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The JISC Information Environment

Bath Profile Four Years On: what’s being done in the UK?

7th July 2003

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

                                                             

Contents• JISC Information Environment technical

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

– putting Z39.50 and the Bath Profile in a national context

• JISC IE service registryhttp://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/

– disclosing the existence of Bath Profile targets

• technical issues– Z39.50/Bath Profile and other ‘discovery’

technologies

                                                             

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)

                                                             

                                                             

                                                             

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 …

                                                             

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

                                                             

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

                                                             

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 …

                                                             

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.)

                                                             

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’

                                                             

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, …)

                                                             

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)– increasingly rich browser-based tools – XSLT, Javascript,

Java, SOAP, …

                                                             

Discovery

• technologies that allow providers to disclose metadata to portals– searching - Z39.50 (Bath Profile Functional Area C), and

SRW

– harvesting - OAI-PMH

– alerting - RDF Site Summary (RSS)

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

– aggregator (harvesting and alerting)

– catalogue (manually created records)

– index (machine-generated full-text index)

                                                             

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.

                                                             

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• ...

JISC Information Environment

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

                                                             

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

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

simple/unqualified Dublin Core– anticipate growing requirement to transport

‘qualified DC’ and IEEE LOM metadata

• 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

IE Service Registry

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

IE Service Registry

                                                             

IESR purpose

“to allow service components to discover and interact with other service components within the JISC IE”

• collection descriptions (describing the content of collections)

• service descriptions (protocol-level detail about how to interact with service components)

• Z39.50, SRW, OAI-PMH, RSS, OpenURL resolvers, SOAP services, Web sites, CGI-based services

ZeeRex

                                                             

Z39.50 – one among many

• in the context of something like the JISC IE…• Z39.50/Bath Profile is part of a bigger fabric of

protocols (SRW, OAI_PMH, SOAP/XQuery, RDF/RDFQuery, …)

• many are based on XML and DC• many developers will work across all the above• desirable to have more consistent approaches

to use of– XML, XML schemas vs. DTDs, XML namespaces

                                                             

e-Learning and Bath Profile

• e-Learning seems to be a significant driving force behind cross-domain activity

• is there an argument that Bath Profile should cater better for e-Learning activities?– support for qualified DC (DC-Education)– support for IEEE LOM (as per IMS Digital

Repositories Interoperability Spec.)

                                                             

Conclusions

• Z39.50 and Bath Profile remains a key component in initiatives like the JISC IE

• but… it is only one component among many• deployment and use is almost always in the

context of other available technologies• future work needs to be mindful of the way the

Web is evolving (XML, URI, RDF, client/server, etc.)

• should IMS DRI (e-Learning work) be folded into Bath Profile?