CNRI Handle System Workshop: Middle Half

Daan Broeder, Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Hadle System in European Research Infrastructure Projects

Already been involved in infrastructure for several e-research projects.

Reliable references and citations of net accessible resources, particularly in language: audio-visual, lexica, concepts...

Number of resources can be large, especially if disaggregating corpora. (Then again, a persistent identifier for each paragraph is overkill, and has a cost.)

Identifiers are cited, and embedded, and in databases.

CLARIN project: making language resources more available. Aims to create federation of language resources, mediated through persistent identifiers. Preparatory phase 2008-2011, construction up to 2020. Builds on DAM-LR project: unified metadata catalogue, shibboleth federation, Handle system.

For flexibility, DAM-LR minimised amount of sharing required. Developed mover (move data + update identifier), and restore Handle DB from scratch. All data needs to be recoverable from the archives themselves. Found that federation is not for all organisations, does impose an IT burden. Need centralised registration.

Max-Planck Society wants PID system throughout the Max-Planck society, which will also support external German scientific organisations.

Requirements for CLARIN: political independence: European GHR and no single point of failure; wide(r) acceptance of PID scheme (w3c!); support for object part addressing (ISO TC37/SC4 CITER: citation of electronic language resources); secure management of resource copies.

CLARIN will do third party registration for small archives.

Ongoing static from W3C in ISO. Proposes URLified Handles, suggests ARK model: http://hdl.handle.net/hdl:/1039/R5

Part identifiers: just like fragments in URIs: A#z => objectA?part=z, with a standard syntax for "z" for the given data type, exploiting existing standards.

Replicas: federated edit access to handle record by old and new managers. Known issue of access by multiple parties, trust. Could also have indirect Handles, i.e. aliasing. Not everything supports aliases well, doubtful status of the new alias for citation.

Value-add services: document integrity; collection registration service (single PID for collection, with aggregation map à la ORE); citation information service (acknowledgements, preferred citation format to be included in citation); lost resource detective (trawl the logs, the web, etc to find where the resource has ended up, including tracking provenance history of who last deposited).



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What have I learned from the Handle workshop?

• Handle type registry is coming. Complete with schema (which will need work) and policies (which look to be way too laissez faire)
  
• The Nijmegen folks are gratifyingly coming to similar conclusions about things as us (e.g. REST resolver queries)
  
• That European digital library is going to be huge... if it can hold together.
  
• Selling the entire Max-Planck Gesellschaft on using persistent identifiers—that's huge too.
  
• Scholars blog. And want credit for blogging.
  
• There are ISO standards for disaggregating texts, among other media. (I can gets standardz?) And Nijmegen looks kindly on ORE.
  
• The ADL-R is being released in a genericised form: DO registry.
  
• Handle is being integrated into Grid services (but we already halfway knew that)
  
• OpenHandle is still a good thing
  
• XMP, for embedding metadata into digital objects, is now getting currency, and can be used to brand objects with their identifiers (amongst other things) and update that metadata with online reference (as I identified in a use case last year, methinks)
  
• W3C continues to be all W3C-ish about non-HTTP URIs. People have not given up on registering hdl: schema.
  

CNRI Handle System Workshop: Second Half

Nigel Ward, Link Affiliates: Towards an Australian Persistent Identifier System: Thoughts on Services and Policy

Well, I already know what he's saying, having reviewed the presentation last night...

Larry Lannom: Grid Identifier Service

Globus approached CNRI, liked the persistent identifiers, distributed and scalable as they are, and could be embedded in Grid software.

Challenges: lots of local prefix (namespace) administration: much greater scale than existing CNRI practice. This means GHR queries may have to be passed on to delegate. This has been prototyped but not deployed; anticipate implementation next year. Can register and resolve Handles through standard grid protocol --- fully embedded in the Grid.

To do more than just HTTP redirects, need to do interpretation of Handle records, with intelligent Handle types. Handle does not validate types, though apps may. Developers do make up types, but that compromises interop.

So every Handle type should be a registered Handle. hdl:0.TYPE/ is cumbersome and restricted to CNRI. Recommend people use their own custom Handles. CNRI are creating Handle Value Type registry, to search for types, and open to the public (policies TBD, but look to be minimalist). Can be used by apps for custom transformation. A schema for types is in internal testing. e.g. 0.TYPE/URL : 10320/HVT-R : . Some fields can be developed with reference to existing fields; e.g. MIME types and RFCs, which should themselves have Handles.

CNRI Handle System Workshop: First Half

Larry Lannom, CNRI: Handle System Update

DOI: 2625 prefixes; Other: 1172

Handles: 35M in DOI.

Three global service sites.

"Chooseby" datatype: structured alternatives in a single Handle value, including selection criteria.

Computed Handles: resolve Handles that have not been registered. Data store of records can be replaced by a computed Handle if the record contents are predictable. e.g. 123/456.x => URL xyz/x (rewrite rule). Resolution attempts registered Handle first, then computed Handle.

More global mirors: new one from Crossref.

Update to RFCs: delegation has changed; execute permissions are obsolete.

Attempt at URI registration of Handle scheme.

Tony Hammond, Nature: A Distributed Metadata Architecture

Downloaded assets have no metadata linking them back to source.

Services: generic (Handle Form, OpenHandle), specific (proxy).

OpenHandle: Accessible as web service, easy read, expose values as markup. In various programming languages and serialisations: RDF/XML, JSON.

Coming up: Web Admin. cf. Freebase MQL transacted through JSON.

XMP: Extensible Metadata Platform. Embeds XML into arbitrary file formats, e.g. PDFs. XMP packet would be RDF/XML document with wrapper. That would include DOI watermarking. Can be viewed through an inspector app. Metadata can be hooked up with services. Can also include "see also" link to more metadata curated online, to allow updating of metadata accessed from branded object.

Ed Pentz, Crossref: DOI Impact on End Users

Trust. Crossref have business interest in trustworthiness of their hyperlinks between texts.

Filling in citation data as they expand. Network effects driven by digitisation of back content. Crossref can automatch biblio citations back to DOIs because of biblio metadata.

Publishers flocking to getting DOIs as imprimatur. (Not necessarily a realistic interpretation of what DOI is!)

IDF Open Meeting: Second Half

Jan Brase, German National Library for Science & Technology (TIB): Access to non-textual information

Data > Publication > Knowledge is accessible; the data itself is not published or accessible. Known problem: verifiability, duplication, data reuse. Data accessibility for 10 years has been mandated in Germany --- and ignored.

Solution: strong data centres; global access to datasets & metadata through existing library catalogues; persistent identifiers.

Results: citability of primary data. High visibility. Verification. Data re-use. Bibliometrics. Enforcing good scientific practice.

Use of DOI to that end: TIB is now a non-commercial DOI registration agency for datasets. Datasets gets DOIs, catalogue entries. Can disaggregate datasets (e.g. multiple measurements), accept conditions, choose formats etc through portal access to dataset.

TIB registers data worldwide, and any community funded research in Europe. Half million objects registered (but not stored at TIB --- they are not a data centre).

Scientific info is not only text: data, tables, pictures, slides, movies, source code, ... which should also be accessible through library catalogues, as publicly funded research outputs. The catalogue becomes a portal within a network of trusted content providers, with persistent links.

Institutions often find it hard to get DOIs from a foreign library (TIB currently being the only show in town); so TIB want to set up new worldwide agency, paralleling CrossRef, as consortium registering DOIs for scientific content by libraries. So far signed up ETH Zürich, INIST France.

ICSTI has started project for citing numerical data and integrating it with text, in which TIB is participant.

Jill Cousins, European Digital Library Foundation: Access to National Resources

European Library: consortium of Council of Europe national libraries. Federated search: starts at federated registry, and also goes to library servers (SRU, Z39.50). Helped national libraries have low barrier to entry, annoying as it is to the user. National libraries themselves know that this won't scale, and are moving from Z39.50 to OAI harvesting.

Persistent identifiers were not priority for national libraries: they hadn't digitised much (5 million for the whole continent), and Z39.50 didn't need to interoperate with external systems. This will change: 100 million items digitised in next 5 years, born digital content, move to OAI PMH, OpenURL.

CENL (Council of euro nat libs) recommends there must be resolution services, based on URNs primarily from NBN namespaces. Each nat lib to have its own resolver service to access its own stuff, following European standards. URN service must deal with other id schemes. For long term survival, DOIs can eventually redirect to nat lib copies (copies of last resort).

NBNs are already being used. They do identify Items not Works, though now that libraries digitise themselves, they move away from that. Resolvers need to deal with appropriate copy.

SURFnet are proposing a global resolver; interested "because it's free (at the moment)", and is prepared to work with both NBNs and DOIs. Nat libs are still learning what the point of persistent identifiers are. Are not working with IDF because of perception of costs and little return (ah, but did they negotiate?); and need to resolve the "last resort" issue, which is not dependent on IDF. Also, a lot of "not invented here", wanting to avoid external providers. Libraries already have working NBNs which work internally, so they haven't had the pressure until now to resolve consistently.

European Digital Library (Europeana) underway. No standards for unique identification yet! Still trying to work out how to realise it (e.g. decentralised?)

IDF Open Meeting: First Half

Normal Paskin: background

DOI is being standardised through ISO: early 2009 formal standard.

Unique persistent identification; required interoperable structural descriptions. DOI does not have apps, but basis for apps. Builds on existing schemes, standards, data types.

Rights metadata as example of structured description. Distributed metadata, distributed rights management. Each object involved --- agreements, permissions, requirements --- is itself a digital object to be identified, linked, and disaggregated. DOI does interoperability of those digital objects.

DOI services: metadata@10.1000/123456, rights, abstract, sample, buy, license, pdf, etc. DOI data vocab needs to be carefully set up to support that. (The Old "one identifier, multiple standards" issue that we've come up against in our own identifier work.)

Gordon Dunsire, U. Strathclyde: Resource description & access for the digital world

• RDA: New content standard for bibliographic metadata, to be published early 2009
  
• Wider range of info carriers, digital & physical
  
• Authors themselves are writing metadata, not just professional cataloguers
  
• New metadata formats in use
  
• Opportunities to harness new digital environment
  
• Internationalised and globalised info services
  

RDA: attributes; guidance on creating content; more controlled vocabs. Esp. carrier type (e.g. "online resource"), and content type.

The wider context of resource description. e.g. International Standard for Bibliographic Description (ISBD). Statement of International Cataloguing Principles. Almost harmonise with RDA. There are wider range of related standards, increasingly interlinked.

• FRBR (Biblio Records), FRAD (Authority Data).
  
  • FRBR has been extended to Object Oriented (FRBRoo), based on CIDOC conceptual reference model
    
  • Project underway to open up FRBR to other developers, esp. through RDF, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System: formalises vocabs and their interdependencies)
    
  
  
• RDA/ONIX ontology to improve metadata interop with publishers <=> libraries
  
  • can build up vocabs, high level content and carrier types
  
  
• Dublin Core: DCMI/RDA Task Group
  
  • Task group: broader use of RDA by Dublin Core & others (SKOS, LOM).
    
  • Define RDA modelling entities as an RDF vocab, to be consumed by these schemas
    
  • Identify RDA vocabs for publication as RDF schemas, for consumption by SKOS
    
  • Dublin Core specific application profiles for RDA, based on FRBR/FRAD
    
  
  
• Do also need to tie RDA in with MARC, since it's not going away
  

Pairwise interop of these standards is starting. RDA can serve as middle of chain(s)/networks of standards interdependencies.

Common semantic foundations: Semantic Web; RDF; SKOS (based on RDF); OWL (slight overlap with SKOS, bridges between vocabs)

DOI has same underlying apporaoch to ontology as RDA/ONIX. IDF has requested funding from JISC to extend the framework: comprehensive vocab of resource relators and categories, for mapping/crosswalks, and reference set (chain above)

Reflection

So what have we learned?

• RDA is setting itself up as semantic middleware for a range of biblio-related metadata standards.
  
• Standards are relying on and exploiting other standards already, pairwise
  
• The whole world will bow down before the Semantic Web: it will outdate current catalogue entries
  

Brian Green, EDItEUR: Standards for rights expression within the ONIX family

ONIX: family of formats for metadata about publications, with common data elements, developed & maintained by EDItEUR.

ONIX for Licensing Terms. Subprojects: Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL); Reproduction Rights Organisations; contributing to ACAP.

Problem

• Need to automate electronic resource management
  
• variations in license terms: automatic policing on the coalface of license, which has typically been filed away in paper and is inaccessible
  

Libraries want: machine readable rights; dissemination of rights info in resource metadata; exposure of rights to users.

ONIX-PL seeks to address this. Expresses complete publisher/library license, for import into libraries' Electronic Resource Mgt system.

Not a technical protection measure, does not include enforcement technologies (like ODRL), but allows flexibility, compliance-based. Communicates usage terms, allows library override e.g. fair use.

Will provide ONIX-PL editing tools (JISC funded): form-filling. Open source, available now. JISC Collections are using the prototype. Bits of the license will be exposed to different parties at a time.

ACAP uses ONIX Licensing Terms semantics.

Both ONIX and IDF use indecs view of metadata. Ongoing sharing of dictionary work beyond indecs. IDF is active member of ACAP.

Reflection

• Communicating licenses means the license should remain human-readable
  
• The license is in chunks so that relevant bits can be excerpted and shown to humans
  
• The license remains machine-readable enough in bits that machines can act on it
  
• Common meta-metalanguage (indecs) necessary to preserve semantic interop