Ron Chernich Principal Research Fellow University of Queensland, Australia

Ron Chernich

Principal Research Fellow

University of Queensland, Australia

Annotation and Security Services

Podd Workshop, CSIRO Gungahlin Campus 2010

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UQ eResearch Labs

Working with collaborative annotations and metadata related services since 2004

Experience with tools and techniques for annotating text and multi-media resources

Began development of a “clean slate” annotation service for DIAS-B in October 2008– Prime user: the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).

Also used by Aus-e-Lit– Open source and generic enough for others

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UQ eResearch Labs

Working brief expanded in 2009 to include Security Services

– Seamless integration with the Australian Access Federation (AAF) using Shibboleth

– Seamless integration with existing Open ID providers, such as Google, Yahoo, Verisign, Microsoft, etc

– Fallback to integrated, bespoke, user management service– All connectable to a locally managed, roll based

Authorization Service.

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UQ eResearch Labs

All services delivered as Java Servlets capable of deployment in Open Source or proprietary web service containers

Services decoupled and configurable so either can stand-alone without the other

Ready NOW (from SourceForge) Will continue to be refined and enhanced

through to at least mid 2011

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Security

Tricky stuff. Nasty details abstracted away so components can be simply configured on or off.

AAF (Shibboleth based) will still require the environment to be Shibboleth enabled and made AAF aware. This is documented.

Other details elided to prevent glazed eye syndrome…

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W3C Annotea

– Annotates (resource)– Author– Body– Context– Created/Modified (date)– Related

A W3C Semantic Web initiative (draft) unchanged since 2002 that defines a protocol for creating, updating, and retrieving annotations using an extensible RDF XML schema having 7 properties :

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On the Server

Store and retrieve structured annotations– Robust– Efficient– Scalable– Extensible

Provide harvesting through OAI-PMH– including sets and resumption tokens

Provides search capability Granularity of Secured access is fully

configurable

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At The Client

Create and display annotations– A whole web page – Selected text on a web page– A selected region of an image on a page– Map markers (in development)

Reply to annotations and other replies Support context sensitive annotation

schemas Support specially authored pages and pages

which are ignorant of the annotation service

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The Ross Wilkinson Challenge:

NO PLUG-INS!– They are browser and version specific– They require installation and configuration– They compromise user security and integrity– They are Verboten by many IT departments

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Surprise!

All objectives met– Firefox– Safari– Google Chrome– Opera– Internet Explorer 8

Now, Introducing…

The developers were the ones surprised

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DANNO, and DannoTATE

One Servlet to Book ‘em One Servlet to Make ‘em and Find ‘em One Script to Bind ‘em all

…and other stuff because nothing is ever that simple…

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Also Introducing…

Emmet– The Security Service– Like Danno, Emmet uses the Java Spring

framework

Chico– Spring wrapper extensions that simplify

configuration so services can be tailored without touching the source code

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The Dreaded Live Demo

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The Same Origin Problem

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Take-Away

Chico, Emmet, Danno and Dannotate are ready NOW!

They allow viewers of specially prepared web pages to shared annotation at page, text string, and image region levels with optional, configurable levels of security

The Danno Repeater extends this ability to many unprepared web pages

The components are open source (LGPL), fully documented, and will be further developed and refined over the life of the ALA/DIAS-B project and perhaps beyond.

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Availability

Chico, Emmet, Danno and Dannotate - open source (LGPL)– Emmet and Danno (server side)

100% Java Servlet (Apache Tomcat or similar) Uses RDF triple store (Sesame or Jenna)

– Dannotate (client side) Java servlet talks to Danno and formats responses JavaScript client provides user interface

http://itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/danno.html

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Key People

University of Queensland – Prof Jane Hunter

Principal Investigator

– Dr Stephen Crawley Senior Research Fellow

– Mr Ron Chernich Principal Research Fellow

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Questions?

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]