IE Demonstrator Blog

On Friday (06/06/2008) the IE Demonstrator project ran its first event for the in conjunction with CRIG. CRIG has, through the efforts of the WoCRIG team, assembled a strong group of institutional repository developers. We decided to exploit this for our first IE Demonstrator event by giving the event a focus on repositories. To this end we invited a few services, mainly from the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE), with potential appeal to repository developers to send a representative with a technical perspective to come and make an ‘elevator pitch’ to the assembled developers. Or, to put it another way, in Tony Hirst’s words:

…the hardcore(?!) of the UK’s academic repository hackers were plotting on how to get the most out of helper webservices being produced by other JISC funded webservices projects….

For the record, the services who courageously came and pitched were:

• Ceri Binding - STAR project
• James Reid - GeoCrossWalk
• Daniel Needham - Names
• Anu Joseph - HILT
• Stuart Lewis - Deposit Plait Project
• David F. Flanders - Service Messaging Architecture

We chose the Parade Bar on the University of Bath’s campus as the students have mostly left the campus for the summer vacation period. The facilities worked I think - and my main fear - that other customers would disrupt our activities - did not come to pass, although the last ‘pitch’ did have to compete with the background noise. The feedback I have had so far is very positive.

Some of the Q&A following the pitches was quite lively. My hope was that, along with the repository developers getting to see some service offerings which might tempt them, the service representatives might get some useful feedback from the developers. One undeniable and strong signal from the repository developers was broadcast with groans whenever anyone mentioned SOAP interfaces. There is a generation of JISC IE services which was developed when SOAP was the fashionable way of exposing the functionality of services to other services and applications - even when this was perhaps unnecessarily complex. With the current appetite for simple, RESTful interfaces, SOAP interfaces are increasingly poorly received by developers of repository and web services.

An event like this has its impact in the small moments - the serendipitous conversations, the quickly hacked demonstrations, the moments of epiphany. I experienced all of these - some quick examples:

• Ian Ibbotson showed me his library for exposing a SOLR interface as a Z39.50 target. He knocked together a quick demo cross searching the index to the repository aggregation which UKOLN has recently developed for Intute, together with the index to Oxford University’s repository developed by Ben O’Steen (who was also at the event). His comment to me was “Couldn’t have got this sorted without peoples’ input here today, so thats cool!”
• In conversation with James Reid and Tony Hirst, we started to explore the idea that datasets might be geoparsed and marked up in a ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) fashion, rather than applied to the entire dataset. In other words, enrich data at the point of outward-facing service, rather than at the point of creation or ingest, and only then when necessary. This way we avoid the overhead of maintaining an increasingly complex and ‘heavy’ source dataset.

I have asked participants to send in their moments like this, so we can begin to capture some of the knowledge and ideas generated at such events. My particular avenue of investigation, inspired by my conversation with James and Tony, will be the geoparsing of repository metadata.

Thanks to all who came, especially to the speakers, and to David Flanders for co-organising the event with us.

Tags: crig, DepositPlait, GeoCrossWalk, HILT, iedemonstrator, Names, STAR

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under event report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.