Reflecting On Openness and the Semantic Web

The printed copy of the proceedings of the Museums and the Web 2008 conference divides the papers into four sections: Institutions, User Participation, Web Space and Reflecting. The concluding section, on Reflecting, contains only two papers: one on Semantic Dissonance: Do We Need (And Do We Understand) The Semantics Web? by Ross Parry (University of Leicester), Nick Poole (The Collections Trust) and Jon Pratty (Culture 24) and my paper on What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?, co-authored by Mike Ellis (Eduserv) and Ross Gardler (JISC OSS Watch), which I’ve posted about recently.

It is pleasing that the two papers which reflect on the challenges and opportunities posed by recent Web developments have been written by a combination of researchers and practitioners based in the UK.

Ross Parry’s paper is based on a series of workshops funded by the AHRC which were held at various locations in the UK during 2006 and 2007. The paper describes discussions which have taken place recently in the UK in which it has been suggested that “museum data with good URIs, consistent metadata and simple tagging are seen to provide a vitally stable infrastructure on which to build“.

To this list I would add the importance of providing data which is free from restrictive licence conditions and which is exposed for reuse by other applications which can exploit the rich semantic data.

But stable URIs, consistent metadata, simple tagging, open data and machine interfaces - isn’t this what Web 2.0 is about? From one perspective, people may regard Web 2.0 as shorthand for referring to blog, wiki and RSS applications. But Tim O’Reilly’s original Web 2.0 diagram makes it clear that Web 2.0 is broader than this.

In a chapter entitled ‘‘If it quacks like a duck…’ - developments in search technologies‘ in a recent Becta Research Report on Emerging Technologies for Learning Volume 3 (2008) (PDF version of chapter) my colleague Emma Tonkin argues that:

By “semantic”, Berners-Lee means nothing more than “machine processable”. The choice of nomenclature is a primary cause of confusion on both sides of the debate. It is unfortunate that the effort was not named “the machine processable web” instead.

I think Emma is right: the term Semantic Web has caused much confusion. But if the Semantic Web is really a machine processable Web in which clean URIs can help to provide programatic access to structured data, then isn’t this very close to what Web 2.0 may be considered to be about?

And can you claim to be in favour of the Semantic Web if you are critical of the architectural aspects of Web 2.0? Or, to put it another way, isn’t engagement with Web 2.0 a needed stepping stone towards the Semantic Web? And won’t we find that those who come out with reasons for not engaging with Web 2.0, will come out with a similar set of reasons for not engaging with the Semantic Web?

What Does Openness Mean To Your Community?

Myself, Mike Ellis (Eduserv) and Ross Gardler (JISC OSS Watch) are the co-authors of a paper on “What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community?” which has been accepted for the Museums and the Web 2008 conference. And I’m pleased that David Bearman (conference co-chair) response when he read the paper was that it should be discussed in a Professional Forum at the conference. Indeed David’s comment on the paper was “it sounds like it could be the most amazing session at MW this year” :-)

The paper suggests that openness can include open standards, open source, open APIs, open access and an open culture (i.e. a willingess to encourage user-generated content). But the paper also acknowledges that there is a downside to each of these aspects. Some of these concerns were raised by Nick Poole, Chief Executive of the MDA in a thread on “The speculative aspect of using Web 2″ on the MCG JISCMail list. Nick commented:

… ‘how can you be so naïve’? Low cost of entry? We were promised that with Open Source Software and it turned out to be no cheaper. Reaching audiences while we sleep? They told us Z39.50 and interoperability would solve that and we’re still not there. Content Management will make everyone a publisher? You just try and get a username and password out of the Council IT Admin.

I’m pleased that Nick raised such concerns. He’s right when he suggests that the potential benefits of both open source and open standards have been over-hyped. And, similarly, the benefits of Web 2.0 can also be exaggerated. But my response to the concerns raised by Nick are to argue that we need to develop more sophisticated ways of engaging with these aspects of openness - and just because policy makers appear to feel that simply mandating use of open standards and open source software will be sufficient to deliver their benefits, doesn’t mean we are faced with the binary choice of accepting or rejecting such views. Rather we need to engage in discussions and debate on ways in which real benefits can be realised.

I’ve been involved in working collaboratively with others in developing models for exploiting the potential of open standards and open source software. At the Museums and the Web 2.007 conference I presented a paper on Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards, co-authored with my colleague Marieke Guy and Alastair Dunning (then of AHDS). These ideas were further developed and extended to include open source and an open access in a paper on Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access co-authored by Scott Wilson (JISC CETIS) and Randy Metcalfe (then of JISC OSS Watch).

But there’s a need to build on these approaches and to develop approaches for exploiting other aspects of openness. And such approaches need to recognise the dangers and difficulties. But just because there are difficulties, doesn’t mean we should reject openness - rather it means we need to continue having the debate, whether it’s on mailing list such as the MCG list, on this blog or at the professional forum at the Museums and The Web 2008 conference. So I’ll ask here the questions w’ll be discussing in a few day’s time: what does openness mean to your community, what are the benefits it can provide, what are difficulties which are likely to be faced and, most importantly, how do you feel such difficulties should be overcome.

Your feedback is warmly welcomed.

Open Science, Open Seminars

Open Science

One of the ways in which myself and my colleagues in UKOLN keep up-to-date with new developments across our communities is through the UKOLN seminar programme. The speakers tend to be those who are working in areas related to our interests and have something new to say.

The most recent seminar was given by Cameron Neylon, of STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and School of Chemistry, University of Southampton. The title of Cameron’s talk was “A Beginner’s Guide to Open Science: Not for beginners but by beginners“. Cameron described his involvement in various aspects of ‘openness’ within the context of scientific research. Further information on his work is available from his Science In the Open blog - and he also contributes to the Openwetware blog, as you can see from his thoughts on his visit at UKOLN. He described how Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis are being used by the scientific research community, not only for making notes and sharing ideas, etc. using blogs and wikis in ways which will be familiar with readers of this blog, but also what I would describe as ’semantic blogging’ - use of templates to allow structured information (e.g. names of objects, processes, etc) to be used in ways which allowed for rich use with the blog/wiki environment and reuse in other contexts. For example in the Sortase Cloning example, the data in the table in not created using a table editor (which can lead to errors being introduced) - rather a template will ensure that the data is valid. In addition the data is integrated with other relevant areas of the blog. Effectively the blog is being used as a structured scientific content management system.

Cameron also described OpenWetWare - “an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering” which runs on the MediaWiki software. Another example Cameron provided of use a a wiki within this community was UsefulChem, which this in this case uses the externally-hosted Wikispaces service.

As well as illustrated how blogs and wikis are being used by the scientific research community, Cameron also described how he is embracing the Web 2.0 philosophy of openness. In a post on “The OPEN Research Network Proposal - update and reflections” Cameron described an open process for submitting a proposal for a research grant. The proposal was written using Google Docs and the final version, prior to its migration to an in-house application for producing the PDF in a format required by the research council, is freely available for viewing. - and, if you are interesting, you can compare this with the version which was submitted(PDF file) to the funding council.

Use of blogs, wikis and open development - some great example of how Web 2.0 is being used by the research community. And, as I discovered when Googling for further information on Cameron Neylon’s work, it doesn’t stop there. A number of given by Cameron and others involved in open Science activities have been videoed, screencasted or recorded. For example a talk by Jean-Claude Bradley on “Open Notebook Science: Putting the Information User in Control through Transparency” is available as a screencast using the Google Video playerand several talks are available as podcasts through iTunes, as illustrated below.

Open Seminars

This latter example reflects some of my current activities. Cameron kindly gave me permission to video his talk and, as an experiment, I have uploaded the first 10 minutes of the talk (which is all I took) to YouTube.

I’m aware of the limitations of this particular video: I didn’t have my tripod to hand, for example and there is visual clutter - bottles of mineral water  - in front of the speaker (although perhaps this could provide an  for a sponsorship deal :-). And there are clearly resource implications in recording seminars on a systematic basis (provided, of course, that speakers would be willing for their talks to be made publicly available). In this case, however, (using my Casio Exlim EX-Z1080 camera) I simply needed to take the recording and plug the camera into my PC. I was then asked which application I wished to use. selecting the YouTube uploader, I simply needed to fill in a few fields and press the upload button. Simplicity itself - and it was pleasing to receive an unsolicited email from a colleague saying “Thanks Brian, that was useful to get a feel for the seminar since I missed it yesterday“.

I think it was particularly appropriate that a seminar on Open Science provided an opportunity for this initial experiment in opening up access to the talk to a wider audience. But what do you feel about this? Is the light weight approach adequate? Is the 10 minute clip sufficient or does the lack of the full talk frustrate you? From the point of view of the speaker and the main audience (colleagues at UKOLN and other participants from the University) would such openness tend to stifle open discussion and debate? And, finally, can we, if we are thinking about making greater use of video recordings, really justify the additional time and effort this make take?

New Open Data Licence - a Milestone for Sharing Data on the Internet

Myself, Scott Wilson and Randy Metcalfe co-authored a paper on “Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access” which Scott presented at the ELPUB 2007 conference. The paper described the potential benefits of use of open standards and open source software and an open approach which characterises much of the Web 2.0 environment.

We were aware when writing the paper, though, that there was a gap related to open data. I’m pleased to report that this gap is now being addressed with the launch by Talis and Creative Commons of a new open data licence, which the press release describes as “a milestone for sharing data on the Internet”.

I was aware of Talis’s work in this area when I attended a session on Open Data at the WWW 2007 conference, which I wrote about some time ago. One of the questions I asked at the conference related to the governance of Talis’s Community Licence.  I was assured that Talis aimed to get it established as an open licence governed by a trusted neutral provider and this was confirmed in a post by Paul Miller in September 2007.  And now the results of that work is openly available.

Talis’s press release is given below.

Talis and Creative Commons are delighted to announce the release of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence, the first output of a successful partnership with the Science Commons project of Creative Commons.  Creative Commons is well known for its advocacy and licensing work in the arena of ‘creative works’ such as songs, images, and copyrightable text.

In developing the Public Domain Dedication and Licence, Talis secured the efforts of Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde, asking them to build upon the principles of the earlier Talis Community Licence in ways that ensured its fitness for international purpose whilst aligning it more closely to the phrasing of Creative Commons’ overarching protocol.

Talis Technology Evangelist Dr. Paul Miller commented, “At Talis we’ve been arguing for a more permissive culture around use and reuse of data for a very long time. Working with our partners at Creative Commons and elsewhere we now have a clear framework upon which to build, and in our Public Domain Dedication and Licence we have the very first licence to conform to that new Science Commons Open Access Data Protocol. With this announcement we provide a tool to those who already understand the value of unlocking their data. We can also use discussion of this first tool to carry a wider set of messages to those who remain unaware of the importance of data licensing to their own activities.”

The legal environment within which data exist is radically different to that for creative works, and although there have been attempts to apply existing Creative Commons licenses to data, the legal validity of those efforts is questionable. In Europe we have Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament, and its various expressions in the laws of member states to define the so-called Database Right. These protections do not apply in jurisdictions such as the United States. A different approach is therefore required if we are to facilitate the widespread availability of data upon which the emerging Semantic Web will depend.

John Wilbanks, Creative Commons’ Vice President responsible for the Science Commons project, commented “For a commercial organisation such as Talis, with a heritage in the business of creating and managing data, to recognise the importance of the ‘freedom to integrate’ says much about changing attitudes to the ownership and use of data. That they  went beyond this recognition and did something about it with their licensing and advocacy work says much about them and the team with which they collaborated. The Open Data Commons Licence is the fruit of that collaboration. Both CC0 and the ODCL offer a sound legal basis upon which creators can follow Talis’ example and recognise that there is far more to be gained by enabling access to data than by continuing to lock it away. Uniquely built for data, the Open Data Commons Licence approach furthermore implements the norms of data sharing for scientific data, providing the guidance for scientists to act as good citizens without exposing them to lawsuits and lawyers.”

Jordan Hatcher, who completed the redrafting effort, commented, “Building an open data licence for the community is very much a collaborative process and we need everyone’s input to make the licence be the best it can be — including meeting everyone’s needs for open data. The project’s goal is to produce an easy to understand licence and that means having it user tested just like software. In the end, the Open Data Commons licence will provide a workable and easy to use solution for data integration that will take care of the relevant rights over data and databases.”

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence is available for use from today. We are working with the Cambridge-based Open Knowledge Foundation in the expectation that they can take on the support and development of this and related licenses in the future, ensuring true community ownership of the licensing cornerstone upon which so much data will come to rely.

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence is available for download from www.opendatacommons.org,  along with the first set of documented Community Norms.

Many congratulations to Talis for this work.  Now that the licence  is available, let’s start making use of it and share our data as well as our text, images and software.

Open Development And Amplified Events

Open Development

Ross Gardler, Manager of the JISC  OSS Watch service, visited UKOLN yesterday to give a seminar on open development. Although OSS Watch’s main interest is in the application of this methodology within open source software development, as Ross made clear open development can also be applied in other contexts, including the development of content and in learning contexts. Ross has recently commented on the application of an open development approach by the JISC-funed WepPA project.

I am very much in favour of the approaches which Ross described, and personally have been making much of the materials I have developed available with a Creative Commons licence for a couple of years.  I have also participated in Wikipedia, creating a number of entries and helping to improve the quality of content created by others. This very much fits in with Ross’s views on open development, I think.

Open Development and Amplified Events

UKOLN has been taking a similar approach to the exploitation of networked technologies at events over the past few years. Lorcan Dempsey coined the term “Amplified Conference” to describe events in which the content and the discussions aren’t restricted to the closed community of participants who are physically present at the event, but can be freely accessed by all. A paper on “Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences“ presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference described our initial work in this area, which was subsequently followed up by a series of briefing papers which provide advice on best practices for doing this.

Open Development and UKOLN’s “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” Workshop

The UKOLN workshop on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” will take place in Birmingham on Monday 26^th November 2007. Although the workshop is fully subscribed, with about 100 participants, we intend to allow remote participants to access the workshop materials and, we hope, either view a live video stream of the plenary talks or event view the video stream within Second Life.

The live video stream and use of Second Life service will be provided by Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation (sponsors of the workshop). Andy has described the plans for the technological infrastructure which will be used to make the talks available to a remote audience, so I won’t repeat this here. What is worth commenting upon from Andy’s post is the openness about the potential problems we may experience: “Sounds complex?  Probably.  Do-able?  I think/hope so.  It’ll be interesting to see how things work out.” But rather than having a low profile experiment with a closed group of friends, the approach Andy and myself are taking is to be open about this experiment (on both our blogs and on a number of mailing lists), which we hope will maximise the learning of the potential benefits of this approach, but perhaps also more useful, the problems we may encounter and the things we might do differently things next time.

As well as the technical challenges which Andy will be addressing, there are also various non-technical issues which I have been focussing on.  I have been in contact with all of the speakers informing them of our plans and getting their agreement to be streamed to a live audience (additional pressure on them, but I’m pleased to say that they are all willing). We have produced an Acceptable Use Policy document for the event, intended for participants who plan to make use of their laptop (or other networked device) during the workshop.  And Andy and myself and currently discussing the best ways of providing real time chat during the talks. This can be used to support the remote audience, for example to inform them of the slide which is being displayed. But should we have separate channels for the various media - would the video streaming audience be interested in the Second Life discussions “nice avatar“)?

And, of course, as well as the work which Andy and I (and my colleagues in UKOLN’s events team) are involved in, this open approach encourages input from potential participants and others who may have taken part in similar amplified events. Such open development also involves shared responsibilities (for example, we would expect remote participants to try out the various tools in advance of the event and to take responsibility for fixing any local configuration problems) and sharing the risks (being supportive if not everything works as planned).  But the open source development approach of ‘release early, release often’ in order to maximise the feedback can also be provide benefits in many other areas. 

We welcome your thoughts.

The Power Of Information

I attended a meeting recently at which a civil servant introduced a report which he was summarising as ‘exciting’. I had to stifle a yawn, thinking that what might be exciting for a civil servant would probably be very dull and boring. But I was wrong - the report on “The Power Of Information” is of much interest to those of us (and I include many readers of this blog) with an interest in promoting open access to information.

The report (which is available as a PDF document - 280 KB, 57 pages) was commissioned by the government and published in June 2007, as described on the Cabinet Office Web site.

The background to the report is an awareness of the popularity of Web 2.0, especially those which provide user generated content and how such technologies, coupled by a more open agenda, can enable information provided by government bodies to be reused in various interesting ways (Paul Walk recently commented on the phrase “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else“).

The government’s response to the review (which is available as a PDF document - 610 KB, 20 pages) was very encouraging, broadly agreeing with all of the recommendations.

Although this report is aimed at information produced by central government bodies (i.e. information covered by Crown Copyright) my view is that the publication of the report and its acceptance should be welcomed by those in the educational and cultural heritage sectors. The report can help to move the debate within these sectors on the reuse of data and encourage experimentation and sharing, rather than the conservatism we have seen in the past, with worries about loss of IPR and potential (though perhaps seldom realised) income-generation possibilities.

A report worth reading, I feel.

Wikipedia - Can We Provide Open Access For Training Materials?

Melissa Knighton, who works on the Staff Development Unit at the University of Leeds, and I took part in a workshop at ITCP held in Trieste a couple of years ago. So I was interested to rediscover her Elgg blog recently. Her posting on Wikipedia - a resource for learning and teaching? described s staff development course on the role of Wikipedia in learning and teaching. Further exploration of the Elgg blog service at the University Of Leeds led me to a posting on Wikipedia: What the critics say by Angela Newton, the Information Literacy Team Leader in the Library at the University Of Leeds. Angela’s posting summarises Wikipedia’s strengths and weaknesses - issues which, I’m sure, will be addressed more fully in the staff development course.

But how much time and effort will be spent in duplicating the development of similar materials across the library and information sector? The Library sector, in particular, should appreciate the benefits to be gained by providing open access to resource, and such benefits need not be restricted to research publications - Creative Commons licences can also be used with document and training materials. This is an argument I made in a paper on Let’s Free IT Support Materials! which I presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference.

Which will be the first Library to provide a Creative Commons licence for its documentation and training materials? And have a Creative Commons logo on slides used in training courses? Or is this already happening?

It’s About Giving, Not Taking

A colleague came in to my office yesterday clutching a book (“Wiki A New Wave in Web Collaboration“) she had just received which, she informed me, had a contribution from me. Rather than a brief mention I was surprised to find that it included an 8 page article on “Experiences of Using a Wiki for Note-taking at a Workshop“. I had to search for this title before finding that this was an article I’d written which had been published in Ariadne (Issue 42, January 2005). I then recalled that over a year ago we had received a request from someone in Indian working for ICFAI (Institute of Chartered Financial Analysis of India) for permission to include this article in a book he was editing. I was happy to give my permission - and was very pleased to receive a copy of the book just before Christmas.

Having a article published in a book produced in India reminded me that back in January 1995 I sent out an announcement about a handbook on “Running A WWW Service” which I had written and which was mirrored in the US, Sweden,Turkey and Slovenia (not Singapore, as I mistakenly announced, misinterpretting the .si country code). The handbook was also, at one stage, included in the SuSE Linux distribution pack.

I’ve always has an open attitude regarding materials I’ve written, and, for the past year, my slides have contained a Creative Commons logo. In June 2005 I gave a talk at the EUNIS 2005 conference on “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!” in which I argued for support services in our institutions should be pro-active in allowing documents produced for internal use available for re-use by others.

Three days before Christmas it is timely to repeat this proposal. Remember, openness is about giving, not taking.

Merry Christmas

Brian