The JISC IE: shared, global or common services?

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The JISC IE: shared, global or common services?JISC Common Services Integration Meeting – 27 October 2004

Andy Powell, UKOLN, University of Bath

a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk

www.bath.ac.uk

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

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JISC IE diagram

JISC-fundedcontent providers

institutionalcontent providers

externalcontent providers

brokers aggregators catalogues indexes

institutionalportals

subjectportals

learning managementsystems

media-specificportals

end-userdesktop/browser pr

esen

tatio

n

fusion

prov

isio

n

OpenURLresolvers

shared infrastructure

authentication/authorisation (Athens)

institutional profilingservices

terminology services

service registries

resolvers

metadata schema registries

3

JISC IE Architecture

• presents a view of the world in terms of 'service components‘

• fairly significant chunks of functionality offered thru network services (e.g. a portal, a repository, etc.)

• loosely-coupled, semi-monolithic applications

• structured and unstructured network services – i.e, machine–oriented and human-oriented Web interface

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Danger of mismatch between…JISC-funded

content providersinstitutional

content providersexternal

content providers

brokers aggregators catalogues indexes

institutionalportals

subjectportals

learning managementsystems

media-specificportals

end-userdesktop/browser pr

esen

tatio

n

fusion

prov

isio

n

OpenURLresolvers

shared infrastructure

authentication/authorisation (Athens)

JISC IE service registry

institutional preferencesservices

terminology services

user preferences services

resolvers

metadata schema registries

What the architecture says…

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end-userdesktop/browser

…what the end-user sees :-(

…and reality!

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JISC IE scope (function)

• “resource discovery”• D2D (discovery to delivery)• functional model (UML)

– discover, access, use– survey, discover, detail, access, use– discover = search, browse and/or alert

• in today’s terminology “metasearch” and “context sensitive linking”– cross-searching multiple collections/targets– linking to most appropriate copy

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IE Standards Framework

• The JISC IE standards framework lays out a set of interfaces (the protocols and standards) that these service components use to talk toeach other inm2m ways forthe purposeof supporting'resourcediscovery'.

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JISC IE technologies• cross-searching

– Z39.50 (Bath Profile) and SRW/SRU

• harvesting– OAI-PMH

• link resolution– OpenURL 1.0

• alerting (news-feeds and related stuff)– RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0

• metadata– DC (largely simple DC) and LOM (UK LOM Core)

• shared infrastructural services– SOAP (or REST)

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E-Learning Framework

• provides a set of lower-level, functional components/APIs (the ELF services)

• much broader in functional scope than the IE

• can think of these as the building blocks that can be used to create larger ‘service components’

• and/or that are used to offer interfaces (APIs) between one service component and another

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ELF IE

• the ELF and the IE meet when the API used to deliver an ELF service is the same as the standard/protocol specified in the IE standards framework

• can enumerate the sub-set of ELF services that are used as building blocks for the current set of JISC IE service components– Alert, Authentication, Authorisation, Content Management,

DRM, Federated Search, Format Conversion, Harvesting, Identifier, Metadata Management, Metadata Schema Registry, Packaging, Rating / Annotation, Resolver, Search, Service Registry, Terminology, User Preferences

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Shared vs. common services

• IE “shared” infrastructural service components…– service components that support the

functionality of other IE service components

– where it makes sense to ‘share’ the delivery of that functionality

– shown as single ‘boxes’ on the IE architecture diagram – but may be distributed

• ELF “common” services…– the building blocks and/or interfaces that are

common to many service components

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Shared infrastructural serviceJISC-funded

content providersinstitutional

content providersexternal

content providers

brokers aggregators catalogues indexes

institutionalportals

subjectportals

learning managementsystems

media-specificportals

end-userdesktop/browser pr

esen

tatio

n

fusion

prov

isio

n

OpenURLresolvers

shared infrastructure

authentication/authorisation (Athens)

institutional profilingservices

terminology services

service registries

resolvers

metadata schema registries

It doesn’t make much sense for lots of libraries to deliver a Dewey terminology service. Better for OCLC to deliver as a “shared” infrastructural service…

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Common serviceJISC-funded

content providersinstitutional

content providersexternal

content providers

brokers aggregators catalogues indexes

institutionalportals

subjectportals

learning managementsystems

media-specificportals

end-userdesktop/browser pr

esen

tatio

n

fusion

prov

isio

n

OpenURLresolvers

shared infrastructure

authentication/authorisation (Athens)

institutional profilingservices

terminology services

service registries

resolvers

metadata schema registries

Many service components will offer a search interface. Therefore, “search” is an example of a “common” service…

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Shared, global or common?

• yes!• “shared” as in “shared infrastructure”…• “common” as in making use of common APIs• “global” as in…

– services offered from within JISC IE to external parties (e.g. requests to host external service registries within IESR)

– services offered from outside JISC IE to IE parties (e.g. OCLC Dewey auto-classification service, purl.org, DCMI metadata registry, handle.net, DOI, …)

– need to integrate and be integrated

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Questions…