The JISC Information Environment and collection description

a centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk

The JISC Information Environment and collection

description

Andy Powella.powell@ukoln.ac.uk

UKOLN, University of Bath

UN/WHO HIV/AIDS meeting, Geneva

29-30 May 2003

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Contents• JISC Information Environment technical

architecturehttp://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/

• collection description• JISC IE service registry

http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/

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Simple scenario

• consider a researcher searching for material to inform a research paper on HIV and/or AIDS

• he or she searches for ‘hiv aids’ using:– the RDN, to discover Internet resources – ZETOC, to discover recent journal articles

• (and, of course, he or she may use a whole range of other search strategies using other services as well)

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Issues• different user interfaces

– look-and-feel– subject classification, metadata usage

• everything is HTML – human-oriented– difficult to merge results, e.g. combine into

a list of references– difficult to build a reading list to pass on to

students– need to manually copy-and-paste search

results into HTML page or MS-Word document or desktop reference manager or …

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Issues (2)

• difficult to move from discovering journal article to having copy in hand (or on desktop)

• users need to manually join services together

• problem with hardwired links to books and journal articles, e.g.– lecturer links to university library OPAC but

student is distance learner and prefers to buy online at Amazon

– lecturer links to IngentaJournals but student prefers paper copy in library

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The problem space…

• from perspective of ‘data consumer’– need to interact with multiple collections of

stuff - bibliographic, full-text, data, image, video, etc.

– delivered thru multiple Web sites– few cross-collection discovery services (with

exception of big search engines like Google, but lots of stuff is not available to Google, i.e. it is part of the ‘invisible Web’)

• from perspective of ‘data provider’– few agreed mechanisms for disclosing

availability of content

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UK JISC IE context…• 206 collections and counting…

(Hazel Woodward, e-ICOLC, Helsinki, Nov 2001)– Books: 10,000 +– Journals: 5,000 +– Images: 250,000 +– Discovery tools: 50 +

• A & I databases, COPAC, RDN, …

– National mapping data & satellite imagery

• plus institutional content (e-prints, research data, library content, learning resources, etc.)

• plus content made available thru projects – 5/99, FAIR, X4L, …

• plus …

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The problem(s)…

• portal problem– how to provide seamless discovery across multiple

content providers

• appropriate-copy problem– how to provide access to the most appropriate copy

of a resource (given access rights, preferences, cost, speed of delivery, etc.)

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A solution…

• an information environment• framework of machine-oriented services

allowing the end-user to– discover, access, use and publish resources

across a range of content providers

• move away from lots of stand-alone Web sites...

• ...towards more coherent whole• remove need for use to interact with

multiple content providers– note: ‘remove need’ rather than ‘prevent’

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JISC Information Env.• discover

–finding stuff across multiple content providers

• access–streamlining access to appropriate copy

• content providers expose metadata about their content for

–searching–harvesting–alerting

• develop services that bring stuff together–portals (subject portals, media-specific portals,

geospatial portals, institutional portals, VLEs, …)

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A note about ‘portals’• ‘portal’ word possibly slightly misleading• the JISC IE architecture supports many

different kinds of user-focused services…– subject portal– reading list and other tools in VLE– commercial ‘portals’ (ISI Web of Knowledge,

ingenta, Bb Resource Center, etc.)– library ‘portal’ (e.g. Zportal or MetaLib)– SFX service component– personal desktop reference manager (e.g.

Endnote)

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Discovery

• technologies that allow providers to disclose metadata to portals– searching - Z39.50 (Bath Profile), and SRW– harvesting - OAI-PMH– alerting - RDF Site Summary (RSS)

• fusion services may sit between provider and portal– broker (searching)– aggregator (harvesting and alerting)

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Access• in the case of books, journals, journal articles, end-

user wants access to the most appropriate copy• need to join up discovery services with

access/delivery services (local library OPAC, ingentaJournals, Amazon, etc.)

• need localised view of available services• discovery service uses the OpenURL to pass

metadata about the resource to an ‘OpenURL resolver’

• the ‘OpenURL resolver’ provides pointers to the most appropriate copy of the resource, given:– user and institutional preferences, cost, access rights,

location, etc.

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Shared services

• service registry– information about collections (content) and services

(protocol) that make that content available

• authentication and authorisation• OpenURL and other resolver services• user preferences and institutional

profiles• terminology services• metadata registries• ...

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JISC IE architecture

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)

JISC IE service registry

institutional preferencesservices

terminology services

user preferences services

resolvers

metadata schema registries

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Summary• Z39.50 (Bath Profile), OAI, RSS are key

‘discovery’ technologies...– … and by implication, XML and

simple/unqualified Dublin Core– IEEE LOM doesn’t feature – but anticipate

delivery of rich metadata as part of content packages

• access to resources via OpenURL and resolvers where appropriate

• Z39.50 and OAI not mutually exclusive• general need for all services to know

what other services are available to them

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Collections

• content is often managed and made available in the form of ‘collections’

• collection– “an aggregation of one or more items”

• aggregation by – location, type/form of item, provenance of

item, source/ownership of item, nature of item content, etc.

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Physical vs. digital

• physical collections– of physical items (e.g. books, journals)

• digital collections– of digital items (texts, images, multimedia

objects, software, datasets, “learning objects”, etc.)

– of digital metadata records • describing physical items (e.g. MARC records in

OPAC) • describing digital items (e.g. Dublin Core records in

subject gateway database)

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Services• service

– “the provision of, or system of supplying, one or more functions of interest to an end user or software application”

• informational services– provide access to items and/or collections– e.g. a library, a Web site, a catalogue

• transactional services– not primarily concerned with supply of information– e.g. photocopy service, authentication service

• users access collections of content and metadata through services

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Services (2)• physical service

– provided physically (e.g. a library)

• network service– provided digitally (e.g. an image archive)– structured network service

• network service that provides structured access to structured resources

• user is software application

– unstructured network service• presenting resources to human user• i.e. a Web site!

Physical collections

Collection of physical

items

Physicallocation

Physicalservice

Physical services make physical collections available at physical locations

Digital collections

Collection of digital

items

Digitallocation

Website

Networkservice

(unstructured)

Network services make digital collections available at digital locations

Collections and catalogues

OPACWeb

interface

Digitallocation Network

service(unstructured

)

Collection of digitalmetadata records

Digital collections / metadata

Collection of digital

itemsWebsite

Networkservice

(unstructured)

Digitallocation

Collection of digitalmetadata records

Collections and services

OAIrepository

Harvestvia OAI-

PMH

Z39.50target

Search/retrievevia Z39.50

Website

Collection of digital

metadata records

Collection of digital orphysical

items

SOAPreceiver

operationsvia SOAP

Collection available viamultiple network services

unstructured network service

structured network service

RSSchannel Alert via

RSS/HTTP

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JISC IE architecture

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)

JISC IE service registry

institutional preferencesservices

terminology services

user preferences services

resolvers

metadata schema registries

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JISC IE Service Registry

• JISC IE Service Registry (IESR) holds descriptions about– physical and digital collections of content– digital collections of metadata (about the

above)– the structured and unstructured network

services that make those collections available (Web sites, OAI repositories, Z39.50 and SRW targets, RSS channels)

– the owners and administrators of those collections and services

• schema still under development

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IESR usage

• intended to be used by– any service that needs machine-readable

collection/service descriptions– any service that simply wants to display

collection descriptions to end-users– portals, brokers, the RDN, VLEs, the JISC

Web site, desktop tools like EndNote, etc.

• pilot service

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IESR interfaces

• need to consider both real-time or batch-mode access

• descriptions made available for searching and harvesting using– Z39.50– SRW– OAI-PMH– UDDI

• not yet clear how or when UDDI will be supported, but probably by registering at uddi.org in the first instance

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Related activities

• DCMI Collection Description working grouphttp://dublincore.org/groups/collections/

• NISO Metasearch Initiative (including collection description issues)

• plus various application or protocol specific initiatives– ZING ZeeRex, ISO ILL Directory, Digital

Reference Standard (Collections and Service), EAD community, …

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Questions…

a centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk