stand, I was free to get stuck into the real business of this event which was, for me at least, learning & networking.

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: identity_session.jpgI 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.

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Repository architecture #83

Monday, July 7th, 2008

At a JISC workshop last Thursday I was invited to present some ideas around an architecture to support and exploit repositories in the UK. I gave the presentation the title Repository Architecture #83 . ;-)

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:

presentation.004.png

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.

deposit.png discovery.png

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.

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Making digitised content available for searching and harvesting(2)

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Back in February I was asked to give a talk to the JISC Digitisation Programme meeting. I blogged about this shortly beforehand asking for comments and suggestions. The response was fantastic – I received a bunch of great suggestions and incorporated many of them into the presentation. Everyone who commented got a public ‘thankyou’ at the event, and I included all names in the slides I used.

I have finally gotten around to making the slides available (someone who was at the meeting has asked for them so they made some sort of impression with someone!).

Thanks again.

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Making digitised content available for searching and harvesting

Monday, February 11th, 2008

I have been invited to give a short presentation to the JISC Digitisation Programme on Friday, giving an overview of different ways of exposing content and metadata. I’ll be talking to projects which are concerned with Cultural Heritage content which is being surfaced in websites to support eLearning. Formats vary tremendously. This is the complete list:

Aside from the obvious stuff like OAI-PMH, Google, RSS, what should I be talking about? Persistent identifiers? Cool URLs? Any other suggestions?

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Finely tuned antennae

Monday, December 17th, 2007

The discovery to delivery hook-line has been used for a while to describe a goal of those information services which support the academic researcher. The challenge to academic libraries, national information services etc. has been to support the researcher from the moment they begin the process of searching to the delivery of the digital or physical artefact which satisfies their enquiry.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about discovery to delivery, wondering why it just doesn’t quite work for me. I’ve been preoccupied with this mainly because I was invited to devise a diagram to express discovery to delivery – an architecture if you will – and found myself either focussing on discovery or delivery, but not really both together.

I think it is the way in which it implies a ’round-trip’ which bothers me. It sounds synchronous – almost ‘client-server’. What it is missing particularly I think, is any notion of how the researcher has registered their interest. There is, perhaps, an implication that the researcher has just initiated a search operation.

At a meeting last week involving, among others, JISC and some of the services they fund, as well as the British Library and CURL, I gave a short presentation (working to a ‘maximum 5 slides’ rule) outlining the idea that it might be interesting to consider the proposition that more and more of our information is being delivered to us without it having been explicitly asked for, and that there might be an interesting model in this for the next generation of services supporting scholarly research.

I considered the fact that, like many, I’m engaged in a sort of continuous, low-level, background research activity. Firstly, I have registered my interests explicitly with a number of online services, and receive regular deliveries of content which is often useful. Secondly, I have registered interests in a less explicit way by choosing to subscribe to the output of a number of academic and non-academic bloggers. Thirdly, some of the systems with which I am registered are starting to make recommendations to me about stuff I might want to look at. This is the technique used most prominently by Amazon, where the system offers suggestions of other items I might be interested in (’recommendations’) using its database which relates me to other users and to our respective activities in the system.

Note that I’m not explicitly seeking particular content here – I’m establishing finely-tuned-antennae to catch useful intelligence. The fine-tuning is a continuous ongoing activity but, importantly, not all of it is conscious, and not all of it is initiated by me. Currently this sort of thing is still done in a fairly passive way – I go to Amazon for example with the intention of making a purchase and Amazon tries to tempt me with what is, essentially, targeted advertising. We might not want Amazon to actively ’send’ us suggestions when it’s algorithms detect a possible sale to be made. But imagine this model applied to a repository, or a library system system. At the meeting last week we considered this scenario – and what might be possible if various services were ‘joined up’ and able to share networks of users and preferences. It seems to me that the ultimate utility of this kind of system is when it feeds useful stuff to me that I didn’t previously know I was interested in. I sometimes discover the things that it turns out I should be interested in this way.

I like the notion of ‘gestures’, recently popularised by Steve Gillmor to describe these ways in which our interests are communicated to others, registered by systems, or mined from transaction logs. As I go about my professional life, I make these gestures or indications of interest, and I ensure that my personal information system is tuned to catch the responses from these gestures. My current toolset for this is based primarily around RSS-based harvesting and subscription, but it is not limited to this.

Of course, if this type of activity continues to grow apace, then the problem of managing information discovery remains, it is just transferred closer to the researcher/user. In fact, the activity of discovery follows the (semi)automatic delivery.

Perhaps there is a new model, complementary to the first:

gesture -> delivery -> discovery

where the different elements happen asynchronously.

Is ‘discovery to delivery’ sufficient any more?

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Repositories get my vote

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Having attended the CRIG Unconference last week, I think that it delivered much that was interesting and valuable. I look forward to the results of the synthesis of the many contributions from the delegates. Although there was just one formal presentation, the volume of content was still considerable, as just about everyone actively contributed something. The final analysis will have to demonstrate whether or not the quality of the content has been good enough to be useful. I’m particularly interested to see if the nature of the synthesis of the content is such that it can be demonstrated that the unconference has delivered something which would be difficult to arrange otherwise.

Spread over one and a half days, the unconference was probably a little too long. I’ve particpated in ‘open-space‘ before, but in a concentrated 3 hour session, not spread over two days. Having said that, it is not reasonable to get people to travel from all over the country to attend a session which only lasts a few hours. Some of the logistics didn’t work so well – it was difficult/impossible to see the SWORD demonstrations in the side room because there just wasn’t enough physical space.

Having said that, some of the logistics worked brilliantly. The pub which was chosen for an informal ‘un-dinner’ was perfect – just the right size, no loud music, walking distance from conference venue and accommodation. Conversation ranged widely, but it was non-stop and a significant proportion of this was around the CRIG domain. David seized the opportunity to gather more feedback in true unconference style (he must carry A3 flip-chart paper and felt-tip pens when he goes to the pub just in case…!) I think the second day worked better than the first – people had warmed up by then, the ‘rules of engagement’ were a little clearer, and the previous evening’s session in the pub had broken the ice.

Some highlights for me included some discussions around SRU/W – (’yes please’ to SRU, ‘no thanks’ to SRW). Remembering to serve developers by making artefacts stored in repositories directly addressable with ‘cool’ URLs was a theme which got general support. And there seems to be wide-spread dissatisfaction with the state of ‘packaging’ in metadata terms. People got to ‘vote’ on ideas using a version of the ‘dotmocracy‘ approach. This worked pretty well – again, I look forward to seeing the outcome of this ‘democracy of ideas’.

I think this may have been the first large gathering I have been to where the Mac users outnumbered the Windows/Linux users. Mind you, the user of the MacBook in the picture might become an ex-Mac user if they adopt this kind of practice:

BTW – I see that I am reported to have said “Wouldn’t it be great if the outcome of this unconference was that repositories were just wrong?” at At the CRIG Unconference last week. (here and here). I did, in fact, utter these words…. but in a sarcastic response to someone who had proffered the observation that “repositories are just wrong” in one of the one-minute roundup sessions. I have an interest in the development of repositories, and I also have an interest in the development and use of unconference techniques. There is a certain scepticism, in parts of the repositories community at least, about the efficacy of unconferences. Such scepticism could only have been reinforced if the CRIG Unconference had delivered shallow thinking, glib conclusions and sound-bites. This was my concern, and the reason for my sarcasm. For the record, I think that there is much that is valuable in repository research, development and deployment.

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