Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

Some ECDL highlights

The main ECDL 2008 program ended today and I will try to quickly summarize some highlights that I catched from the poster session. I participated with a poster on Dynamic Catalogue Enrichment with SeeAlso Link Servers (self-archived at E-LIS, abstract also as DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-87599-4_62).

First I talked with Magnus Pfeffer und Kai Eckert (University Mannheim, see photo). Kai developed a tool called Semtinel to visualize thesauri and classifications, and their usage for indexing a particular collection. He also published a paper (Semtinel: Interactive Supervision of Automatic Indexing, see PDF) at the JCDL’08 and gave a presentation at the Bibliothestag 2008. Displaying a hierarchical knowledge organization system and its usage in a treemap seems to be a simple idea, but it looks like nobody has done it before. If Semtinel becomes OpenSource and reads SKOS, this will be a useful tool for every „ontology engineer“ (that’s what „thesaurus managers“ are called now, as Dagobert Soergel remarked in his tutorial).

Unfortunately I missed the demo Using Terminology Web Services for the Archaeological Domain about an SKOS terminology webservice developed at the university of Glamorgan. Reminds me at the German terminology registry Museumsvokabular.de. I also liked the demo of DIGMAP, a set of services to enrich maps in libraries with geographical information and to mash them up with Google Maps. The best ECDL demo award was choosen democratically by all participants. It went to the Preservation Planning Tool Plato and to the search engine Summa.

I had some time to glimpse the nice „little“ city of Århus (2nd largest of Denmark with 300.000) and I liked it a lot. The ECDL 2009 will take place at Corfu which is a bit warmer (last year I visited it for the MTSR 2007) – see you next year at ECDL or another digital library related conference!

So called „best“ ECDL paper ignores tagging

The first normal talk at the ECDL2008 was about „Improving Placeholders in Digital Documents“ by George Buchanan and Jennifer Pearson. Placeholders (also known as bookmarks) in physical form are common and easy to use: you just put a peace of paper (or similar flat thing) inside a book, and optionally add notes on it. Bookmarks in the digital world are known but have low usability. A bookmark in a browser is just a plain link without additional information (color, notes, etc.), it only points to a webpage instead of specific parts of the content and it does not show up if you open the object that had been bookmarked. Moreover there is other content you may want to bookmark, for instance PDF files.

Buchanan and Pearson identified current uses of placeholders by user studies (interviews with a dozen of researchers) and created a demo interface for bookmarking PDFs. The talk was nice but I really wonder why it was selected as best paper. Especially the lack of referencing Social Tagging (Brewster Kahle brought it up in a question after the talk) would have been a clear reason for rejection if I was the reviewer! Social Tagging and Social Bookmarking has limitations – but it is much more than normal digital bookmarks and there are several tools to support tagging the files on your own hard disk. You should better try enhance tagging tools so tagging becomes more like annotating documents with placeholders instead of asking people to use artificial bookmarking tools. I hope the next talks will be better in scientific and practical relevance. Maybe the fact that Buchanan also got the best paper award last year (while beeing in the ECDL programm commitee) has influenced the decision? One more argument for open review.

Anyway: as long as there are no good interfaces to easily read and annotate documents, people will prefer paper notes for good reason. Give people a working e-paper-device with high resolution, long-lasting battery, touchscreen and the possibility to share documents without technical barriers like DRM and we can create a collaborative workspace for bookmarking and annotating documents; or as I already called it 2005 in the article „Mehr als Marginalien – das E-Book als gemeinsamer Zettelkasten“ in the German library science e-journal „LIBREAS“: a common file-card box.

User generated Metadata: Connecting the Communities

At the eighth International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC-2008) Wikimedia Germany organizes a workshop on user generated metadata. The seminar will take place at Friday, the 26th of September 2008 afternoon.

During the recent years several projects like Wikipedia, LibraryThing, and OpenStreetmap have emerged on the Web. This projects enable volunteers to collect and create structured data such as bibliographies, encyclopaedic factsheets, geodata etc. However connections and exchange between different projects is still limited to seperated initiatives. Therefore Wikimedia Germany wants to bring together projects and communities on a workshop on user generated metadata. To enhance collaboration, we want to share experiences in the creation and management of communities and metadata. Standards and tools to simplify the exchange and connection with other institutions will be discussed as well as aspects of quality, rights, and privacy.

The workshop consists of one session where several projects (Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, BibSonomy, The Open Library…) are shortly presented in 10-15 minutes each, and another session in form of a moderated podium of all projects to deeper discuss common general issues: How can we best connect and reuse user generated metadata among communities? Which data silos must be opened? What are the limits of cooperation? How can sustainability be established in dynamic communites? etc.

We invite you to visit the Dublin Core conference in general and the seminar on user generated metadata in particular. Registration fee will be reduced until end of July, so better hurry up!

related events include the Wikimedia and libraries panel at Wikimania 2008 and the Linked data initiative

Wikimania 2008 schedule published

Last week the schedule of Wikimania 2008 finally was published online (Brianna already blogged). The annual conference devoted to Wikipedia, all other Wikimedia projects and free knowledge in general will take place at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt at July 17–19, 2008. There are more interesting talks then I will be able to participate – for instance about OpenStreetMap which is like Wikipedia for maps in my opinion. By the way the free OSM map of Alexandria is pretty poor – you can join in improving it!.

First impressions from the Europeana meeting

Today and tomorrow I participate in a Europeana/EDLnet conference in Den Haag. Europeana is a large EU-funded project to create a „European Digital Library“. Frankly speaking I cannot give a simple definition of Europeana because in the first instance it is just a buzzword. You can ask whether library portals have a future at all, and Europeana has many ingredients that may help to make it fail: a large ambitious plan, a tight schedule, and many different participants with different languages, cultures and needs. The current Europeana Outline Function Specification partly reads like a magic wishlist. Instead of following one simple, good idea from bottom-up, it looks like the attempt to follow many ideas in a bottom-up way.

But if you see Europeana less as a monolithical project but as a network of participants (libraries, museums, and archives) that try to agree on standards to improve interoperability, the attempt seems more promising. In his introductionary speech Jill Cousins (director of Europeana) stressed the importance of APIs and ways to export information from Europeana so other institutions can build their websites and mashups with services and content from Europeana. I hope that open content respositories like Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource can act as both as source and as target of exchange with the European Digital Library. What I also found interesting is that Google and Wikipedia are seen as the default role models or at least important examples of portals to compare with. The talks I have seen so far give me the impression that the view on possibilities and roles for libraries, museums, and archives are more realistic than I thought. One of their strength is that they hold the content and are responsible for it – in contrast to user generated collections like YoutTube, Slideshare, and (partly) Wikipedia. But in general cultural institutions are only one player among others on the web – so they also need to develop further and „let the data flow“. If the Europeana project helps in this development, it is a good project, no matter if you call it a „European Digital Library“ or not.

The next short talks were about CIDOC-CRM and about OAI-ORE – both complex techniques that you cannot easily describe in short time (unless you are a really good Wikipedia author ;-), but at the least my imagination of them has been improved.

I [edit] Wikipedia campaign for Wikipedia

Mike Perez, design student at Texas State University, and his fellow students Mark Decker and Jacob Brubaker have created a wonderful campaign for Wikipedia in their design class. The posters or ads each show a straight view of an everyday person as an expert on a specific subject and a mind map of their thought process. This are the best ads for Wikipedia that I have seen since the Wikipedia promotion images that André created back in 2005 for the German Wikipedia. Just have a look (photos at flickr only because of copyright restrictions) and enjoy if you like Wikipedia as much as I do!

P.S: My other favourites of the Wikipedia search at flickr that I just performed are: this shirt, this manifestation (and this) , this and this and this data visualization, and this meal.

Working group on digital library APIs and possible outcomes

Last year the Digital Library Federation (DLF) formed the „ILS Discovery Interface Task Force„, a working group on APIs for digital libraries. See their agenda and the current draft recommendation (February, 15th) for details [via Panlibus]. I’d like to shortly comment on the essential functions they agreed on at a meeting with major library system (ILS) vendors. Peter Murray summarized the functions as „automated interfaces for offloading records from the ILS, a mechanism for determining the availability of an item, and a scheme for creating persistent links to records.“

On the one hand I welcome if vendors try to agree on (open) standards and service oriented architecture. On the other hand the working group is yet another top-down effort to discuss things that just have to be implemented based on existing Internet standards.

1. Harvesting: In the library world this is mainly done via OAI-PMH. I’d also consider RSS and Atom. To fetch single records, there is unAPI – which the DLF group does not mention. There is no need for any other harvesting API – missing features (if any) should be integrated into extensions and/or next versions of OAI-PMH and ATOM instead of inventing something new. P.S: Google Wave shows what to expect in the next years.

2. Search: There is still good old overblown Z39.50. The near future is (slightly overblown) SRU/SRW and (simple) OpenSearch. There is no need for discussion but for open implementations of SRU (I am still waiting for a full client implementation in Perl). I suppose that next generation search interfaces will be based on SPARQL or other RDF-stuff.

2. Availability: The announcement says: „This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group“. Yes, there is definitely a need (in december I wrote about such an API in German). However the main point is not the API but to define what „availability“ means. Please focus on this. P.S: DAIA is now available.

3. Linking: For „Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it“ (announcement) there is no need to create new APIs. Add and propagate clean URIs for your items and point to your APIs via autodiscovery (HTML link element). That’s all. Really. To query and distribute general links for a given identifier, I created the SeeAlso API which is used more and more in our libraries.

Furthermore the draft contains a section on „Patron functionality“ which is going to be based on NCIP and SIP2. Both are dead ends in my point of view. You should better look at projects outside the library world and try to define schemas/ontologies for patrons and patron data (hint: patrons are also called „customer“ and „user“). Again: the API itself is not underdefined – it’s the data which we need to agree on.

Inetbib 2008, first German „2.0“ library conference

Participating at the Inetbib 2008 conference in Würzburg I am pleased to see that web 2.0 usage among German librarians finally has reached the critical mass. I’d guess that we are more or less 18 month behind the situation of the vital US „library 2.0“ scene. With Inetbib 2008 we finally have a larger general library conference with open wifi and participants blogging (technorati, google blogsearch), twittering, flickring and social-networking the event (or just reading email if the speaker bores ;-). I hope that soon no more library colleauge will think that „all this internet services“ are a waste of time but usefull tools to better recognize developements, ideas, and events – even outside the German biblio-blogosphere (for instance here). The next event will be BibCamp, a Library 2.0 BarCamp at March May 16th/17th in in Potsdam and Berlin.

Semantic Wiki Workshop

The 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) at the beautiful island of Tenerife (June 1st to 5th 2008) will host the 3rd Semantic Wiki Workshop (SemWiki2008). Forget about specialized ontology editors – Wikis are the smarter way to edit information for the Semantic Web! Deadline for submission of research papers, position papers, and system demonstrations is February 22th. Unfortunately I have another meeting the same days, but you should consider to participate!

Wikimania 2008 Call for Participation

In 2008 the Wikimania conference – that is the annual conference of Wikimedia Foundation devoted to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wikisource etc. and Free Knowledge – will take place at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt at July 17–19, 2008. The Call for Participation is out now. Final deadline for submission is March 16th 2008. Please spread the word among Wikimedia communities, researchers and other people and join us in Alexandria!

P.S: Yes, Alexandria will have Internet connection again in July 😉