Learning Technology Blog Aggregator

OER Quality

2011-03-16T01:21:48+00:00

Terry Anderson has a new post regarding the quality of open education resources. From the post:

What we are seeing is first iterations in produsage development of educational material.

University Prep MOOC

2011-03-16T01:18:27+00:00

Dave Cormier has a new post announcing a Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) for university preparation. From the post:

If you’ve participated in one of our open courses before, it will be similar, with a bit more structure built in. We’re currently working with a number of folks to try and stitch together analytics for participants in a course so that they a student can track their own participation and compare it to others.

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

Open Education 2011 Call for Proposals

2011-03-16T01:14:15+00:00

David Wiley has announced that the Open Education 2011 conference call for proposals is now available.

Quality of Open Educational Resources

2011-03-15T18:31:57+00:00

Terry Anderson, Virtual Canuck, March 15, 2011.

Terry Anderson takes a crack at Tony Bates's challenge on the quality of OERs, offering a pretty basic bootstrap argument: "The commercial publishers have led educators to expect a model where they produce the quality content and educator's buy their product [but] it is time we trained ourselves and pre service teachers to become produsers, not whining consumers with insufficient cash to buy the products we want... the only viable alternative is as Rory has argued to make do, upgrade, enhance, edit, illustrate, customize and otherwise become produsers." [Link] [Comment]

The Way You Learned Math Is So Old School

2011-03-15T18:26:24+00:00

Staff, NPR, March 15, 2011.

This is interesting. I learned to do math the 'old' way - that is, by multiplying the top number by each digit of the bottom number, shifting, and adding the products. The 'new way' apparently involves multiplying each digit by each digit. I don't think it's easier. I don't do it either way any more. I multiply by the nearest whole number and subtract the difference (or add the difference). I guess the advantage of the new way is that all your multiplications are one digit by one digit. So if you must work it out in your head, you can at least ballpark it. I don't know, though. If you do a lot of counting (eg., in retail, where you should be able to just look at a stack of boxes and know how many units you have) it really makes sense to be able to do it the old way. Via TechDirt. [Link] [Comment]

Poker Bots Invade Online Gambling

2011-03-15T18:16:40+00:00

Gabriel Dance, New York Times, March 15, 2011.

I know, I've sworn off the New York Times more times than you can count. But you won't want to miss this item about automated online poker players that outsmart the humans. It identifies what may be a new field of employment - identifying and shutting down robot accounts. I certainly spend enough time doing that on my web site. [Link] [Comment]

On limiting learning and impairing comprehension with mobile technologies

2011-03-15T18:11:22+00:00

Artichoke, Artichoke, March 15, 2011.

Reading this post my main reaction was "Where's the real Artichoke and what did you do with her?" I wonder, because this attack on reading online seems uncharacteristic. It's not that she holds an unpopular view; no, nothing new there, Artichoke is a wealth of opinions from all across the spectrum. It's just that this particular item seems so, well, shallow. Would the real Artichoke say "The ways in which reading from a screen can limit learning and comprehension is not common knowledge for governments, parents, educators, students or sales representatives. Any caveat over readability issues and the betrayal of learning outcomes is largely ignored?" Would the real Artichoke use 10-year-old data like this: "Reading text (long-form) is slower on tablets (iPad, Kindle) than reading print text for adults (with at least high school levels of literacy). Research on reading speeds suggests that reading on paper is between 10% to 30% faster than reading online. (Jakob Nielsen and Kurniawan, S., and P Zaphiris (2001) Reading Online or on Paper: Which is Faster?" Please bring back the real Artichokle, the one who knows people do talk about outcomes, all the time, and that today's e-reading devices make those of 2001 look like Palm Pilots... no, wait, they were Palm Pilots. [Link] [Comment]

An open university prep course - MOOC for basic skills

2011-03-15T17:55:55+00:00

Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, March 15, 2011.

Dave Cormier contemplates a university prep course - "a massive open online course for basic skills." It's a good idea and he has support for it: "UPEI has funded a 30 month project exploring the possibilities of running Massive Open Online Courses to help students prepare themselves for university the year before the arrive. The course is not targeted for our university specifically, but rather at the university experience anywhere they may experience it." He's looking for suggestions, so this is a good chance to let him know what's needed. [Link] [Comment]

"Pseudoteaching" - brilliant lectures can (and often do) involve this, according to Frank Noschese

2011-03-15T07:50:03+00:00

Frank Noschese writes incisively - with reference to Walter Lewin's gripping introductory physics lectures at MIT - about about why a lot of apparently excellent teaching is nothing of the sort:

"The key idea of pseudoteaching is that it looks like good teaching. In class, students feel like they are learning, and any observer who saw a teacher in the middle of pseudoteaching would feel like he’s watching a great lesson. The only problem is, very little learning is taking place."

Noschese has several pseudoteaching links on his blog, and a useful RSS feed that aggregates comments on his blog relating to pseudoteaching.

[With thanks to Eric Mazur for the link.]

No to NC

2011-03-15T00:47:30+00:00

“Efraim” has a new post on why content creators should decline to use the Non-Commercial clause as part of a Creative Commons license. From the post:

One argument that I have heard promoting the use of the non-commercial term is the fear of a larger bogeyman. The identity of this bogeyman differs depending on who is making the argument. For content developers, the bogeyman is often a large publishing house. The new media entrepreneur worries that a larger publishing house will either take their free data and undercut their price or sell their free data without returning anything to its source.

This argument does not distinguish between two types of relationships with commercial entities: simple “commercial use” and “exploitation.”

History of Paralympics Wikibook

2011-03-15T00:44:54+00:00

Leigh Blackall has a new post on a proposal to create a History of Paralympics on Wikibooks. From the post:

Having the proposal openly available as it developed drew incredibly useful feedback, as well as support from potential partner organisations such as Wikimedia Australia.

Unforgettable Learning

2011-03-14T19:30:50+00:00

(Cross posted on the Powerful Learning Practice blog as a part of an ongoing conversation with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach.)

Dear Sheryl,

(Note: I’m grumpy and tired after being sick for a week so I apologize for the somewhat random thoughts that follow. Hope you can make sense of it.)

I’ve been thinking about your post from the other day. This weekend, I ran across this 10th Grade Mathematics state assessment from Massachusetts. Forty-two questions that supposedly would identify whether or not a 15-year-old in Boston was “ready” for the world. I figured, what the heck, and I took the test.

Sad to say, based on the result, I should probably be heading back to middle school with Tucker (my 6th grade son) to get a refresher in Mr. Mead’s class.

But here is the thing: not only did I get the majority of the questions wrong, the vast majority of the questions asked me to do things I have never had to do in real life. I’ve never had to figure out the lateral surface area of a cone, nor been asked to give the mode of a series of numbers, nor had to figure out a square root. At least not that I can remember. If I ever did know how to do any of that stuff, and I probably did since I passed the test at some point long ago, it’s now long gone from my memory banks. Somehow, I’ve survived.

Yong Zhao recently linked to an article from a few years ago that indicates that kids in Wisconsin are spending somewhere around 3 million hours taking standardized tests, and that doesn’t include “time spent distributing and collecting materials, taking practice tests, giving instructions, and addressing other logistics of testing.” And I wonder, how much of that time is being spent on stuff that kids are going to forget? And then I wonder how much kids could really learn if they spent that time immersed in the stuff that they want to learn rather than what we want them to?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t make sure every child can read and write and do basic math and have a fundamental understanding of history and science and the rest. We should provide every child with the skills and literacies he or she needs to understand the world and continue to learn. And I know that if we are to help kids find their own passions for learning that we need to expose them to many different things, especially when they are young.

But I have to ask, does every child have to pass the same test by the end of 10th grade? Really? Does every child have to read Voltaire and Turgenev and Amy Tan as the Common Core suggests? Our friend Karl Fisch admirably asked this same type of question last fall:

And therein lies the dilemma - is it possible to provide in a systemic way a customized educational experience for all students that both allows and encourages them to pursue their passions, but also exposes them to the wide range of human endeavors that they may have little or no knowledge about and therefore wouldn’t be able to even know if they were passionate about in the first place?

They key word there is obviously “systemic” because we do want every child to have the foundation to continue to learn about whatever he or she wants or needs to learn. But, like Karl, I’m not at all sure that’s even possible. For one thing, there is a real disconnect between what “learning” is and the all-purpose goal of “higher student achievement;” I would argue the two are almost totally unrelated in today’s heightened political rhetoric around schools. And for another, real learning for the most part requires real contexts, not the contrived experiences that schools in general can offer.

To that end, the Common Core doesn’t help. The real impetus for the Common Core has nothing to do with learning in the contexts that we talk about it. Nothing to do with exploration, experience, reflection, creation, sharing, collaboration, or changing the world. Instead, it has everything to do with creating a new “Easy Button” for education, one that will let us compare our kids even more. In a world where we can personalize and individualize in ways like never before, we’ll give students an even more “common” educational experience. That saddens me.

The crux of all of this is that it’s just too hard to do it any other way. It’s too hard to let kids make decisions around their own learning (even though they’re doing it all the time at home) because we won’t be able to track it easily. It’s too hard to let them read books that fuel their passions because we can’t read all those books to see if they are “appropriate” or “effective” or whatever else. And we can’t let kids go really deeply into the things they’re interested in because goodness knows we have too much stuff to cover in the curriculum that they need to pass the test to make that work.

And while I’m sure that there will be some great, inquiry-based, choice-based curriculum that will be developed around the Common Core that will make even me happy, I fear that in general, we just don’t want to work that hard. We’ll go running to those textbook publishers and “approved providers” (who are no doubt salivating at the prospect) who will help us get our students to meet the standards but, in the end, do nothing to expand the opportunities for kids to learn things in ways they will never, ever forget.

Thinkses Around Open Course Accreditation

2011-03-11T14:45:15+00:00

What do P2PU, the University of Mary Washington (UMW), and a joint venture between the National Research Council of Canada (Institute for Information Technology, Learning and collaborative Technologies Group, PLE Project), The Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University and the University of Prince Edward Island have in common? The answer is that they either have, or are about to, run open online courses, at undergraduate level, for free, on the web.

In the case of P2PU and the Canadian joint venture, the courses were run without credit. At UMW, the DS106 Digital Storytelling course ran for the first time in 2010 as a for credit course for registered UMW students, albeit largely in public. In 2011, it has run as a course with loose boundaries, open to all whilst at the same time providing a recognised course offering within UMW itself. In each case, the course duration was of the order of 10 weeks.

With HE in the UK going through a phase of soul-searching around the question of “where’s the money going to come from”, it could be argued that we need to start doing some work around business model innovation. So here’s one of my starters for ten… (I have floated this internally, and no-one’s picked up on it, so I feel as if I’m not giving away anything away by posting it here…)

The idea is simple: a recognised award offering body offers a module or course container that will allow participants in online courses to receive recognised academic credit points based in part on their participation in an open, online course, in part on their reflections about what they learned on the course.

What follows are initial (probably naive) thoughts on how it might work…

The module is inspired in part by the International Baccalaureate’s CAS (Creativity, Action, Service) component as well as HE level course modules developed to recognise work based or prior experiential learning; it provides a means by which paid for assessment may be decoupled from course delivery. To try and address concerns, the proposal in the first instance is that the container be used to award credit for students who have freely participated in one of a recognised number of open educational units, for example from the OU’s OpenLearn website or one or more courses offered by P2PU (subject to agreement).

OpenLearn Courses: participation in these courses is based on individual engagement with the course material, informally supported by one or more forums or social spaces open to all. This model allows us to explore the extent to which purely independent learning within a controlled open courseware context provides an appropriate context for accredited independent study.

One or more OU Uncourses/Learning Journey Courses (or open, online courses run by academics in other institutions): a significant part of the original course material drafted for the Relevant Knowledge short course T151 Digital Worlds was authored over a 15-20 week period on a public blog hosted on wordpress.com. The materials posted combined elements of personal learning diary as the OU author explored the subject area, as well as learning devices borrowed from the OU’s tutorial-in-print style of writing (in-line exercises, self-reflection questions, and worked through tutorials, for example). By running one or more new “learning journey” courses, such as in areas where material is being drafted for fully fledged future OU courses, where material is timely (for example, in response to a BBC series or short term skills gap (such as the opening up of data in central and local government)), or where there exists considerable vendor produced third party training material albeit in a poorly structured form as far as course design goes (for example, Google tutorials around Google Apps, or Google Analytics, or the Yahoo User Interface libraries), we can: i) pilot the open course container model; ii) create useful open resources “for the common good”; c) draft course materials for possible formal (paid for) OU course offerings.

P2PU Courses: P2PU runs 10 week courses for small cohorts starting throughout the year. Learners engage with each other as well as the course resources and course instructors. Recognising participation in this sort of course allows us to explore the extent to which an open accreditation module can be used to recognise participation in semi-formal courses. Recognising participation with P2PU courses also provides an opportunity for the OU to develop ties to the Mozilla Foundation, who support P2PU and are keen to see it develop a range of semi-professional courses based around the open web and open software development.

How the Container Works

The container awards credit based on the fulfilment of several criteria:

- demonstration of engagement with, or participation in, a recognised open, online course; this requirement means we know that learners were at least exposed to a certain of content we recognise;

- a reflective assessment component; this may take the form of a reflective essay, or piece of project work arising from the course and a critical review of that work.

- optionally, results from quizzes provided during the course. These not only demonstrate engagement with the course, but also provide some means of demonstrating a particular level of attainment in particular topic areas through computer marked assessment.

In the first instance, accreditation is offered for independent study based on participation with one of a limited number of pre-identified open online courses. In this way, we could artificially limit the range of subject areas and course models engaged with by the initial batches of learners to a know set of approved courses. This approach allows us to mitigate the risks involved with a prove the model and allow the course model to develop in a carefully controlled way.

The OpenLearn Context (2011I-2011L)

To a certain extent, the idea is based on a particular vision of how we might go about assessing participation in open online courses run outside the OU. However, I think it might also be used to provide a way in to formal study for students wishing to take formal OU awards based on prior engagement with OpenLearn materials.

By accrediting engagement with two OpenLearn based units derived from current Technology short course/Relevant Knowledge programme courses, we can compare achievement levels across formal and informal presentations of the material. For example, if material from Relevant Knowledge short courses in the their final presentation are released to OpenLearn immediately prior to the final presentation, we can engage learners around course material that is concurrently being offered in a supported fashion as an officially recognised OU course through the VLE, and informally via OpenLearn. As such, we can explore the extent to which an open course container might: i) extend the life of a course; ii) provide alternative pathways to credit and assessment models for students interested in a particular topic area but not necessarily interested in “named credit” for a course.

The Uncourse/Learning Journey Context

As institutions such as the OU continue to innovate in the areas of informal and semi-formal education through OpenLearn and emerging practice in Digital Scholarship, the uncourse/learning journey, originally inspired, in part, by the notion of “misguided tours”, provides a framework for digital scholars to record their learning journey through a new subject area as a learning pathway that others might follow. By employing writing devices that well are proven in the delivery of “tutorial-in-print” style learning materials, the learning diary becomes a piece of instructional material in its own right. Through openly recording the learning journey, and ideally engaging with other learners interested in the topic area, the author should also remain free to negotiate the future direction of the learning journey (hence its declaration as an ‘uncourse’) and so discover a curriculum that fairly reflects the learning needs of its participants.

The P2PU Context

If, as seems likely, ad hoc open online courses continue to emerge as a consequence of: a) the increasing availability of high quality content that can be put to use as a learning resource, even if not originally designed as one; b) the growth in online social networks and an apparent desire and willingness for learners to come together and participate in semi-structured learning directed activity, there will be a growing market for recognising participation in such activities and acknowledging it in some way. Through recognising participation in P2PU courses in certain areas, it may be possible for HEIs to develop closer ties with the Mozilla Foundation and engage with open courses in areas complementary to formal offerings (e.g. in the OU’s case, the Web Certificate, Open Source Tools and Linux courses). Such engagement provides opportunities for using P2PU courses as a marketing channel similar to the way in which OpenLearn units may be used, as well as providing a continuing education context for alumni in areas where an institution may not provide courses. P2PU may also provide a slightly more structured context than is offered by the uncourse/learning journey model for the developmental testing of formal course materials as they are being developed for fully fledged distance online courses.

What’s in it for folk offering online courses?
An obvious argument against the above approach is that folk running courses may get upset that someone else if offering (for a fee) accreditation around their course materials. (I always thought non-commercial could be a Bad Thing ;-) However, a couple of benefits come to mind.

Firstly, the institution offering the accreditation may pay to advertise on the site offering the course. (Yes, I know this might seem as if it’s a way for an institution to essentially outsource its course production and delivery, and in a way it is… But if open courses take off, and if they offer educational benefit, and if there’s value in proving to someone else you have taken an open course, and if HEIs don’t start offering certification around open courses, then someone else will. Such as an organisation like Pearson…

Secondly, by accepting that participation in a course can be used as partial fulfillment of requirements for the receipt of formal academic credit, it reflects back some of the authority of the award offering body on the course, showing that the course has something of educational value to offer.

Isn’t the Audience Limited?
Open educational courses aren’t for everyone; they require some element of motivation on the part of the learner, they are often best followed in a social way. At times they may lack structure, and instead focus on resource investigation activities, which can be hard for learners who prefer very heavily structured courses with linear narratives and “teacher” leading from the front. But if you want to develop skills and a model of learning that helps you exploit the power of the web, then open courses may help you on your way…

Conclusion
Err, that’s it… ;-)

Term-based thesauri and SKOS (Part 4): Change over time (ii)

2011-03-10T12:56:58+00:00

This is the fourth in a series of posts (previously: part 1, part 2, part 3) on making a thesaurus available as linked data using the SKOS and SKOS-XL RDF vocabularies. In the previous post, I examined some of the ways the thesaurus can change over time, and problems that arose with my proposed mapping to RDF. Here I'll outline one potential solution to those problems.

The last three cases I described in the previous post, where an existing preferred term loses that status and is "relegated" to a non-preferred term, all present a problem for my suggested simple mapping, because the URI for a concept disappears from the generated RDF graph - and this creates a conflict with the principles of URI stability and reliability I advocated at the start of that post.

My first thoughts on a solution circled around generating concept URIs, not just for the preferred term, but also for all the non-preferred terms, and using owl:sameAs (or skos:exactMatch?) to indicate that the concept URIs derived from the terms associated with a single preferred term were synonyms, i.e. each of them identified the same concept. That way the change from preferred term to non-preferred term would not result in the loss of a concept URI. But the proliferation of URIs here feels fundamentally flawed - the problem is not one that is solved by having multiple URIs for a single concept; the issue is the persistence of a single URI. Introducing the multiple URIs also seems like a recipe for a lot of practical difficulties in managing the impact of changes on external applications, particularly if URIs which were once synonyms cease to be so.

After some searching, I found a couple of useful pages on the W3C wiki: some notes on versioning (which as far as I know didn't make it into the final SKOS specifications) and particularly this page on "Concept Evolution" in SKOS. The latter is rather more a collection of pointers than the concrete set of examples and guidelines I was hoping for, but one of those pointers is to a thread on the W3C public-esw-thes mailing list, starting with this message from Rob Tice, which I think describes (in his point 2) exactly the situation I'm dealing with in the problem cases in the previous post:

How should we identify and manage change between revisions of concept schemes as this 'seems' to result in imprecision. e.g. a concept 'a' is currently in thes 'A' and only has a preferred label. A new revision of thes 'A' is published and what was concept 'a' is now a non preferred concept and thus becomes simply a non preferred label for a new concept 'b'.

It seems to me that this operation loses some of the semantic meaning of the change as all references to the concept id of 'concept a' would be lost as it now is only a non preferred label of a different concept with a different id (concept 'b').

The suggested approach emerging from that discussion has two elements:

A notion that a concept can be marked as "deprecated" (using e.g. a "status" property with a value of "deprecated" or a "deprecated" property with Boolean (yes/no) values) or as being "valid" or "applicable" only for a specified bounded period of time (see the messages from Johan De Smedt and from Margarita Sini)
Such a "deprecated" concept can be the subject of a "replaced by" relationship linking it to the "preferred term" concept (see the message from Michael Panzer)

The application of these two elements in combination is illustrated in this example by Joachim Neubert (again, I think, addressing the same scenario).

I wasn't aware of the owl:deprecated property before, but as far as I can tell, it would be appropriate for this case.

Joachim's message highlights the question of what to do about skos:prefLabel/skosxl:prefLabel or skos:altLabel/skosxl:altLabel properties for the deprecated concept. In the term-based thesaurus, the term has become a non-preferred term for another term: in the SKOS model, the term is now the alternate label for a different concept, and the preferred label for no concept. So on that basis, I'm inclined to follow Joachim's suggestion that the deprecated concept should be the subject of neither skos:prefLabel/skosxl:prefLabel nor skos:altLabel/skosxl:altLabel properties, though it could, as Joachim's example shows, retain an rdfs:label property. And similarly it is no longer the subject or object of semantic relationships.

I did wonder about the option of introducing a set of properties, parallel to the SKOS ones, to indicate those former relationships, e.g. ex:hadPrefLabel, ex:hadAltLabel, ex:hadRelated, ex:hadBroader, ex:hadNarrower, essentially as documentation. But I'm really not sure how useful this is: the semantic relationships in which those other target concepts are involved may themselves change. And I suppose in principle (though it seems unlikely in practice) a single concept may itself go through several status changes (e.g. from active to deprecated to active to deprecated) and accrue various different "former" relationships in the course of that. If this level of information is required, then I think it probably has to be provided using some other approach - like the use of a set of date-stamped graphs/documents that reflect the state of a concept at a point in time.

So applying Joachim's approach to Case 8 from the examples in the previous post, where the current preferred term "Political violence" is to become a non-preferred term for "Collective violence", we end up with the concept con:C2 as a "deprecated" concept with a Dublin Core dcterms:isReplacedBy relationship to concept con:C6 (and the inverse from con:C6 to con:C2):

@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       rdfs:label "Political violence"@en;
       owl:deprecated "true"^^xsd:boolean;
       dcterms:isReplacedBy con:C6 .
       
term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6;
       skos:altLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T2; 
       dcterms:replaces con:C2 .       

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

Using this approach then, the full output graph for Case 8 would be as follows (the highlighting indicates the difference between this graph and that for Case 8 in the previous post):

@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6;
       skos:altLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3; 
       dcterms:replaces con:C2 .       

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       rdfs:label "Political violence"@en;
       owl:deprecated "true"^^xsd:boolean;
       dcterms:isReplacedBy con:C6 .
       
term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C6 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C6 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

Now our graph retains the URI con:C2 and provides a description of that resource as a "deprecated concept".

And for Case 9 (again the highlighting indicates the difference from the initial graph for Case 9):

@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.

con:C1 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3; 
       dcterms:replaces con:C2 .       
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6.

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       rdfs:label "Political violence"@en;
       owl:deprecated "true"^^xsd:boolean;
       dcterms:isReplacedBy con:C1 .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C1 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C1 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

In the (unlikely?) event that the (previously preferred) non-preferred term is once again restored to the state of preferred term, then the concept con:C2 loses its deprecated status and the dcterms:isReplacedBy relationship, and acquires skos:prefLabel/skos:altLabel properties as normal.

Generating these graphs does, however, imply a change to the process of generating the RDF representation. As I noted at the start of the previous post, my first cut at this was based on being able to process a snaphot of the thesaurus "stand-alone" without knowledge of previous versions. But the capacity to detect deprecated concepts depends on knowledge of the current state of the thesaurus, i.e. when the transformation process encounters a non-preferred term x, it needs to behave differently depending on whether:

concept con:Cx exists in the current thesaurus dataset (as either an "active" or "deprecated" concept), in which case a "deprecated concept" con:Cx should be output, as well as term:Tx (as alternate label for some other concept, con:Cy); or
concept con:Cx does not exist in the current thesaurus dataset, in which case only term:Tx (as alternate label for a concept con:Cy) is required

I think that test has to be made against the current RDF thesaurus dataset rather than using the previous XML snapshot in time, as the "deprecation" may have taken place several snapshots ago.

I have to admit this does make the transformation process rather more complicated than I had hoped. The only way alternative would be if it is somehow possible to distinguish the "deprecation" case from the "static" non-preferred term case from the input data alone, but as far as I know this isn't possible.

Summary

The previous post highlighted that for one particular category of change, where an existing preferred term is "relegated" to the status of a non-preferred term, the results of the suggested simple mapping into SKOS had problematic consequences.

Based on some investigation of how others approach similar scenarios (and here I should note I'm very grateful to the contributors to the wiki page on concept evolution and to those discussions linked from it, as I was struggling to see clearly how to deal with these scenarios), I've sketched above an approach to representing a concept which has been "deprecated", or is no longer applicable, and is replaced by another concept. I'm sure it isn't the only way of addressing the problem, but it seems a reasonable one to try.

I think this creates new challenges for implementing this approach in the transformation process and I need to work on that to test it, but I think it is achievable. But I would also be very grateful for any comments, particularly if there are gaping holes in this which I haven't spotted!

Term-based thesauri and SKOS (Part 3): Change over time (i)

2011-03-10T12:40:16+00:00

This is the third in a series of posts (previously: part 1, part 2) on making a thesaurus available as linked data using the SKOS and SKOS-XL RDF vocabularies. In this post, I'll examine some of the ways the thesaurus can change over time, and how such changes are reflected when applying the mapping I described earlier.

A note on "workflow"

In the case I'm working on, the term-based thesaurus is managed in a purpose-built application, from which a snapshot is exported (as an XML document) at regular intervals. These XML documents are the inputs to a transformation process which generates an SKOS/SKOS-XL RDF version, to be exposed as linked data.

Currently at least, each "run" of that transformation operates on a single snaphot of the thesaurus "stand-alone" i.e. the transform process has no "knowledge" of the previous snapshot, and the expectation is that the output generated from processing will replace the output of the previous run (either in full, or through a process of establishing the differences and then removing some triples and adding others). This "stand-alone" approach may be something I have to revisit.

The mapping

To summarise the transformation described in the previous post, a single preferred term and its set of zero or more non-preferred terms are treated as labels for a single concept. For each such set:

a single SKOS concept is created with a URI based on the term number of the preferred term
the concept is related to the literal form of the preferred term by an skos:prefLabel property
an SKOS-XL label is created with a URI based on the term number of the preferred term
the label is related to the literal form of the preferred term by an skosxl:literalForm property
the concept is related to the label by an skosxl:prefLabel property
the "hierarchical" (broader term, narrower term) and "associative" (related term) relationships between preferred terms are represented as "semantic" relationships between concepts
And for each non-preferred term in the set
- the concept is related to the literal form of the non-preferred term by an skos:altLabel property
- an SKOS-XL label is created with a URI based on the term number of the non-preferred term
- the label is related to the literal form of the preferred term by an skosxl:literalForm property
- the concept is related to the label by an skosxl:altLabel property

In the discussion below, I'll take the following "snapshot" of a notional thesaurus - it's another version of the example used in the previous posts, extended with an additional preferred term - as a starting point:

Civil violence
USE Political violence
TNR 1

Collective violence
TNR 6

Political violence
UF Civil violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 2

Terrorism
BT Political violence
TNR 3

Violence
NT Political violence
TNR 4

Violent protest
USE Political violence
TNR 5

Using the mapping above, it is represented as follows in RDF using SKOS/SKOS-XL:

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6.

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C2 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C2 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

"Versioning" and change over time

Once our resource URIs are generated and published, they will be used/cited by other agencies in their data - in other linked data datasets, in other thesauri, or in simple Web documents which reference terms or concepts using those URIs. From the linked data perspective, it is important that once generated and published the resource URIs, which will be http: URIs, remain stable and reliable. I'm using the terms "stable" and "reliable" as they are used by Henry Thompson and Jonathan Rees in their note Guidelines for Web-based naming, which I've found very helpful in breaking down the various aspects of what we tend to call "persistence". And for "stability", I'm thinking particularly of what they call "resource stability". So

once a URI is created, we should continue to use that URI to denote/identify the same resource
it should continue to be possible to obtain some information "about" the identified resource using the HTTP protocol - though that information obtained may change over time

For our particular case, the requirement is only that the "current version" of the thesaurus is available at any point in time, i.e. for each concept and for each term/label, at any point in time, it is necessary to serve only a description of the current state of that resource.

So, in my previous post, I mentioned that the Cabinet Office guidelines Designing URI Sets for the UK Public Sector allow for the case of creating a set of "date-stamped" document URIs, to provide variant descriptions of a resource at different points in time. I don't think that is required for this case, so for each term and concept, we'll have a URI for the that "thing", a "Document URI" for a "generic document" (current) description of that thing, and "Representation URIs" for each "specific document" in a particular format.

The formats provided will include a human-readable HTML version, an RDF/XML version and possibly other RDF formats. Over time, additional formats can be added as required through the addition of new "Representation URIs".

My primary focus here is the changes to the thesaurus content. Over time, various changes are possible. New terms may be added, and the relationships between terms may change. Terms are not deleted from the theasurus, however.

The most common type of change is the "promotion" of an existing non-preferred term to the status of a preferred term, but all of the following types of change can occur, even if some are infrequent:

Addition of new semantic relationships between existing preferred terms
Removal of existing semantic relationships between existing preferred terms
Addition of new preferred terms
Addition of new non-preferred terms (for existing preferred terms)
An existing non-preferred term becomes a new preferred term
An existing non-preferred term becomes a non-preferred term for a different existing preferred term
An existing non-preferred term becomes a non-preferred term for a newly-added preferred term
An existing preferred term becomes a non-preferred term for another existing preferred term
An existing preferred term become a non-preferred term for a term which is currently a non-preferred term for it (and vice versa)
An existing preferred term becomes a non-preferred term for a newly added preferred term

Below, I'll try to walk through an example of each of those changes in turn, starting from the example thesaurus above, showing the results using the mapping suggested above, and examining any issues which arise.

Case 1: Addition of new semantic relationship

The addition of new broader term (BT), narrower term (NT) or related term (RT) relationships is straightforward, as it involves only the creation of additional assertions of relationships between concepts, using the skos:broader, skos:narrower or skos:related properties, not the creation of new resources.

So if the example above is extended to add a BT relation between the "Collective violence" (term no 6) and "Violence" (term no 4) terms (and the inverse NT relation):

Civil violence
USE Political violence
TNR 1

Collective violence
BT Violence
TNR 6

Political violence
UF Civil violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 2

Terrorism
BT Political violence
TNR 3

Violence
NT Political violence
NT Collective violence
TNR 4

Violent protest
USE Political violence
TNR 5

resulting in the RDF graph

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6;
       skos:broader con:C4 .

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C2 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C2 ;
       skos:narrower con:C6 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

i.e. two new triples are added to the RDF graph

con:C6 skos:broader con:C4 .
con:C4 skos:narrower con:C6 .

The addition of the triples means that, from a linked data perspective, the graphs served as descriptions of the resources con:C6 and con:C4 change. They each include one additional triple for the concise bounded description case; two triples for the symmetric bounded description case (see the previous post for the discussion of different forms of bounded description). So the contents of the representations of documents http://example.org/doc/concept/polthes/C4 and http://example.org/doc/concept/polthes/C6 change - but no new resources are generated, and no new URIs required.

Case 2: Removal of existing semantic relationship

The removal of existing broader term (BT), narrower term (NT) or related term (RT) relationships is similarly straightforward, as it involves only the deletion of assertions of relationships between concepts, using the skos:broader, skos:narrower or skos:related properties, without the removal of existing resources.

I won't bother writing out an example in full for this case, but imagine the case of the previous example reverting to its initial state.

Again, from a linked data perspective, the graphs served as descriptions of the resources con:C6 and con:C4 change, with each containing one triple less for the CBD case or two triples less for the SCBD case, but we still have the same set of term URIs and concept URIs.

Case 3: Addition of new preferred terms

The addition of a new preferred term is again a matter of extending the graph with new information, though in this case some new URIs are also introduced.

Suppose a new preferred term "Revolution" (term no 7) is added to our initial example:

Civil violence
USE Political violence
TNR 1

Collective violence
TNR 6

Political violence
UF Civil violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 2

Revolution
TNR 7

Terrorism
BT Political violence
TNR 3

Violence
NT Political violence
TNR 4

Violent protest
USE Political violence
TNR 5

resulting in the following graph:

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6.

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C7 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Revolution"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T7 .

term:T7 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Revolution"@en.
        
con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C2 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C2 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

The following triples are added:

con:C7 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Revolution"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T7.

term:T7 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Revolution"@en.

The RDF representation now includes an additional concept and label, each with a new URI. So now there are two new resources, with new URIs (con:C7 and term:T7), and a corresponding set of new Document URIs and Representation URIs for descriptions of those resources.

It is quite probable that the addition of a new preferred term is accompanied by the assertion of semantic relationships with other existing preferred terms. This is the equivalent of following this step, then a second step of the type shown in case 1.

Case 4: Addition of new non-preferred term (for existing preferred term)

The addition of a new non-preferred term is, again, a matter of adding new information, and new URIs.

Suppose a new term "Assault" (term no 8) is added as a new non-preferred term for "Violence" (term no 4):

Assault
USE Violence
TNR 8

Civil violence
USE Political violence
TNR 1

Collective violence
TNR 6

Political violence
UF Civil violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 2

Terrorism
BT Political violence
TNR 3

Violence
UF Assault
NT Political violence
TNR 4

Violent protest
USE Political violence
TNR 5

which results in the graph

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/> .

term:T8 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Assault"@en.

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6.

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C2 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:altLabel "Assault"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T8;
       skos:narrower con:C2 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

i.e. the following triples are added:

term:T8 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Assault"@en.

con:C4 skos:altLabel "Assault"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T8 .

So from a linked data perspective, there is a new resource with a new URI (term:T8) (and its own new description with a new Document URI), and the existing URI con:C4 is the subject of two new triples, an skos:altLabel for the literal, and an skosxl:altLabel link to the new label, so the graph served as description of that existing resource changes to include additional triples.

Case 5: Existing non-preferred term becomes new preferred term

Suppose the existing term "Civil violence", initially a non-preferred term for "Political violence" is "promoted" and made a preferred term in its own right

Civil violence
USE Political violence
BT Violence
TNR 1

Collective violence
TNR 6

Political violence
UF Civil violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 2

Terrorism
BT Political violence
TNR 3

Violence
NT Civil violence
NT Political violence
TNR 4

Violent protest
USE Political violence
TNR 5

resulting in the following graph

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

con:C1 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T1;
       skos:broader con:C4 .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6.

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C2 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C2;
       skos:narrower con:C1 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

For this case, the following new triples are added

con:C1 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T1;
       skos:broader con:C4 .

con:C4 skos:narrower con:C1 .

and also the following existing triples are removed

con:C2 skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1 .

So from a linked data perspective, there is a new resource with a new URI (concept:C1) (and its own new description with a new Document URI), and the graph served as description of the existing resources con:C2 and con:C4 both change: the former loses the skos:altLabel and skosxl:altLabel triples and the latter includes a new skos:narrower triple. If symmetric bounded descriptions are used, the description of term:T1 changes too.

Case 6: Existing non-preferred term becomes non-preferred term for a different existing preferred term

Suppose we decide that "Civil violence", initially a non-preferred term for "Political violence", is to become a non-preferred term for "Collective violence".

Civil violence
USE Political violence
USE Collective violence
TNR 1

Collective violence
UF Civil violence
TNR 6

Political violence
UF Civil violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 2

Terrorism
BT Political violence
TNR 3

Violence
NT Political violence
TNR 4

Violent protest
USE Political violence
TNR 5

This generates the following graph:

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1.

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C2 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C2 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

For this case, the following new triples are added

con:C6 skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1.

and also the following existing triples are removed

con:C2 skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1 .

The graphs served as descriptions of the existing resources con:C2 and con:C6 both change: the former loses the skos:altLabel and skosxl:altLabel triples and the latter gains skos:altLabel and skosxl:altLabel triples. If symmetric bounded descriptions are used then the description of term:T1 also changes.

Case 7: Existing non-preferred term becomes non-preferred term for a newly added preferred term

I think this case is just a combination of Case 3 (addition of new preferred term) and Case 6 (existing non-preferred term becomes non-preferred term for a different existing preferred term) in sequence. We've seen above that these changes can be made without problems, so the "composite" case should be OK too, and I won't bother working through a full example here.

Case 8: An existing preferred term becomes a non-preferred term for another existing preferred term

Suppose the current preferred term "Political violence" is to be "relegated" to become a non-preferred term for "Collective violence", with the latter becoming the participant in hierarchical relations previously involving the former. (I appreciate that these two terms probably don't constitute a great example, but let’s suppose it works, for the sake of the discussion!)

Civil violence
USE Political violence
USE Collective violence
TNR 1

Collective violence
UF Civil violence
UF Political violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 6

Political violence
USE Collective violence
UF Civil violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 2

Terrorism
BT Political violence
BT Collective violence
TNR 3

Violence
NT Political violence
NT Collective violence
TNR 4

Violent protest
USE Political violence
USE Collective violence
TNR 5

This maps to the rather substantially changed RDF graph

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6;
       skos:altLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C6 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C6 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

The following RDF triples have been added

con:C6 skos:altLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

con:C3 skos:broader con:C6 .

con:C4 skos:narrower con:C6 .

And the following RDF triples have been removed

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

con:C3 skos:broader con:C2 .

con:C4 skos:narrower con:C2 .

So the graphs served as descriptions of the concepts con:C3 and con:C4 change (with the removal of a triple and the addition of a new one); and that for concept con:C6 changes with the addition of several triples.

So far, so good.

However, the URI con:C2 has now completely disappeared from the graph. If this new graph simply replaces the previous graph, then there will be no description available for resource con:C2.

Case 9: An existing preferred term become a non-preferred term for a term which is currently a non-preferred term for it (and vice versa)

Suppose that the current non-preferred term "Civil violence" is to become preferred to "Political violence", and the latter is to become a non-preferred term for the former - both "relegation" and "promotion" taking place together, if you like.

Civil violence
USE Political violence
UF Political violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 1

Collective violence
TNR 6

Political violence
USE Civil violence
UF Civil violence
UF Violent protest
BT Violence
NT Terrorism
TNR 2

Terrorism
BT Political violence
BT Civil violence
TNR 3

Violence
NT Political violence
NT Civil violence
TNR 4

Violent protest
USE Political violence
USE Civil violence
TNR 5

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.

con:C1 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .
        
con:C6 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Collective violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T6.

term:T6 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Collective violence"@en.

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C1 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C1 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

The following RDF triples have been added

con:C1 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .
       
con:C3 skos:broader con:C1 .

con:C4 skos:narrower con:C1 .

And the following RDF triples have been removed

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

con:C3 skos:broader con:C2 .

con:C4 skos:narrower con:C2 .

The outcome here is similar to that of the previous case.

The graphs served as descriptions of the concepts con:C3 and con:C4 change (with the removal of a triple and the addition of a new one). A new concept con:C1 is created. But again the URI con:C2 has completely disappeared from the graph, with the same consequences that no description will be available.

Case 10: An existing preferred term becomes a non-preferred term for a newly added preferred term

I think this case is just a combination of Case 3 (addition of new preferred term) and Case 8 (existing preferred term becomes a non-preferred term for another existing preferred term) in sequence.

The same problem will arise with the URI of the existing concept disappearing from the new output graph.

Summary

I've walked through in detail the different types of changes which can occur to the content of the thesaurus. This highlighted that for one particular category of change, where an existing preferred term is "relegated" to the status of a non-preferred term, exemplified by my cases 8, 9 and 10 above, the results of the suggested simple mapping into SKOS had problematic consequences: the URI for a concept disappears from the generated RDF graph - and this creates a conflict with the principles of URI stability and reliability I advocated at the start of this post.

In the next post, I'll suggest one way of (I hope!) addressing this problem.

Another step on the Road to a Distributed data.ac.uk – Southampton University Linked Open Data

2011-03-10T12:27:06+00:00

Earlier this week, Chris Gutteridge and Dave Challis pushed data.southampton.ac.uk, Southampton University’s Linked Open Data store (Southampton U Data blog), containing for starters at least the following:

place data
a (non-authoritative) dataset describing the university’s organisational units
Academic programme data; this dataset identifies courses according to UCAS course code and JACS code, as well as remodelled Unistats course data for some of the courses.

From what I can tell, Chris has been running round Southampton grabbing data from wheresoever he can get it, so it’ll be interesting to see how the datasets grow out over the coming months;-)

Here’s how I think part of the data looks at the moment?

graph soton { "Programmes(2010-2011session)"--"OpenDataCatalog"; "JACSCodes"--"OpenDataCatalog"; "JACSCodes"--"StudentStatistics"; "StudentStatistics"--"OpenDataCatalog"; "Programmes(2010-2011session)"--"JACSCodes"; "BuildingsandPlaces"--"OpenDataCatalog"; "PublicPhonebook"--"OpenDataCatalog"; "Organisation"--"OpenDataCatalog"; "PublicPhonebook"--"Organisation";} }

A full list of datasets can be found here.

I wonder if it would be useful if each institution publishing Linked Open Data published an authoritative, local-to-them version of the Linked Open Data Cloud Diagram showing the local datasets and the third party datasets that are directly linked to? As well as the diagram, a data representation of the diagram (e.g. a Graphviz .dot file, would be handy…)

As a quick way in to writing your own queries on the Southampton open data SPARQL endpoint, previews of the queries used to generate results pages in the data store are also provided:

So for example:

A couple of quick observations about the data:

The organisation data looks quite flat at the moment, but I wonder if more structure will become available over time, allowing an organogram for the university to be generated directly from this data? Whenever I see an organisational chart (such as the Soton Corporate Servies organisation chart, I can’t help feeling it should be generated from an underlying data description, rather than simply presented as a flat image, with the underlying data published alongside the chart, or progressively enhanced to display the chart?) Given the general crapness of institutional search engines, surely we should be able to find a way of using organisational structure and committee workflows to help surface relevant content to folk at a particular location in the organisation/workflow?

The academic/course data is quite thin at the moment, but provides really important piece of scaffolding for linking to ever richer course related content, as well as linking out through services like UCAS. [UPDATE: by the by, @scottbw just created and shared an RDF XCRI vocabulary for course descriptions, for use with this MLO RDFS (I have no idea what any of that means, either;-).]

In the same way that getting access to postcode data and its various associations was foundational for the development of many location based services in the UK, so access to course code data for building course level applications is key.

I thought it was particularly interesting to see a link from courses to data obtained and remodelled from the Unistats service:

As well as the Southampton open data store, the OU is also running a 5 star linked open data service at data.open.ac.uk for OU Linked data, which is currently exposing module information and data around OU podcasts (OU Linked data on OUseful.info). I think location data is also in the store, though not publicly avalaible yet???

One thing that excites me about the opening up of data across sites is the extent to which institutions will start to open up different datasets to other HEIs, and hopefully drive the wider roll out of data as a result as everybody sees what everyone else is opening up… The other thing that excites is being able to join datasets;-)

So, which university will be next?

Cobbling Together a Searchable Twitter Friends/Followers Contact List in Google Spreadsheets

2011-03-09T19:41:02+00:00

Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you want to send someone a Twitter message but you can’t remember their Twitter username although you do know their real name? Or where you can remember their twitter username or their real name, but you do remember who they work for, or some other biographical fact about them that might appear in their Twitter biography? If that sounds familiar, here’s a trick that may help…

… a searchable Twitter friends and followers contact list in Google Spreadsheets.

It’s based on Martin Hawksey’s rather wonderful Export Twitter Followers and Friends using a Google Spreadsheet (I have to admit – Martin has left me way behind now when it comes to tinkering with Google Apps Script…!) To get started, you’ll need a Google docs account, and then have to indulge in a quick secret handshake between Google docs and Twitter, but Martin’s instruction sheet is a joy to follow:-) Follow the *** Google Spreadsheet to Export Twitter Friends and Followers *** link on Martin’s page, then come back here once you’ve archived your Twitter friends and/or followers…

..done that? Here’s how to make the contact list searchable… I thought it should have been trivial, but it turned out to be quite involved!

The first thing I did was create a drop down list to let the user select Friends or Followers as the target of the search. (Martin’s application loads friends and followers into different sheets.)

The next step was to generate a query. To search for a particular term on a specified sheet we can use a QUERY formula that takes the following form:

=query(Friends!B:E,”select B,C,D,E where D contains ‘JISC’”)

Friends! specifies the sheet we want to search over; B:E says we want to pull columns B, C, D and E from the Friends sheet into the current sheet; the select statement will display results over four columns (B, C, D and E) from Friends for rows where the entry in column D contains the search term JISC.

To pull in the search term from cell D1 we can use a query of the form:

=query(Friends!B:E,concatenate(“select B,C,D,E where D contains ‘”,D1,”‘”))

The =concatenate formula constructs the search query. Make sure you use the right sort of quotes when constructing the string – Google Spreadsheets seems to prefer the use of double quotes wherever possible!

To search over two columns, (for example, the real name and the description columns of the twitter friends/follower data) we can use a query of the form:

=query(Followers!B:E,concatenate(“select B,C,D,E where C contains ‘”,D1,”‘ or D contains ‘”,D1,”‘”)

Again – watch out for the quotes – the result we want from the concatenation is something like:

=query(Followers!B:E,concatenate(“select B,C,D,E where C contains ‘Jisc’ or D contains ‘Jisc’)

so we have to explicitly code in the single quote in the concatenation formula.

Unfortunately, the query formula is case sensitive, which can cause the search to fail because we haven’t taken (mis)use of case into account in our search term. This means we need to go defensive in the query formulation – in the following example, I force everything to upper case – search corpus as well as search terms:

=query(Followers!B:E,concatenate(“select B,C,D,E where upper(C) contains upper(‘”,D1,”‘) or upper(D) contains upper(‘”,D1,”‘)”)

The final step is to define the sheet we want to search – Friends! or Followers! – depending on the setting of cell B1 in our search sheet. I had idly though I could use a concatenate formula to create this, but concatenate returns a string and we need to define a range. In the end, the workaround I adopted was an if statement, that chooses a query with an appropriate range set explicitly/hardwired within the formula depending on whether we are are searching Friends or Followers. Here’s the complete formula, which i put into cell E1.

=if(B1=”Friends”,query(Friends!B:E,concatenate(“select B,C,D,E where upper(C) contains upper(‘”,D1,”‘) or upper(D) contains upper(‘”,D1,”‘)”)),query(Followers!B:E,concatenate(“select B,C,D,E where upper(C) contains upper(‘”,D1,”‘) or upper(D) contains upper(‘”,D1,”‘)”)))

I now have a query sheet defined that allows me to search over my friends or followers, as required, according to their real name or a search term that appears in their biography description.

Making standards and specifications: Technical approaches

2011-03-09T08:58:12+00:00

Later this month is the second CETIS Future of Interoperability Standards event, and as I've been involved in drafting interoperability specifications and standards for about a decade now, using quite a wide range of different techniques, its a good time for me to articulate what I think I've learned so far. What follows is my position paper for this event.

When I first started the specifications I worked on were based principally around lists or tables of elements, as many as people could think of, with an XML DTD. Since then I've seen the introduction of UML, Use Cases, WSDLs, REST, RDF and a whole host of other things into the specification process. Some of these work, some don't. Here's my personal view based on my experiences to date.

UML

I like UML, but I've seen it overused. In small doses, UML can bring clarity and simplicity to what can otherwise be an impenetrable wall of SHALL, MUST and MAYs. In large doses, it can bulk out a simple spec into a huge impenetrable tome full of arcane diagrams. I think a UML class diagram is a great way to summarise a data model. If you need more than one page for it, the spec is probably too complex. If you need more than one diagram, the spec may need breaking up into multiple smaller modules.

UML sequence diagrams can be handy when there is a very important choreography that needs to be implemented, particularly for things like security specifications where you need to understand how multiple parties interact (e.g. oAuth). However they aren't always very readable, even for developers, and so if there is a need for a sequence diagram then there is also a need for a step-by-step walkthrough. For example, Eran's simple oAuth workflow with pictures is much easier to follow than a UML sequence diagram. Without it I probably wouldn't have bothered trying to understand the detailed choreography.

Overall I think I would recommend using UML as an aid to explanation, and as a way of warning yourself when things are becoming too complex. During the specification process, using UML is also a good way to check mutual understanding of what the spec is and it current status, but must be heavily moderated for the actual specification documentation.

Use Cases and Requirements

Specifications really do need requirements, and there are several ways to do this. IMS uses Use Cases in a fairly traditional format. W3C uses use cases for brainstorming, and then captures Requirements from them as brief, but normative statements (see, for example, the Widgets 1.0 Requirements document). In CEN I've worked on specs using high level "business cases" which are similar to use cases but structured slightly differently to capture things like non-functional requirements and the business context (see, for example, CWA 15903.)

In general I don't think it matters too much how these things are documented. But it does matter how requirements are managed.

One particular problem is defining the specification scope. It is very easy to stretch the scope to fit an edge case, particularly in a small community with a few vociferous members, as someone can latch onto such a case and easily distort the whole process. It is really difficult sometimes to make a distinction between requirements that have a direct implementation need (that is, its part of an existing system or will be implemented as soon as the spec is in draft) versus those that are speculative with no identifiable implementation strategy. Its not necessarily a bad thing to design specifications so that they are flexible and can meet future needs - I think that is an excellent design goal (q.v.), but quite another to invent speculative requirements and use cases to justify it.

Overall I think we're getting better at requirements and scoping, but some specifications are still far too broad.

Another problem is the requirement defining its solution, which then hampers the process of coming up with the specification design to suit a range of implementations.

Design Goals

Something I like about the way the webapps group has worked in W3C is setting out some general design goals independently of specific requirements. I think these are a good checklist to use when evaluating the effectiveness of a specification as a whole, rather than whether it implements a particular requirement. I've also introduced this approach in other specification work, such as XCRI and HEAR and I think its one I'd recommend more widely.

RDF and Semantic Stuff

I'm a bit ambivalent about Semantic Web technologies, but I do think a way of modelling semantics is very useful and worth applying to specifications. Most specifications involve concepts that are implemented in information models, and the way RDF properties and classes are defined provides a good model for how to do this in a way that builds on and references concepts in other specifications. For example, explicitly relating properties in a specification to elements in the Dublin Core Element Set (aka ISO15836). Also, if an information model is expressed using the semantic web constructs of "classes", "properties", "domains" and so on, it is then very clear how to relate this to a UML class diagram summarising the specification, and makes it easier to cross-check.

Another really good idea that came from RDF is the idea of assigning a URI to each property and class. This makes it very simple to reuse individual properties defined in other standards as you can identify them unambiguously.

On the negative side, there is a lot of academic complexity and obscure terminology in these technologies and this really should be avoided for specifications where possible.

Singapore Framework

A technique that emerged from the metadata and semantic web world is to create a distinction between "vocabulary" specifications and implementation profiles. This is subtly different from the approach taken to create application profiles (e.g. of the LOM); vocabulary specifications defines only concepts, whereas profiles defines relationships and constraints.

The Singapore Framework sets out a methodology for constructing "domain models" and "description set profiles" based on Dublin Core, but which applies equally well to any specification based on reusing core vocabularies.

Use of this framework is being explored in specifications such as CEN's European Learner Mobility (EuroLMAI) standards and the UK HEAR specification. For example, CEN ELM defines a core vocabulary of classes and properties used in achievement data, a generic description set profile for "european learner mobility documents" and then a specific profile for the Europass Diploma Supplement.

As another example, CWA 15903 defines the concepts of learning opportunities and their properties. It doesn't offer any constraints on how many instances of a property a model can have, or really very much about their syntax. Other specifications can then take the concepts and define the constraints and bindings, for example XCRI.

However, I don't think the specific language and techniques for defining a Description Set Profile are of as much value as the distinction itself (however realized), so I'd suggest we learn from and be inspired by the framework rather than adopt it. For example, in EuroLMAI, the Description Set Profile is actually realised using constraint clauses (e.g. "each instance of ClassX MUST have exactly one PropertyY").

A side effect of separating concepts from implementation profiles is that you have a specification where you just focus on definitions. I think this can be really important; for example in recent IMS specifications for web services the information on what a field is for is tiny compared with the big UML interface diagrams and interface definition stuff, and in some cases has been pretty vague and even incorrect. This isn't to malign the authors (I was one of them!) - it is just that the format makes it harder to focus on providing good explanations of the meaning of properties and to provide good guidance on their use.

I think this approach may be useful to make better reuse of concepts shared across the domain, and for making it clearer when a specification actually needs a binding and technical conformance, and when it doesn't.

Conformance Testing

Testing is something we've struggled with as a community, and there has been some confusion over conformance testing, badging and certification and so on.

Overall I think its important to be able to test implementations of a specification. In W3C, there is a requirement for having tested implementations of specifications before they can be approved, and Marcos Caceres from Opera has produced a very interesting methodology for developing these tests. Having worked on an implementation myself I found the tests developed using this method easy to work with. Also, having a nice visible performance gauge for my work was a good motivation for improving the implementation.

I think this does point up something important about conformance testing - I think it has to be open, free, and transparent. There is a temptation to politicize conformance, or to make it into a revenue stream. I think this misses the point - conformance is also about making better specifications, and you don't want that to be distorted by a "pay to test" environment or have aspects of testing that are based on a nod-and-a-wink from some staffer. If necessary it may be a case of having neutral, free conformance testing alongside paid certification and marketing, but with a good clean separation of the two.

Another thing about testing - its useful to make the tests available early on, during the evolution of the specification. Often the tests themselves show up specification problems, and help identify scope issues. For example, if the specification mandates an untestable behaviour, maybe it should be optional; if its unclear what a fallback position is when something is missing, maybe it has to be mandatory or have a specified fallback behaviour that can be tested. Again I'd point to Marcos & Dominique's work here on test generation at W3C, as well as to the work of Ingo Dahn.

Open Source (Reference) Implementations

Again, something the community has struggled with over the years. Overall I think there is considerable value in having running code for new specifications, particularly things like basic libraries for a range of platforms. In some cases this is uncontroversial, but there have been problems in terms of ownership conflicts and sustainability. In general I think its important to have viable open source implementations, independent of the specification body itself, but not necessarily considered "reference" implementations. I think much of the trouble comes from the SSO endorsing particular implementations rather than relying on an open conformance process (see above) to allow users and implementers to draw their own conclusions.

There is also the issue of OSS projects having access to specifications under development, and OSS contributors contributing to specifications. In some cases this isn't really important (e.g. IETF) in others by having an MOU (e.g. W3C and the ASF). However I think given the value that OSS brings to standards, if the process of specification development doesn't allow ANY open source project to engage (not just cherry picking the most popular) then the development process needs rethinking.

Note that this only really applies to specifications that are aimed at direct implementation; "vocabulary"-style standards and domain models aren't implemented in this fashion. I guess a rule of thumb is, if there are conformance tests, then there should be OSS implementations.

If in doubt, throw it out

One final thing, not really a technology but certainly a technique, is to be really ruthless about what makes the final cut. That doesn't just apply to the appendices and guidance stuff kicking around in some specification documents, but also the core models and functionality. If the key implementations that are testing a spec can't find a use for a field or never use a method or interface, consider cutting it out completely. Keep the draft around as it might turn out useful in a revision. If there is a whole section of functionality that is only used by a few implementations, separate it out as a mini-spec published separately to keep the core as small and easy to understand and implement correctly as possible. This can continue right up to the end of the process - for example in the W3C Widgets specs we've removed API methods and properties at each stage of the spec, often very simply as a result of asking "is anyone using this?"

In the early days I think we were keen to capture as wide a set of requirements as we could and provided redundancy in the specification to avoid too many non-conforming extensions. I think one consequence was an explosion of application profiles, and just as many interoperability issues as if we'd kept the specifications lean and mean to begin with.

Also, large complex specifications need many, many more tests to check conformance. In my recent W3C work I think its on average about 20 tests per XML element. So if a spec has 100 elements, that's about 2000 conformance tests to pass if you're doing it to the same level of detail. (W3C Widgets has 10 elements; some of its sub-specifications like Widget Updates have just a couple.)

Summing up

So what should we do in future? Or at least, until something better comes along?

Clearly separate standards for concepts from specifications for implementation
Use UML only where it adds clarity
Split up large standards/specifications into smaller documents

For standardising concepts:

Build on other standards (and reference rather than repeat)
Take note of the Singapore Framework for inspiration
Give each class and property its own URI

For specifications aimed at implementation:

Collect requirements broadly, but define scope narrowly (or push non-core cases into speclets/profiles)
Split up complex specifications into speclets
Have design goals as well as requirements
Encourage open source implementations during spec development, but don't necessarily label them as "reference" implementations
Provide useful tests, and provide them as early as possible to implementers (i.e. evolve them with the spec)
Remove things that don't get implemented during testing
Explain the specification in the terms an implementer will understand

Getting Started With Google APIs – Round Up of Google Interactive API Explorers

2011-03-08T11:58:55+00:00

The official Google Code blog a announced a Google APIs Explorer earlier today that allows you to experiment with a variety of Google APIs – Google API Explorer.

Currently supported APIs include:

- Buzz API
- Custom Search API
- Diacritize API
- Moderator API
- Shopping API
- Translate API
- URLShortener API

though you have to assume that more will be added as and when…

The API Explorer provides a quick way of checking API calls, as well as generating RESTful calls to the corresponding API (simply grab the GET request URL that is generated).

If your favourite API isn’t supported by the explorer, fear not, because there are several other interactive explorers for Google APIs and services around…

First up, the Google Analytics API Explorer (aka the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer).

Then there’s the Google AJAX APIs Code Playground that lets you explore all manner of Google APIs in an interactive fashion (including the Google visualisation API, maps and Google Earth APIs, search APIs etc etc):

If it’s charts you want to experiment with, try out the Chart Tools Live Chart Playground (aka the old Chart API):

Any more that I’ve missed?

Links for 2011-03-07 [del.icio.us]

2011-03-08T08:00:00+00:00

Announcing Zipcast – changing the way the world conducts web meetings | SlideShare Blog
It was always only going to be a matter of time.. live online presentation rooms via Slideshare...

Counting the cost

2011-03-07T23:23:25+00:00

The context of this post and related work is that our local public library service (Warwickshire Library and Information Service) is facing a cut of approximately 27% of its budget over the next 3 years (£2million from an overall budget of £7.4million). For more information see Facing the Challenge on libraries on the Warkwickshire County Council website.

One canard that seems to come up repeatedly in discussions around public libraries and their role is that ‘books are cheap’ and that this means there isn’t the need for public libraries that there once was. I thought an interesting experiment might be to work out how much our family’s use of the library service might equate to based on the cost of buying the books that we have borrowed from the library. So I set about writing a script to achieve this.

The first stage was to retrieve details of a loan history – luckily the system used by Warwickshire libraries (Vubis) do have a loan history which seems to go back 18 months (although with an absolute minimum of information – more on this later). Unluckily there is no way of querying this via an API, only via a web browser. This is not so unusual, and there are good ways of scraping data out of html which I’ve used before. However, in this case the page I needed to get the data from was protected by a login – as it was a loan history linked to an individual library account, and required a barcode and PIN to be input into a form on a webpage before accessing the loan history page.

To help with this I used a Ruby library called ‘Mechanize‘ (inspired by the Perl Mechanize library which does the same sort of thing). This essentially allows you to simulate web browser behaviour within a script – it can fill in forms for you and deal with things like cookies which the web page might try to write to the browser. (incidentally, if you are interested in doing stuff like automating checks for authenticated library resources online Mechanize is worth a look)

Once Mechanize has navigated through the login form and then to the loan history page the content of the page can be parsed as usual – luckily Mechanize supports parsing page content with another Ruby library called Nokogiri – which is my preferred HTML/XML parser in Ruby anyway. So grabbing the details from loan history page was fine once Mechanize had retrieved it.

Unfortunately the amount of information available in the loan history is minimal – just a title and a date. Since at minimum I need to have a price, I need more information. My first thought was I’d get prices from Amazon, but with only the title available I quickly realised I was going to get a lot of duplicate items – especially since my son (3 and a half) borrows books with titles like ‘Goldilocks and the three bears’ and ‘Shapes’ – not very unique.

So I needed to get more details – preferably an ISBN – before I start looking up prices. Any method of looking up books given only the title is going to suffer from the same problems of many duplicate titles. The way to minimise the number of duplicates is to search in the most limited pool of items for the titles from the loan history – which in this case is to search the Warwickshire library catalogue and limit the results to books in our local branch (Leamington Spa) – as this is the only branch we use.

The software that Warwickshire use to provide their library catalogue interface on the web is called ‘Aquabrowser‘ (as opposed to the one that stores administrative information like the loan history – which is called Vubis). Happily unlike Vubis, Aquabrowser does have some APIs that can be used to get information out of the system in a machine readable format. I have to admit that this functionality isn’t well advertised (neither by Warwickshire Library service nor by the vendor of the software), but luckily Chris Keene and Ed Chamberlain have both done some work in documenting the Aquabrowser API (here and here) which is in use at their place of work (University of Sussex and University of Cambridge respectively).

Aquabrowser supports what is meant to be a sector wide standard interface called SRU. The location of the SRU interface for each Aquabrowser interface seems to be in a standard place – http://aquabrowser-url/aquabrowser-path/sru.ashx? (in this case librarycatalogue.warwickshire.gov.uk/abwarwick/sru.ashx?) - then followed by the relevant SRU parameters (e.g. operation=explain&version=1.1&query=dogs&maximumRecords=100&recordSchema=dc – see http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ for full documentation on SRU). However, there are several issues with the Aquabrowser implementation of SRU. I’m not clear which issues are Aquabrowser issues, and which are down to local configuration decisions, but the result is a rather limited interface. In this case the main problems for me was that it didn’t allow me to limit a search by title, and it didn’t include the ISBN in the results.

As well as the ‘standard’ SRU interface, Aquabrowser also supports a proprietary interface which will provide search results as XML. This is pretty much undocumented as far as I can tell, but it seems you can take some of the URLs from the HTML interfaces and add the parameter ‘output=xml’ to the URL (I’m not 100% sure, but my guess is that the HTML interface actually is built over the XML API). A basic request looks like http://aquabrowser-url/aquabrowser-path/result.ashx?q=emily%20gravett&output=xml (in this case http://librarycatalogue.warwickshire.gov.uk/abwarwick/result.ashx?q=emily%20gravett&output=xml).

The default HTML interface uses frames which obscures some of what is happening – however, if you use the ‘Accessible’ version, the syntax in the URLs can be seen easily. Using this method I was able to copy the syntax for limiting the results to stock available in a specific branch – in this case the parameter required is ‘branch=LEA’.

The results returned by the XML interface in the Warwickshire instance include information lacking from the SRU interface – and ISBN is one of the elements included. However searching by title is still not possible as far as I can tell – although I came up with a work around for this.

So, once I have the list of titles from the loan history, I use each title to run a search against the Aquabrowser XML interface, limiting the results to stock in the Leamington Spa branch. Since I can’t limit to just title search instead I check the contents of the <title> tag in each record contained in the XML response (note in the XML response Aquabrowser wraps matches to your search terms <exact> tags so you have to ignore these when comparing search phrases). This technique also means I can do more exact matching (e.g. including case sensitivity) than a search would let me.

I decided that if I found duplicates having done this filtering I’d take each duplicate record and include them in my results for later manual tweaking.

So now I have a set of bibliographic records with generally a title, an author (or author statement) and an ISBN. An added bonus is a URL for a cover image for the book is in the response, so I grab that as well (it’s an Amazon cover image). What I don’t have is the price (price may well be in the library record somewhere, but it isn’t included in the XML response). So I then use the ISBN to look up the price on Amazon – I tried a couple of Ruby libraries designed to work with the Amazon ‘Product Advertising’ API (which is the one you need for stuff like prices), but the only one I really liked was ‘Sucker‘ – it is very lightweight, doesn’t hide the Amazon API that much, and again has Nokogiri somewhere underneath (and some other stuff) – which means dealing with the results is relatively straightforward if you’ve used Nokogiri.

So, from the Amazon response I grab the price (I check it is in GBP first) and also a URL for the Amazon product page (so I can provide a link back to Amazon). (This isn’t perfect – despite the library catalogue searching above, I don’t get ISBNs for every item and so can’t search them all on Amazon).

Now I have all the information I need but I don’t have a way to present it (and I still have some unwanted duplicate entries in the books list). For this I went back to a tactic I used previously for the (currently defunct) ‘What to Watch‘ application – importing the results of a script into WordPress as a series of blog posts. In this case created a csv file which allowed me to easily add in a few tags – such as names to indicate which account (mine, Damyanti’s or our son’s) the item had been borrowed on. The ‘text’ of the blog post was some simple html to display the cover image and a few links – including an option to add the item to a LibraryThing account in a single click. I also included some WordPress ‘custom fields’ to record the title, ISBN and price – to enable to additional functions in the blog.

Using the ‘csv importer’ WordPress plugin (a great plugin) to import the csv file the content was now in the blog. This is the point at which we removed those duplicate book entries (this did require us to remember what we’d borrowed!). The final step was to actually do the calculation I originally wanted to do – the cost of the books we’d borrowed. This final step was achieved by writing a WordPress plugin to support the display of a Widget which uses SQL to get values from the ‘custom field’ storing price information. Since I haven’t got prices for all books, I use those I have got, work out an average per book, and multiply this up by the total number of loans.

The final result is the ‘Overdue Books‘ blog showing every book we have borrowed as a family since September 2009 at http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_books/. The headline figure is that if we’d bought those items we’ve borrowed in this time the cost would have been approximately £3,428.26 – or around £190 per month - or £44 pounds a week. I think it is fair to say even a relatively well off family would find this steep!

Finally the code is available at https://github.com/ostephens/Savelibs – there are all kinds of things I’m unhappy about and want to improve – including modifying it so it can be used to regularly update the Overdue Books blog without any manual intervention from me – and if anyone wants to take it and make something that any library user could use to do the same type of calculation feel free (I’d like to do this, but not sure where I’m going to get the time).

Addendum 08/03/2011

In an oversight last night I forgot to add my apologies and thanks to the IT people at Warwickshire council and library – firstly they chose a system for their library catalogue with an API (despite some shortcomings, this is a big step!) and secondly they didn’t shout at me when I repeatedly ran hundreds of searches against their catalogue in quick succession, but rather got in touch politely so we could work together to ensure the scripts weren’t going to cause a problem on the system – if you are thinking of hacking stuff around like this, probably as well to get in touch with system owners first!

What I do hope is that there might be some opportunity for developers like me to work with the library system and data – it would be really good if we could see applications built on top of the library systems APIs (such as this one which won the first ‘Hack Warwickshire’ competition) – the attitude Warwickshire have to open data and wanting to get developers involved is really refreshing

The Rise of Server-Side JavaScript (SSJS)

2011-03-06T01:11:01+00:00

For a long time now the established pattern of web development has been to use one programming language for interactivity in the browser (JavaScript) and another for server-side logic and request processing (PHP, JSP, ASP, Java, Python, Ruby…) However we're now seeing the rise of JavaScript as a sort of universal web language encompassing the server side too.

Having a single language makes some sense. For one thing, you can reuse code between browser and server implementations rather than try to map APIs between different languages. You can also happily use JSON as your default serialization. And you only need to learn one language.

Other benefits are perhaps less obvious - for example, in recent years there has been considerable investment made in making JavaScript interpreters as fast as possible to meet the rising complexity of web applications. This has resulted in the screamingly fast V8 JavaScript engine used by Chrome, for example. This provides an infrastructure to create lean, mean JavaScript-based server applications.

Platforms

Node.js is a native JavaScript server application running right up against the OS. Node.js builds directly on Chrome V8 and uses event-driven, asynchronous JavaScript to create a very distinctive development environment. Node.js has very few dependencies, runs very fast, and has a very active community. Most of all, its fun! I ported the Google Wave Gadget API implementation from Apache Wookie over to Node.js in a couple of days (you can download it here). Node also seems to use very little memory regardless of demand - this is due to it using a threadless, event driven server model rather than a more traditional thread pool approach. On the downside, there is some skepticism of the hype around the speed of Node.js. Also, while being very lightweight has its advantages, being so close to the OS makes it harder to manage and track server performance without a lot of Linux Jujitsu: there are, as yet, no simple graphical management tools or utilities for handling deployed applications, for example. However, if you need a platform to prototype demanding real-time applications such as multiplayer games then Node.js is well worth looking at.

Ringo takes a more traditional approach, and uses the Rhino JavaScript engine to run JavaScript applications using Jetty, a Java application server. While Rhino isn't as fast as V8, its usually good enough, and one author has noted some benefits of using the tried-and-tested JVM as the basis for server code as opposed to Node.js's more radical approach. Another plus is that by using Java you get access to tons of Java libraries in your code using Java-JavaScript integration, rather than having to access everything through spawning a console process as in Node. On the other hand, all this Java does weigh a fair amount, and so you won't see the small memory footprints you can acheive with Node.js. If you're a Java developer interested in server-side JavaScript, but think Node.js looks a bit scary - or you just have a ton of Java code you can't face porting - then I think Ringo is a great place to start.

Jack is inspired by Ruby's Rack: it provides an interface between JavaScript and the web server. Jack provides handlers for JavaScript applications to respond to webserver calls building on JSGI in a similar manner to Rack or other lightweight CGI-style frameworks. You can use Jack with Jerry and other Java application servers such as Simple. In many ways, Jack is similar in final deployment to Ringo, and the two are broadly compatible. Jack is probably a good starting point if you want to develop your own specialized server-side javascript framework or middleware.

Nitro is a set of libraries that build on JSGI and Rhino. Rather than a complete platform, Nitro provides components that are useful in building JavaScript frameworks, including templating and parsing engines. The most prominent use of Nitro is AppEngineJS , which lets you run JavaScript servers using Google's app engine infrastructure - so if you want to deploy your application using Google's App Engine, then clearly this is the platform you need to look at.

Opera Unite is a very different kind of system entirely - it uses JavaScript to deploy web services directly from your desktop rather than on a separate server, for example to share music or have your own personal chatroom. Opera Unite services are created using JavaScript with some special extensions, which are then packaged as W3C Widgets. It may not suit every purpose, but it makes sense that a personal web server uses JavaScript as the server programming language, and makes it very easy to create and share simple applications with your friends. Plus it uses Widgets, my other favourite web technology of the moment!

Apache Sling is an example of putting JavaScript on the same footing as other server-side scripting languages such as PHP and JSP. Sling lets you create JavaScript applications and deploy them using its common web application server engine; in fact, "ESP", its implementation of server-side JavaScript looks a lot like JSP. If you want to use server-side JavaScript with a Java content repository (JCR) then Sling is clearly where you need to be looking. (Sling, incidentally, is also at the core of the Sakai 3 LMS).

Standards

The most important emerging standard in this space is the CommonJS initiative. CommonJS defines standard APIs for basic functionality needed by non-browser JavaScript, including module loading, writing to the console, and filesystem access. Most of the platforms described above implement one or more of the existing CommonJS specifications. On the roadmap for CommonJS are areas such as JSGI, Web Sockets, HTTP clients. Eventually we should see a high level of compatibility between applications written in JavaScript for deployment on any of the platforms described above (and the many others I've not looked at) making developing services in JavaScript less dependent on the foibles of any one deployment platform.

In Summary

Server-side JavaScript is an obvious direction for the evolution of web applications and services that ties in well with the developments on the client side of things like HTML5. While many of the current platforms are quite young, there is a very active community, and an active engagement in standardisation, that makes is a promising area for developers to look into. I think also it confirms for me that JavaScript is finally emerging from the scripting ghetto to become recognised as the web's most important programming language - the only language usable in both browsers and servers.

Term-based thesauri and SKOS (Part 2): Linked Data

2011-03-01T18:18:56+00:00

In my previous post on this topic I outlined how I was approaching making a thesaurus available using the SKOS and SKOS-XL RDF vocabularies. In that post I focused on:

how the thesaurus content is modelled using a "concept-based" approach - what are the "things of interest", their attributes, and the relationships between them;
how those things (concepts, terms/labels) are named/identified using http URIs;
how those things can be "described" using the simple "triple" statement model of RDF, and using the SKOS and SKOS-XL RDF vocabularies;
an example of how an expresssion of the thesaurus using the term-based model is mapped or transformed into an SKOS RDF expression

What I didn't really address in that post is how that resulting RDF data is made available and accessed on the Web - which is more specifically where the "Linked Data" principles articulated by Tim Berners-Lee come into play.

(A good deal of the content of this post is probably familiar stuff for those of you already working with Linked Data, but I thought it was worth documenting it both to fill out the picture of some of the "design choices" to be made in this particular example, and to provide some more background to others less familiar with the approaches.)

Linked Data, URIs, things, documents and HTTP

The use of http URIs as identifiers provides two features:

a global naming system, and a set of processes by which authority for assigning names can be delegated/distributed;
through the HTTP protocol, a well understood and widely deployed mechanism for providing access to information "about", or descriptions of, the things identified by those URIs (in our case, the concepts and terms/labels).

As a user/consumer of an http URI, given only the URI, I can "look up" that URI using the HTTP protocol, i.e. I can provide it to a tool (like a Web browser) and that tool can issue a request to obtain a description of the thing identified by the URI. And conversely as the owner/provider of a URI, I can configure my server to respond to such requests with a document providing a description of the thing.

And the HTTP protocol incorporates features which we can use to "optimise" this process. So, for example, the "content negotiation" feature allows a client to specify a preference for the format in which it wishes to receive data, and allows a server to select - from amongst several it may have available - format which the server determines is most appropriate for the client. In the terminology of the Web Architecture, the description can have multiple "representations", each of which can vary by format (or by other criteria). In the context of Linked Data, this technique is typically used to support the provision of document representations in formats suitable for a human reader (HTML, XHTML) and in one or more RDF syntaxes (usually, at least as RDF/XML). (The emergence of the RDFa syntax, which enables the embedding of RDF data in HTML/XHTML documents, and the growing support for RDFa in RDF tools, offers the possibility, in principle at least, of a single format serving both purposes.)

The widespread use of the HTTP protocol and tools that support it mean that these techniques are widely available (in theory at least; experience suggests that in practice the ability (or authority) to set up things like HTTP redirects (more below) can create something of a barrier). It also means that the "Web of Linked Data" is part of the existing Web of documents that we are accustomed to navigating using a Web browser.

One of the principles underpinning RDF's use of URIs as names is that we should try to avoid ambiguity in our use of those names, i.e. we should use different URIs for different things, and avoid using the same URI as a name for two different things. One of the issues I've slightly glossed over in the last few paragraphs is the distinction between a "thing" and a document describing that thing as two different resources. After all, if I provide a page describing the Mona Lisa, both the page and the Mona Lisa have creators, creation dates, terms of use, but they have different creators, creation dates and terms of use. And if I want to provide such information in RDF, then I need to take care to avoid confusing the two objects - by using two different URIs, one for my document and one for the painting, and citing those URIs in my RDF statements accordingly.

However, as I emphasise above, we also want to be in a position where, given only a "thing URI", I can obtain a document describing that thing: I shouldn't need in advance information about a second URI, the URI of a document about that thing.

The W3C Note Cool URIs for the Semantic Web describes some possible approaches to addressing this issue, broadly using two different techniques:

the use of URIs containing "fragment identifiers" ("hash URIs") (i.e. URIs of the form http://example.org/doc/123#thing). In this case, the "fragment identifier" part of the URI is always "trimmed" from the URI when the client makes a request to the server, and this allows the use of the URI with fragment identifier as "thing URI", leaving the trimmed URI without fragment id as a document URI.
the use of a convention of HTTP "redirects". In this case, when a server receives a request for a URI which it "knows" is a "thing URI" rather than a document URI, it returns a response which provides a second URI as a source of information about the thing, and the client then sends a second request for that second URI. Formally, the initial response uses the HTTP "303 See Also" status code, which sometimes leads to these being called colloquially "303 URIs", even though there's nothing special about the URIs themselves.

I'm conscious that I'm skipping over some of the details here; for a more detailed description, particularly of the "flow" of the interactions involved, and some consideration of the pros and cons of the two approaches, see Cool URIs for the Semantic Web.

URI Sets for the UK Public Sector

The Cool URIs note focuses mainly on the patterns of "interaction" for handling the two approaches to moving from "thing URI" to document URI. Its examples include example URIs, but the exact form of those URIs is intended to be illustrative rather than prescriptive. I think it's important to note that in the redirect case, it is the server's notification to the client of the second URI that provides the client with that information. There is no technical requirement for a structural similarity in the forms of the "thing URI" and the document URI, and consumers of the URIs should rely on the information provided to them by the server rather than making assumptions about URI structure.

Having said that, the use of a shared, consistent set of URI patterns within a community can provide some useful "cues" to human readers of those URIs. It can also simplify the work of data providers - for example by facilitating the use of similar HTTP server configurations or the reuse of scripts/tools for serving "Linked Data" documents. With this (and other factors such as URI stability) in mind, the UK Cabinet Office has provided a set of guidelines, Designing URI Sets for the UK Public Sector which build on the W3C Cool URIs note, but offer more specific guidance, particularly on the design of URIs.

For the purposes of this discussion, of particular interest is the document's specification (in the "Definitions, frameworks and principles" section) of several distinct "types of URI", or perhaps more accurately, URIs for different categories of resource, and (in the "The path structure for URIs" section) of suggested structural patterns for each:

Identifier URIs (what I have been calling above "thing URIs") name "real-world things" and should use patterns like:
- http://{domain}/{concept}/{reference}#id or
- http://{domain}/id/{concept}/{reference}
where:
- {concept} is "a word or string to capture the essence of the real-world 'Thing' that the set names e.g. school". (I think this is roughly what I think of as the name of a "resource type" - note this is a more generic use of the word "concept" than that of the SKOS concept)
- {reference} is "a string that is used by the set publisher to identify an individual instance of concept".
The document allows for the use of a hierarchy of concept-reference pairs in a single URI if appropriate, so for a specific class within a specific school, the path might be /id/school/123/class/5
Document URIs name the documents that provide information about, descriptions of, "real-world things". The suggested pattern is
- http://{domain}/doc/{concept}/{reference}
These documents are, I think, what Berners-Lee calls Generic Resources. For each such document, multiple representations may be available, each in different formats, and each of those multiple "more specific" concrete formats may be available as a separate resource in its own right (see "Representation URIs" below). If descriptions vary over time, and those variants are to be exposed then a series of "date-stamped" URIs can be used, with the pattern
- http://{domain}/doc/{concept}/{reference}/{yyyy-mm-dd}
Representation URIs name a document in a specific format. The suggested pattern is
- http://{domain}/doc/{concept}/{reference}/{doc.file-extension}
This can also be applied to a date-stamped version:
- http://{domain}/doc/{concept}/{reference}/{yyyy-mm-dd}/{doc.file-extension}

The guidelines also distinguish a category of "Ontology URIs" which use the pattern http://{domain}/def/{concept}. I had interpreted "Ontology URIs" as applying to the identification of classes and properties, and I was treating the terms/concepts of a thesaurus as "conceptual things" which would fall under the /id/ case. But I do notice that in an example in which she refers to these guidelines, Jeni Tennison uses the /def/ pattern for an SKOS example. I don't think it's really much of an issue - and pretty much all the other points I discuss apply anyway - but any advice on this point would be appreciated.

So, applying these general rules for the thesaurus case, where, as I discussed in the previous post, the primary types of thing of interest in our SKOS-modelled thesaurus are "concepts" and "terms":

Term URI Pattern: http://example.org/id/term/T{termid}
Concept URI Pattern: http://example.org/id/concept/C{termid}

However, if we bear in mind that within the URI space of the example.org domain, we're likely to want to represent, and coin URIs for the components of, multiple thesauri, and our "termid" references (drawn from the term numbers in the input) are unique only within the scope of a single thesaurus, then we should include some sort of thesaurus-specific component in the path to "qualify" those term numbers. Let's use the token "polthes" for this example:

Term URI Pattern: http://example.org/id/term/{schemename}/T{termid}
Example: http://example.org/id/term/polthes/T2
Concept URI Pattern: http://example.org/id/concept/{schemename}/C{termid}
Example: http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/C2

We should also include a URI for the thesaurus as a whole. The SKOS model provides a generic class of "concept scheme" to cover aggregations of concepts:

Concept Scheme URI Pattern: http://example.org/id/concept-scheme/{schemename}
Example: http://example.org/id/concept-scheme/polthes

where each concept and term in the thesaurus is linked to this concept scheme by a triple using the skos:inScheme property. (I omitted this from the example in the previous post so that it was easier to focus on the concept-term and concept-concept relationships, and to try to keep the already rather complex diagrams slightly readable!)

Aside: An alternative for the concept and term URI patterns would be to use the "hierarchical concept-reference" approach and use patterns like:

Term URI Pattern: http://example.org/id/concept-scheme/{schemename}/term/T{termid}
Example: http://example.org/id/concept-scheme/polthes/term/T2
Concept URI Pattern: http://example.org/id/concept-scheme/{schemename}/concept/C{termid}
Example: http://example.org/id/concept-scheme/polthes/concept/C2

My only slight misgiving about this approach is that (bearing in mind that strictly speaking the URIs should be treated as opaque and such information obtained from the descriptions provided by the server) in the (non-hierarchical) form I suggested initially, the string indicating the resource type ("concept", "term") is fairly clear to the human reader from its position following the "/id/" component in the URI (e.g. http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/C2). But with the hierarchical form, it perhaps becomes slightly less clear (e.g. http://example.org/id/concept-scheme/polthes/concept/C2). But that is a minor gripe, and really the hierarchical form would serve just as well. For the remainder of this document, in the examples, I'll continue with the initial non-hierarchical pattern I suggested above, but it may be something to revisit if the hierarchical form is more in line with the intent - and current usage - of the guidelines. (So again, comments are welcome on this point.)

For each of these "Identifier URIs", there should be a corresponding "Document URI" naming a document describing the thing, and following the /doc/ pattern:

Description of Concept Scheme: http://example.org/doc/concept-scheme/polthes
Description of Term: http://example.org/doc/term/polthes/T{termid}
Description of Concept: http://example.org/doc/concept/polthes/C{termid}

And for each format in which the description is available, a corresponding "Representation URI":

Description of Concept Scheme (HTML): http://example.org/doc/concept-scheme/polthes/doc.html
Description of Concept Scheme (RDF/XML): http://example.org/doc/concept-scheme/polthes/doc.rdf
Description of Concept (HTML): http://example.org/doc/concept/polthes/C{termid}/doc.html
Description of Concept (RDF/XML): http://example.org/doc/concept/polthes/C{termid}/doc.rdf
Description of Term (HTML): http://example.org/doc/term/polthes/T{termid}.html
Description of Term (RDF/XML): http://example.org/doc/term/polthes/T{termid}.html

Descriptions and "boundedness"

The three documents I've mentioned so far (Berners-Lee's Linked Data Design Issues note, the W3C Cool URIs document, or the Cabinet Office URI patterns document) don't have a great deal to say on the topic of the content of the document which is returned as a description of a "thing". This is discussed briefly in the "Linked Data Tutorial" document by Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and Tom Heath, How to Publish Linked Data on the Web.

In principle at least, it is quite possible to provide a single document which describes several resources. This approach has been quite common in association with the use of "hash URIs" in a pattern where a number of "thing URIs" differ only by fragment identifier, and share the same "non-fragment" part (http://example.org/school#1, http://example.org/school#2, ... http://example.org/school#99), and a number of common ontologies make use of this sort of approach. One consequence is that a client interested only in a single resource always retrieves the full set of descriptions. If my thesaurus really did consist only of the half-dozen concepts and terms I described in the example in my previous post, retrieving a document describing them all would probably not be a problem, but for the "real world" case where there are several thousand terms involved, it would represent a significant overhead if every request results in the transfer of several megabytes of data.

Generally, the approach taken is for the data provider to generate some set of "useful information" "about" the requested resource - though saying that rather begs the question of what constitutes "useful" (and whether there is a single answer to that question that is applicable across different datasets dealing with different resource types). Typically the generation of a description is based on some set of rules which, for a specified node in the dataset RDF graph (a specified "thing URI"), selects a "nearby" subgraph of the graph, representing a "bounded description" made up of triples/statements "about" the thing itself and maybe also "about" closely related resources.

Various such algorithms for generating such descriptions are possible and I don't intend to attempt any sort of rigorous analysis or comparison of them here - for further discussion see e.g. Patrick Stickler's CBD - Concise Bounded Description or Bounded Descriptions in RDF from the Talis Platform wiki. But there is one aspect which I think it is worth mentioning in the context of the thesaurus example. One of the key differences between the algorithms used to generate descriptions is how they treat the "directionality" of arcs in the RDF graph, i.e. whether they base the description only on arcs "outbound from" the selected node (RDF triples with that URI as subject), or whether they take into account both arcs "outbound from" and "inbound to" the node (triples with the URI as either subject or object).

That probably sounds like a very abstract point, and the significance is perhaps best illustrated through a concrete example. Let's take the graph for the example from my previous post (tweaked to use the slightly amended URI patterns above - I've continued to leave out the concept scheme links to keep things simple) and suppose this is the dataset to which I'm applying the rules.

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T1 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Civil violence"@en.

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C3 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Terrorism"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T3;
       skos:broader con:C2 .

term:T3 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Terrorism"@en.
       
con:C4 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C2 .

term:T4 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violence"@en.

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

And in graphical form (as before with the rdf:type triples omitted):

(In the figures below, I've tried to represent the idea that a subgraph is being selected by "fading out" the parts which aren't selected, and leaving the selected part fully visible. I hope the images are sufficiently clear for this to be effective!)

Let's first take the approach known as the "concise bounded description (CBD)" - formally defined here, but essentially based on "outbound" links. For the concept C2 (http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/C2), the CBD would consist of the following subgraph (i.e. the document http://example.org/doc/concept/polthes/C2 would contain this data):

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

For the term T2 (http://example.org/id/term/polthes/T2), corresponding to the "preferred label" (i.e. the document http://example.org/doc/term/polthes/T2 would contain):

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

For the term T5 (http://example.org/id/term/polthes/T5), corresponding to the "alternate label" (i.e. the document http://example.org/doc/term/polthes/T5 would contain):

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

Note that for the two terms, the "concise bounded description" is quite minimal (though remember I've simplified it a bit): in particular, it does not include the relationship between the term and the concept. This is because using the SKOS-XL vocabulary that relationship is expressed as a triple in which the concept URI is the subject and the term URI is the object - an "inbound arc" to the term URI in the graph - which the CBD approach does not take into account when constructing the description of the term.

But the fact that the relationship is represented only in this way - a link from concept to term, without an inverse term to concept link - is arguably slightly arbitrary.

An alternative approach, the "symmetric bounded description" seeks to address this sort of issue, by taking into account both "outbound" and "inbound". For the same three cases, it produces the following results:

Concept C2:

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

con:C2 a skos:Concept;
       skos:prefLabel "Political violence"@en;
       skosxl:prefLabel term:T2;
       skos:altLabel "Civil violence"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T1;
       skos:altLabel "Violent protest"@en;
       skosxl:altLabel term:T5;
       skos:broader con:C4;
       skos:narrower con:C3 .

con:C3 skos:broader con:C2 .

con:C4 skos:narrower con:C2 .

Term T2:

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T2 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Political violence"@en.

con:C2 skosxl:prefLabel term:T2 .

Term T5:

@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#> .
@prefix skosxl: <http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#> .
@prefix con: <http://example.org/id/concept/polthes/> .
@prefix term: <http://example.org/id/term/polthes/> .

term:T5 a skosxl:Label;
        skosxl:literalForm "Violent protest"@en.

con:C5 skosxl:altLabel term:T5 .

For the concept case, the difference is relatively minor (for the skos:broader and skos:narrower relationships, the inverse triples are ow also included). But for the term cases, the relationship between concept and term is now included.

So (rather long-windedly, I fear!), I'm trying to illustrate that it's worth thinking a little bit about the content of descriptions and how they work as "stand-alone" documents (albeit linked to others). And for this dataset, I think there's an argument that generating "symmetric" descriptions that include inbound links as well as outbound ones probably results in more "useful information" for the consumer of the data.

(Again, I'm simpifying things slightly here to illustrate the point: I've omitted type information and the links to indicate concept scheme membership. Typically the descriptions might (depending on the algorithm) include labels for related resources mentioned, rather than just the URIs, and would include some metadata about the document - its publisher, last modification date, licence/rights information, a link to the dataset of which it is a member, and so on.)

Summary

What I've tried to do in this post is expand on some of the "linked data"-specific aspects of the project, and to examine some of the design choices to be made in applying some of those general rules to this particular case, shaped both by external factors (like the Cabinet Office guidelines on URIs) and by characteristics of the data itself (like the directionality of links made using SKOS-XL). In the next post, I'll move on, as promised, to the questions of how the data changes over time, and any implications of that.

CORE

2011-03-01T12:33:01+00:00

CORE (COnnecting REpositories) (Presented by Petr Knoth from Open University)

Working with content and metadata from Open Access Institutional Repositories – approx 167 repositories in the UK. Mainly interested in Full-text items (approx 10 percent of metadata records in repositories have full-text items attached).

Will use OAI-PMH to harvest metadata, and then use to grab the pdf (or other full-text) representations of resource. Will then analyse content, and find ‘similarities’ between items – and then express as RDF. Will then make available via triple store.

Have started working with the Open University repository (ORO) – finding about 30% have full-text. Will focus on extracting relationships – specifically ‘semantic similarity’ based on content… (rather than on metadata)

Use cases – demonstrator client that can be integrated into any repository – which will provide links to papers in other repositories based on similarity relationships – will be open to any institution to use.

COMET

2011-03-01T12:27:41+00:00

(Ed Chamberlain presenting) – COMET (Cambridge Open Metadata) – follow on from the Open Bibliography project- collaborating with CARET at Cambridge, with support from OCLC.

Want to publish lots of Open Bibliographic data – engaging with RDF, enriching records with FAST and VIAF linking – and will document experiences

Be taking MARC21 encoded records from library catalogue – data taken from main University Library catalogue – historical mix of quality and origin built overtime – some mixture of standards as cataloguing practice has changed over time

Data will be made available as MARC21 (bulk download) and also RDF/XML (bulk download and triple-store with SPARQL endpoint etc.) Will publish where possible under PDDL, but will need discussions with OCLC where it includes data from OCLC derived records…

Contextual Wrappers

2011-03-01T12:24:17+00:00

(Presented by David Scruton) Contextual Wrappers is project from FitzWilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge – working with Knowledge Integration Ltd and Culture Grid.

Looking at how ‘Collection Level Descriptions’ interact/add value to ‘item level descriptions’

Will be providing metadata for 160k items and 50 collection level descriptions (think I got that right)

Will be producing draft update for collection level descriptions (and related APIs) in the Culture Grid

Discovering Babel

2011-03-01T12:14:28+00:00

(Martin Wynne presenting) Discovering Babel based on Oxford Text archive – looking at c.1400 metadata records and c.1400 electronic literary and linguistic datasets – electronic texts, text corpora, lexicons, audio data, etc.

Also including British National Corpus and an archive of central and East European language resources (TRACTOR)

Metadata will be made available via TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML headers; Dublin Core – but will use DC extensions from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC); CLARIN Metadata Initiative (CMDI); RDF linked data (‘may as well’!)

Will provide an OAI-PMH target, and will be harvested by OLAC, CLARIN, etc.

Example use cases … want to provide data/metadata and allow others to build services on top of this…
Aim to make it easier for end-users to find and access resources; will also produce a ‘How to make your language resources discoverable’ manual.

Key technical challenges – establishing sensible and standards conformant architecture for resource file locations (persistent URLs) …

Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt)

2011-02-28T13:51:26+00:00

(Cross posted at the ASCD Whole Child Blog, here is a snip from my new book, co-authored with Rob Manabelli, which comes out in May.)

Seventh/eighth grade teacher Clarence Fisher has an interesting way of describing his classroom up in Snow Lake, Manitoba. As he tells it, it has “thin walls,” meaning that despite being eight hours north of the nearest metropolitan airport, his students are getting out into the world on a regular basis, using the Web to connect and collaborate with students in far flung places from around the globe. The name of Clarence’s blog, “Remote Access,” sums up nicely the opportunities that his students have in their networked classroom.

“Learning is only as powerful as the network it occurs in,” Clarence says. “No doubt, there is still value in the learning that occurs between teachers and students in classrooms. But the power of that learning is more solid and more relevant at the end of the day if the networks and the connections are larger.”

Without question, Clarence imbues the notion of the “connected learner.” Aside from reflecting on his life and his practice on his blog, he uses Twitter to grow his network, uses Delicious to capture and share bookmarks, and makes other tools like Skype and YouTube a regular part of his learning life. In other words, he’s deeply rooted in the learning networks he advocates for his students.

“It’s changed everything for me as a learner,” he says. “I teach in a small school of 145 kids, so I don’t know what it’s like to have a lot of colleagues. I can’t imagine closing my door and having to generate all of these ideas on my own.”

So Clarence helps his students create these networked interactions at every turn. A few years ago, his students collaborated with a classroom in Los Angeles to study S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, using Skype for live conversations and blogs to capture their reflections on both the story and the interactions. More recently, his students studied The Book Thief by Markus Zusak with a class of Ontario students, listening online as their teachers read the book aloud while conducting a chat in the background filled with questions, reflections, and predictions as to what would happen next. Over the years, his students have worked with kids in Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and China, just to name a few.

But here’s the thing. While Clarence may be the conductor of these connections at the outset, most of the networking quickly starts coming from his students. As he was beginning to explore the idea of the “thin walled” classroom back in 2006, he wrote on his blog:

The connections have had very little to do with me. I’ve provided access, direction, and time, but little else. I have not had to make elaborate plans with teachers, nor have I had to coordinate efforts, parceling out contacts and juggling numbers. It is all about the kids. The kids have made contacts. They have begun to find voices that are meaningful to them, and voices they are interested in hearing more from. They are becoming connectors and mavens, drawing together strings of a community. They are beginning to expect to work in this way. They want to know what the people in their network are saying, to hear about their lives and their learning. They want feedback on their own learning, and they want to know they are surrounded by a community who hears them. They make no distinction about class, about race, about proficiency in English, or about geography. They are only interested in the conversation and what it means to them.

That’s a very different picture from what happens in most traditional classrooms, but it captures the essence of what student (and teacher) learning can look like in schools these days. “Thin walls” expand the classroom, and in the process deepen our understanding and practice of all of those “21st Century Skills” that we examined earlier, the critical thinking, the problem solving skills, and the rest. And as students begin to experience the powerful pull of connection to other students and teachers outside of their physical spaces, they also begin to see the world writ large as a part of their daily learning lives. Just as Clarence says that these networks “changed everything for me as a learner” they also change just about everything about our interactions with the kids we teach, the way we think about classrooms, and the way we see the world. Those are big statements, but these shifts are being played out every day in profound ways. And more and more they reflect the real world of learning that our students will graduate into, whether we help them get there or not.

No doubt, all of this has huge implications for us as educators. In fact, even those of us living at the heart of these changes feel some discomfort trying to think through all the ways that the Web challenges the traditional structures of schools and classrooms and learning. But here’s the thing: given these opportunities for connection that the Web now brings us, schools will have to start leveraging the power of these networks. And here are the two game-changing conditions that make that statement hard to deny: right now, if we have access, we now have two billion potential teachers and, soon, the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.

That, in no uncertain terms, is different.

Most schools were built upon the idea that knowledge and teachers are scarce. When you have limited access to information and you want to deliver what you do have to every citizen in an age with little communication technology, you build what schools are today: age-grouped, discipline-separated classrooms run by an expert adult who can manage the successful completion of the curriculum by a hundred or so students at a time. We mete out that knowledge in discrete parts, carefully monitoring students progress through one-size-fits all assessments, deeming them “educated” when they have proven their mastery at, more often than not, getting the right answer and, to a lesser degree, displaying certain skills that show a “literacy” in reading and writing. Most of us know these systems intimately, and for 120 years or so, they’ve pretty much delivered what we’ve asked them to.

But, what happens when knowledge and teachers aren’t scarce? What happens when it becomes exceedingly easy to people and content around the things you want to learn when you want to learn them? What happens when in the next decade or so, almost everyone gains access to these profoundly different learning spaces, filled with teachers and content outside the walls through the devices they carry in their pockets? What happens when we don’t need schools to manage the delivery of content any more, when we can get it on our own, anytime we need it, from anywhere we’re connected, from anyone who might be connected with us?

In a word, things change.

For each of us as learners in the world at large, the fundamental change is that we can be much more in control of the learning we do. It’s not about the next unit in the curriculum as much as it is what we need to know when we need to know it. And it’s not so much even what we carry around in our heads, all of that “just in case” knowledge that schools are so good at making sure students get these days. As Jay Cross, the author of Informal Learning, suggests, in a connected world, it’s more about how much knowledge you can access. “‘What can you do?’ has been replaced with, ‘What can you and your network connections do?’ Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts.” If we have access to our networks, we’re a lot smarter than we used to be. In fact, “connection with others in a network is of prime importance in having access to a wide repository of knowledge,” according to Vance Stevens of the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi. In other words, if we want to make the most of our brains these days, we need to connect online.

What hasn’t changed is this: learning, online or off, is still social, and that’s good news for all of us. If you’re seeing a vision of students sitting in front of computers working through self-paced curricula and interacting with a teacher only on occasion, you’re way, way off. That’s not effective online learning. What is possible, however, is that because of the connections we can now make on the web, there is as much potential (if not more) for meaningful learning to occur in the interactions between people online than in their face to face places. Why? Primarily because online, we can connect to others who share our passions to learn in extended, deeper ways that in many ways can’t occur offline. That’s not to say that face-to-face learning isn’t important or valuable. It is. But so is the learning we can now do on the Web. And it’s the melding of the two that will shape our schools in the 21st century.

Excerpted with permission from R. Mancabelli & W. Richardson (in press), Personal Learning Networks, Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Simplifying Learning Design

2011-02-28T12:51:02+00:00

Guillaume Durand has posted a proposal for a Simple Learning Design 2.0. Simplifying IMS LD is certainly something worth attempting, but there turn out to be different ways to go about it.

Durand comments that "The main idea behind SLD 2.0 was to keep the essence of learning design in a voluntary simplistic specification easily usable as an add-on for IMS-CC 1.0. Several documents are already available."

I think this is a reasonable position to take; the IMS LD specification is extremely complex, hard to implement, and perhaps most problematic, hard for authors and users to understand. Most of the effort in recent years to improve adoption has focussed on improvements to tools supporting the specification, for example with ReCourse and Astro.

However there is only so far you can go with building tools and doing odd spec tweaks (like bolting on support for Widgets into the LD Services element) and so a re-think of IMS LD from the ground up is something worth thinking about.

Looking at Durand's proposal my immediate thought is that his idea of the "essence" of Learning Design is rather different from my own - and in fact he keeps what I would have thrown out, and he throws out some of what I would have kept.

Specifically, Durand has kept the aspects of Learning Design that are concerned with conditional branching. This has always been my least-favourite part of LD for a number of reasons; one of which is that I don't like putting programming logic into XML (<if>x<then>y<else>z<endif>). If you're going to use this sort of logic in an XML document, I think its better to use a scripting language like JavaScript or a functional programming language like Erlang. However, that's a pretty technical reason. The main reasons I would give for this being something to leave out of a simplified Learning Design language are that (a) SCORM already does this and is widely implemented and (b) most examples of simple learning designs don't use this feature, and are fairly linear flows.

This is brought home I think by what Durand has left out, which is grouping. In SLD 2.0, the only "groups" you can have for activities are everyone, and individuals. So as far as I can tell, no small-group activities are supported.

This positions SLD 2.0 much more closely to SCORM than to something like LAMS, which is probably the most popular LD platform. Which makes me wonder whether SLD 2.0 would have been better positioned as additional requirements for SCORM 2.0 rather than a simplification of LD?

So what would I do differently? Well, I think I'd start from somewhere else. I'd recognise that for individual, self-paced, adaptive content the only game in town is SCORM. And I'd take a look at existing implementations, like LAMS. And I'd focus on the things which make LD different from SCORM, which is around group and collaborative activities. And what I'd come up with would be something like this:

<sequence> a set of activities that have to be completed one after another
<choice> a set of activities that users can complete in any order they want
<dissolve> split the participants up to work as individuals
<merge> merge all the participants into one group
<group> split the participants into groups; this can be specified as dynamic, using some heuristics like preferred numbers per group, or with pre-defined groups. The design could specify whether the runtime should assign users randomly, let users select which group to join for themselves, or prompt the moderator to assign the users.
<synchronize> stop progress until everyone has completed the previous sequence or choice.
<wait> stop progress until the moderator decides to go on
<schedule> stop progress until a specified time.

Each of these concepts should seem pretty familiar to LAMS users, although the LAMS file format doesn't really look like this. It also looks an awful lot like a group workflow pattern language.

I think this specification is simpler than IMS LD, but at the same time it has almost no overlap with Durand's proposal. Which just goes to show that IMS LD is not only complex, but you can carve up the space it occupies in many different ways.

(For the activities themselves, they need titles, instructions, resources, and tools, and there are various ways you could specify that which I won't elaborate here.)

Here's an example of how it might look:

<schedule time="2010-05-05:12:00:00Z"/>
<sequence>
	<activity>
		<title>Getting started</title>
		<instructions>Read the briefing</instructions>
		<resource>
			<title>Briefing </title>
			<url>briefing.html</url>
		</resource>
		<content src="briefing.html"/>
	</activity>
</sequence>
<synchronize/>
<dissolve/>
<choice>
	<activity>
		<title>Read the articles</title>
		<instructions>Read each of the resources in this activity</instructions>
		<resource>
			<title>Article 1</title>
			<url>article-1.html</url>
		</resource>
		<resource>
			<title>Article 2</title>
			<url>article-2.html</url>
		</resource>
	</activity>
	<activity>
		<title>Do a quiz</title>
		<assessment src="self-test.xml"/>
	</activity>
</choice>
<group maxGroups="4" selection=":random"/>
<sequence>
	<activity>
		<title>Discuss</title>
		<instructions>Now in your group discuss the articles ...</instructions>
		<tool type="chat"/>
	</activity>
</sequence>
<wait/>
<dissolve/>
<sequence>
	<activity>
		<title>write individual log entry on activity</title>
		<tool type="text editor"/>
	</activity>
</sequence>
<synchronize/>
<merge/>
<sequence>
	<activity>
		<title>Plenary</title>
		<resource>
			<title>Debrief notes</title>
			 <url>debriefing.html</url>
		</resource>
	</activity>
</sequence>

Poincaré's "Mathematical Creation" - via a review by Jim Holt of Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows"

2011-02-27T09:23:21+00:00

I did not enjoy Nicolas Carr's "The Shallows - How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember" (in the US the strapline is the much brasher "What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains".....), which seemed to veer between coherent scientific investigation and journalistic hyperbole.

There is an interesting review of The Shallows in the current issue of the LRB by science writer Jim Holt (who from his self-description comes across as someone who is not exactly an inveterate user of the Web). Holt's review gently and playfully points out several of the weaknesses in Carr's argument.

But this does not mean that Holt is calm about the impact of the Web on thought.

To cut a long story short, Holt argues that the connection between memory and creativity ought to make us wary of the web. What bothers Holt is the way that the Web allows you to avoid internalising facts and concepts, because you can look things up on demand, without needing to learn them, thereby denying your unconscious mind the chance to turn over learned facts and concepts to generate new ideas. This, Holt argues, is the process that is at the heart of creativity, which he illustrates with a short quotation from the French mathematician Henry Poincaré's essay "Mathematical Creation":

Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience’s sake, I verified the result at my leisure.

Digging on the Web led me to the February 2ooo issue of Resonance, an Indian journal of science education, and the whole accessibly written essay by Poincaré.

RDTF metadata guidelines - Limp Data or Linked Data?

2011-02-25T16:51:08+00:00

Having just finished reading thru the 196 comments we received on the draft metadata guidelines for the UK RDTF I'm now in the process of wondering where we go next. We (Pete and I) have relatively little effort to take this work forward (a little less than 5 days to be precise) so it's not clear to me how best we use that effort to get something useful out for both RDTF and the wider community.

By the way... many thanks to everyone who took the time to comment. There are some great contributions and, if nothing else, the combination of the draft and the comments form a useful snapshot of the current state of issues around library, museum and archival metadata in the context of the web.

Here's my brief take on what the comments are saying...

Firstly, there were several comments asking about the target audience for the guidelines and whether, as written, they will be meaningful to... well... anyone I guess! It's worth pointing out that my understanding is that any guidelines we come up with thru the current process will be taken forward as part of other RDTF work. What that means is that the guidelines will get massaged into a form (or forms) that are digestable by the target audience (or audiences), as determined by other players with the RDTF activity. What we have been tasked with are the guidelines themselves - not how they are presented. We perhaps should have made this clearer in the draft guidelines. In short, I don't think the document, as written, will be put directly in-front of anyone who doesn't go to the trouble of searching it out explicitly.

Secondly, there were quite a number of detailed comments on particular data formats, data models, vocabularies and so on. This is great and I'm hopeful that as a result we can either extend the list of examples given at various points in the guidelines (or, in some cases, drop back to not having examples but simply say, "do whatever is the emerging norm here in your community").

Thirdly, the were some concerns about what we meant by "open". As we tried to point out in the draft, we do not consider this to be our problem - it is for other activity in RDTF to try and work out what "open" means - we just felt the need to give that word a concrete definition, so that people could understand where we were coming from for the purposes of these guidelines.

Finally, there were some bigger concerns - these are the things that are taxing me right now - that broadly fell into two, related, camps. Firstly, that the step between the community formats approach and the RDF data approach is too large (though no-one really suggested what might go in the middle). And secondly, that we are missing a trick by not encouraging the assignment of 'http' URIs to resources as part of the community formats approach.

As it stands, we have, on the one hand, what one might call Limp Data (MARC records, XML files, CVS, EAD and the rest) and, on the other, Linked Data and all that entails, with a rather odd middle ground that we are calling RDF data (in the current guidelines).

I was half hoping that someone would simply suggest collapsing our RDF data and Linked Data approaches into one - on the basis that separating them into two is somewhat confusing (but as far as I can tell no-one did... OK, I'm doing it now!). That would leave a two-pronged approach - community formats and Linked Data - to which we could add a 'community formats with http URIs' middle ground. My gut feel is that there is some attraction in such an approach but I'm not sure how feasible it is given the characteristics of many existing community formats.

As part of his commentary around encouraging http URIs (building a 'better web' was how he phrased it), Owen Stephens suggested that every resource should have a corresponding web page. I don't disagree with this... well, hang on... actually I do (at least in part)! One of the problems faced by this work is the fundamental difference between the library world and museums and archives. The former is primarily dealing with non-unique resources (at the item level), the latter with unique resources. (I know that I'm simplifying things here but bear with me). Do I think that resource discovery will be improved if every academic library in the UK (or indeed in the world) creates an http URI for every book they hold at which they serve a human-readable copy of their catalogue record? No, I don't. If the JISC and RLUK really want to improve web-scale resource discovery of books in the library sector, they would be better off spending their money encouraging libraries to sign up to OCLC WorldCat and contributing their records there. (I'm guessing that this isn't a particular popular viewpoint in the UK - at least, I'm not sure that I've ever heard anyone else suggest it - but it seems to me that WorldCat represents a valuable shared service approach that will, in practice, be hard to beat in other ways.) Doing this would both improve resource discovery (e.g. thru Google) and provide a workable 'appropriate copy' solution (for books). Clearly, doing this wouldn't help build a more unified approach across the GLAM domains but, as at least one commenter pointed out, it's not clear that the current guidelines do either. Note: I do agree with Owen that every unique museum and archival resource should have an http URI and a web page.

All of which, as I say, leaves us with a headache in terms of how we take these guidelines forward. Ah well... such is life I guess.

Dylan Wiliam - Formativeness as a potential property of an assessment

2011-02-25T15:36:46+00:00

I heard "inside the black box" Dylan Wiliam speak at an LSIS event today for the current cohort of Research Development Fellows. Wiliam was fascinating as always. For example here is his definition of formative, which he sees as a property of (some, and only some) assessments:

"An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement elicited by the assessment is interpreted and used to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions that would have been taken in the absence of that evidence."

CAS’ifying WordPress 3.1

2011-02-24T18:11:26+00:00

http://solr.bccampus.ca/wiki/index.php/CASify_WPMU_3.1

Still on hiatus from social media (and really enjoying the general silence and calmness that’s brought me) but did want to share this in case it helps anyone else out. As part of hosting the new BC Ed Tech User’s Group site, now powered by WordPress/Buddypress, we hooked the user accounts up to the BCcampus Central Authentication Server. Not only will this allow single sign-on for the ETUG users to other BCcampus resources, but more importantly, as we role out Shibboleth with our partner schools (the first one with SFU to go live in a few weeks) it will mean that users can access the community with their existing institutional accounts.

We were greatly assisted by the existence of the wpCAS plugin and the phpCAS library, as well as the work by Steve Hannah at SFU to do account provisioning in an early version of WordPress.

But as is usually the case, it was not simple “plug and play” and we needed to re-write some of this to work in our environment and against the new WordPress 3.1. The wiki page documents this work, the lion’s share of which was done by my colleague Victor Chen, and is free to reuse, modify, etc. – SWL

Transfer Summit: Open Innovation-Development-Collaboration

2011-02-23T13:51:33+00:00

Last week I attended TransferSummit, a conference organised by OSSWatch aimed at open innovation and collaboration between academia and the private sector.

I gave two talks at the event, and these were based around our experience at moving the outcomes of an EU-funded research project into the Apache Software Foundation, and in engaging with commercial partners.

The first was on barriers to community and focussed on areas such as governance, diversity and personal barriers to engaging in an Open Source development community, and how as a member of such a community you can make a contribution. Noirin Shirley, who gave another talk on a similar topic, made the useful suggestion of being a "greeter" for a project so that everyone who posts on a project mailing list gets a friendly response straight away.

The second talk was on dissemination beyond academic circles. This was a case study of the transfer of our work from a closed research project into an open project in the ASF incubator (Apache Wookie (Incubating)), looking at the process and business case. For us this move has proven to be extremely successful, and the value generated through adopting a fully-open development approach rather than the"open source, closed community" more typical of research projects has been far greater than the sum of our investment. While not every project can be as successful as this, hopefully it will at least help making the case easier for others.

Of course I didn't just go to do some talks! There were lots of sessions and two very interesting keynotes. I don't normally enjoy keynotes, but these were sufficiently different to be of interest. Steven Pemberton provided a historical perspective on open innovation before delving into what he sees as the key challenge facing open source: usability. Roland Harwood's keynote provided some very interesting case studies of open innovation, with examples including applying F1 logistics technology to hospital waiting lists, and Virgin Atlantic sourcing innovations from an online community of frequent flyers.

Other sessions I attended look at open innovation between business and academic teams, FOSS business models, the CodePlex Foundation (not .com!), open source innovation, community, knowledge transfer partnerships... its going to take me quite a while to let it all settle and figure out which of the things I learned about I can apply next.

Overall the "Open Innovation" message came through loud and clear, as did the clear willingness of both academic and commercial organisations to work together on this basis.

In my own mind I'm seeing "Open Innovation" as a methodology that can both support and be supported by the other "Open" agendas that the CETIS, OSSWatch and UKOLN innovation support centres have been pushing for some years now - Open Source, Open Standards, Open Content, Open Data - each of which also build upon and sustain each other.

The combination of these factors enables companies and universities to unlock innovation that generates far greater value than could be created by any one of them alone, or even by a more traditional "closed" partnership. The challenge ahead is to remove any remaining barriers to openness and collaboration, and to unlock the potential for open innovation involving universities and innovative companies; I think the event last week was an excellent start.

Erewhon: Mobile and location-based services in Oxford

2011-02-22T18:15:34+00:00

This article is part of a series of brief reviews of recent projects I've been asked to write by JISC.

Overview

The Erewhon project at the University of Oxford investigated the areas of mobile applications, web services and institutional geo-spatial data. The key areas where there were innovation outcomes are in (1) an open-source framework for institutional mobile applications, (2) an open-source solution for managing institutional geo-spatial data, (3) the data set that was collected, and (4) advice to institutions on developing services, managing open data, and identifying a mobile strategy. The advice they've produced seems pretty sound, so I'll concentrate on the other items for this review.

Molly

Molly is an open-source framework developed by the project for exposing institutional web services as mobile web applications. Essentially it is a specialised web framework with mobile-friendly widget-style HTML templates for common campus applications (e.g. library search, maps) backed by connectors for taking data from web services at the institution.

The idea of mobile applications backed by web services is certainly not novel, nor the idea of mobile applications backed by geo-spatial data (these were some of the first mobile applications on on the iPhone platform, for example). Nor is the case for developing mobile applications for universities a new idea; many institutions have been developing mobile applications, either as bespoke in house development (e.g. TVU, Coventry and Northumbria ) or in partnership with specialist companies (e.g. Duke Apps). JISC has also funded other projects to develop mobile applications, for example MyMobile Bristol.

At around the same time as the project was underway, several commercial offerings were developed that also enabled institutions to offer mobile applications connected to their institutional data, so the overall technical model is not itself an innovation - for example the CampusM platform operates in a similar manner, although in this case it offers native mobile applications (e.g. iPhone apps) rather than mobile web applications (see this article on ReadWriteWeb for a brief discussion of native applications on mobile versus web applications targeting mobile browsers).

There are also other offerings based on particular institutional systems, such as Blackboard Mobile Central and Moodle Touch. Molly itself provides connectors for the Sakai VLE.

It is likely that MIS vendors will follow suit and offer suites of mobile applications for their platforms. For example, Sungard is offering a range of mobile applications for its public-sector MIS applications.

It is also worth noting that the MIT Mobile Web framework, a very similar open-source mobile framework emerged at around the same time as the Molly project; from which the Mobile Web OSP community open source project has been developed.

So the key innovation here is not the application itself, but its position as a UK-oriented community open source project as a sustainable alternative to both commercial products and also bespoke development by individual institutions.

This is a strategic intervention, and relies on the adoption of Molly by other institutions to share the costs of developing and maintaining mobile applications and contribute to the sustainability of the Molly project itself. The team have made a good start by taking a community-oriented approach, and have two production implementations (University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes).

The key challenges are promoting an open-source community alternative when vendors will be aggressively pushing their own solutions, and to attract more users and developers to sustain the project. Oxford has good support in place for this type of project, the project team have already been working with OSSWatch, and Oxford have their own deployment of Molly they will want to maintain; all of these are good indicators for sustainability for the near term.

To aid in monitoring progress by Molly I used Ohloh code analysis and this shows that while development is ongoing, there are still a very small number of active contributors. Molly really needs to work hard on engaging a more diverse community of core developers to reduce the dependency of the project on institutional support at Oxford in the longer term.

For the JISC - the funders of this project - the main action points to take forward would be for its advisory services to point institutions looking to develop mobile web applications to the Molly project to consider it as an option, and to consider carefully whether new project proposals involving mobile applications should be encouraged to contribute to the sustainability of Molly in preference to either bespoke development or adopting commercial solutions.

Gaboto

Gaboto is a system for managing geo-spatial data; it emerged from a need identified by the Erewhon project to store and make available geo-spatial data for its mobile applications. In particular a need to tag locations of institutional buildings and resources and to describe connections between locations and resources. The team had already evaluated a number of existing GIS systems and found them unsuitable.

The Gaboto system is now described as follows:

"Gaboto maps first class java objects onto RDF. By this it introduces a layer on top of RDF giving you RDF's flexibility in storing objects, their properties and the relationships between objects while preserving the full power of java objects."

So Gaboto is positioned as a more generic piece of Semantic Web middleware for Java applications rather than by its initial implementation as geo-spatial storage - this may improve its prospects for uptake elsewhere. However there are a large number of Semantic Web frameworks and tools that do approximately the same job: for example Jena, Elmo and Sommer. Gaboto seems positioned as a Java-RDF mapping framework on top of Jena, quite similar to Elmo and Sommer, with some pre-defined ontologies for geo-spatial and temporal data.

A good overview of the problem space that Gaboto addresses can be found here.

Clearly the Erewhon team felt that existing solutions in this space had some drawbacks for them; however its not terribly clear what the advantages may be for other organisations with a similar requirement. The unique proposition of Gaboto seems less to be the framework itself so much as components developed for it that serialize data in a range of geo-spatial formats such as KML.

Overall I think Gaboto is more of a point solution for the project to get over a particular problem rather than something innovative in itself; other institutions may find it a good approach for holding and serving geo-spatial data, but there are other options available. Gaboto is also not an out-of-the-box solution, but rather a toolkit that can be used by Java and RDF-savvy developers to create their own solution to similar problems.

Modelling institutional spaces and resources

In terms of innovation, I think what Oxford have done here that is new is to undergo the process of mapping buildings and other resources (including wireless access points and car parks), and linking the descriptions of these resources together into a coherent model (for example, to describe sites as well as individual buildings). This model is then used to drive applications using Gaboto as the framework to deliver the data to applications. The data is exposed for use in a variety of formats which can be found from the Oxpoints website.

This type of semantic location modelling is something which has been described quite well in research literature (for example, see Roth, 2005; and Kalamatsos et al. 2009) and there is a current EU FP7 project which seems to explore similar principles (see MUGGES). However there no other live, practical examples of implementing this approach in the HE sector that I'm aware of which is what makes this work innovative. It will be interesting to see what kinds of services the Oxpoints team can support with this data, and whether the benefits of those services will be sufficient to encourage other institutions to undertake similar exercises with their own resources.

As with open linked data generally, the benefits are only made visible in the applications that make use of it, but I think there is a lot of potential future innovation to be developed using the dataset.

References

Kolomvatsos, Kostas and Papataxiarhis, Vassilis and Tsetsos, Vassileios (2009). Semantic Location Based Services for Smart Spaces. In Metadata and Semantics. Sicilia Miguel-Angel and Lytras, Miltiadis D.(eds.), Springer US.

Roth, Jorg. (2005) The Role of Semantic Locations for Mobile Information Access. Mobiles Informationsmanagement und seine Anwendungen, Sept. 22, 2005, Bonn, Proceedings of the 35th annual GI conference, Vol. 2, 538-542

UCISA cloud computing event

2011-02-22T16:50:24+00:00

I attended UCISA's Cloud Computing Seminar last week, a pretty good event overall though, like many 'cloud' events, there was quite a mix of IaaS (e.g. Amazon Web Services (AWS)) and SaaS (e.g. Google Apps) presentations so it sometimes felt like the programme was jumping around a bit. There is no doubt that the 'cloud' is generating a lot of interest at the moment, which is gratifying since it is also the topic of our annual Eduserv Symposium this year (May 12th in London).

Phil Richards, of Loughborough, talked about their partnership with Logicalis, building what he called a 'hybrid cloud' comprising both an on-campus virtualisation infrastructure and some in-the-cloud burst capacity (based on Logicalis' Cooperative Cloud Service). He seemed to make the point that research and teaching, being two of the key differentiators between universities, are inappropriate for outsourcing to the cloud. Well, yes, I tend to agree - but that doesn't mean that the compute infrastructure on which those things are built can't be outsourced? With the exception of some very specialised cases, I doubt that many people choose their place of research or learning based on the size of its data centre?

And, as David Wallom of OeRC pointed out in his talk about the FleSSR project, outsourcing to cloud infrastructure is already happening, albeit in a rather ad hoc and bottom-up way. He suggested that most institutions (certainly research intensive institutions) will probably have around 200-300 researchers that are already using AWS (or equivalent) for some aspects of their research. So, for at least some researchers, the decision to use cloud infrastructure has already been taken, often on the back of a personal credit card! The problem for universities is that it is happening in an unmanaged (and in some senses unmanagable) way.

Given the announcement of UMF funding a couple of weeks ago, which includes a pilot "virtual server infrastructure (a 'cloud')" hosted by us, and given our involvement in the FleSSR project, we now fall rather squarely into the camp of those people thinking about building shared 'cloud' infrastructure services for the education sector. Understanding both the needs of those individual researchers who are currently choosing to go to Amazon and those of university IT Services who likely have more strategic 'virtualisation' issues in mind brings, I suspect, some interesting tensions, not least around business models (which was the topic of Matt Johnson's talk), pricing models and, ultimately, sustainability.

Interestingly, JANET's new role as a broker for the "procurement of shared virtual servers and data centre capacity" (as part of the UMF funding announcement) got positive support on a couple of occassions during the day, with the speakers from UCD saying that they'd like to see a similar service being set up in Ireland.

So-called 'cloud bursting' was also refered to several times during the day as being an attractive option. This approach, like that adopted by Loughborough, retains virtualisation/compute and storage capacity in-house but uses the cloud to meet demand when it exceeds local capacity ('bursting'). This is also the architectural approach being investigated by the FleSSR project. What is not clear to me, when we view the UK HE community as a whole, is the extent to which this kind of approach is able to achieve such significant overall cost savings when compared to a more whole-hearted 'push everything out to a shared cloud provider' model, nor the ease with which such cloud-bursting services can become sustainable.

From our perspective, the issues around business models, costing and sustainability are taxing our minds at least as much as the nuts and bolts of building the infrastructure as we consider the future of both FleSSR and our UMF pilot. More anon...

Statistical literacy - ARTIST - a resources site

2011-02-22T13:56:47+00:00

ARTIST - "Our goal is to help teachers assess statistical literacy, statistical reasoning, and statistical thinking in first courses of statistics. This Web site provides a variety of assessment resources for teaching first courses in Statistics."

Peer Instruction in the Humanities and Arts a resource from Monash University

2011-02-21T06:43:49+00:00

The diagram below is from an area of the Monash University Philosophy Department's web pages devoted to peer instruction in the humanities, mostly dated 2008.

For more on Eric Mazur's peer instruction, go to Data is not the plural of anecdote, this two-minute overview, or the Mazur Group web site. Or read the book.

Source

Crazy Days

2011-02-19T17:55:53+00:00

Meant to post this yesterday, but didn’t get time. I think the headlines tell the tale around education right now.

MICHIGAN

NEW JERSEY

WISCONSIN

CONNECTICUT

I didn’t even get to look at Texas…

These are some crazy days, and I fear we haven’t even seen the half of it. And I wonder a couple of things. What will it take for people to figure out that the disruption here is far greater than budgets and unions which are right now the easy scapegoats in the reform message? And, if we keep going down this road to oblivion, what rises from the ashes?

“Online Learning” Isn’t “Learning Online”

2011-02-16T13:08:36+00:00

(Cross posted to the Powerful Learning Practice blog.)

So what does the following list suggest to you about the value of “online learning”:

1. I can work ahead if I’m able to
2. I get nearly instant responses from my teachers
3. I get personalized support when I need it
4. My teachers are just as excited about online learning as I am
5. I can do all my math for the week on one day if I want to
6. I know how I’m doing, my grades are right on the screen
7. My parents can see my work and grades
8. My courses are more challenging
9. I can keep up with my work when my family travels
10. I can work around a busy schedule

Those are the “benefits” touted by a group of Utah sophomores in this Huffington Post piece by Tom Vander Ark, ones that apparently impressed senators, representatives and school board members. I’m not as impressed.

Sure, taking a course online may offer more individuation and student choice in how to manage the process, but at the end of the day, I wonder what those online students have learned more or better than the ones who took the course in a classroom. And if we’re touting the online experience has superior because kids can take trips and still do the work or because their teachers are excited, that speaks to bigger, more fundamental issues that aren’t being addressed. This is still all about content delivery, old wine in a new bottle that’s being motivated more by economics and convenience than good or better design. And it’s about, as I mentioned yesterday, a growing business interest that sees an opportunity to make inroads into education as “approved providers.” Hmmmm.

Learning online is not about finishing the course requirements a few days early or answering the questions that the text or the teacher dictate. It’s about finding our own path through the material. As I asked in a comment on the post, do students practice inquiry in these settings? Are they able to ask their own questions? Are they assessed any differently? Do they create any new knowledge in the process and, if so, is that knowledge shared anywhere? Does their experience in the course replicate real life in any new way? Does it teach them how to learn on their own? To go deep? Not that any of that shouldn’t be taking place in face to face classrooms as well, but if you’re going to suggest something as different…

My point is that if this vision of online learning is being touted as reform, why? What’s really different here? Obviously, I’m a big believer in the value of online networks and communities to support lifelong and lifewide learning. The work that Sheryl and I and our amazing colleagues have been doing with PLP attests to fact that there is another way to learn online aside from digitizing a curriculum. We have goals and outcomes for our participants, but we don’t say to them “here is the path, work ahead if you like, and your grades will be posted online.” We let them find their own way, supporting and prodding as needed, trying to keep them moving in the general direction of shift. With any luck, they experience the change in their own way, on their own terms.

Not saying there isn’t any value to offering classes online. But if we do, let’s make sure they take advantage of the online piece to let participants develop the connections that will sustain them far beyond the class. Or, if not, let’s call it what it is…online coursework, not learning.

The Urgency for Change

2011-02-15T13:36:18+00:00

I feel like I should do some fun tool blogging or great classroom blogging or something before heading down the depressing road of writing more about change in schools, but I guess I can’t help myself. Especially after taking pictures like the one at right at a school I visited a couple of weeks ago and after reading quotes like this one:

“Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.”

That’s Stan Karp of the New Jersey Education Law Center lamenting the cuts and “reforms” here in my great state and elsewhere in a blog post in the Washington Post. (If you want to see a video of Karp giving basically the same riff on the topic, check out his YouTube video and there is a transcript here.) It’s a really powerful exploration of the current conversation around change and the many problems surrounding it.

The critical point to me, however, is this: all of this orchestrated bashing of teachers and schools is opening the door for folks outside of education to come in and “save the day” Superman style, a fact that, as Karp suggests, could undermine the whole democratic ideal that we built schools upon. You can catch whiffs of it everywhere, when people say that “competition” is what will save education, to the “approved providers” the Jeb Bush and his Excellence for Education crew are promoting in their reforms to the growing number of personalized and customized tutoring programs that are cropping up all over the place. It may not be on a lot of folks’ radar at the moment, but rest assured, we’re going to see more and more corporate attempts to not just provide content (as they’ve done forever with textbooks) but, increasingly, to provide instruction as well. And, as Karp suggests in the quote above, that reality will surely make worse the already growing educational divide for our kids.

There is no question that businesses will play a part in the “reforms” or “transforms” that we so often talk about in this community. And there is also no question that we need to promote a different vision for what teaching and learning look like. But there is a big difference between the vision we have for students having equitable, thoughtful access to technology and teachers as opposed to the vision where only a few do. I’ll once again quote Allan Collins and Richard Halverson:

For education to embrace both equity and economic development, we believe that our leaders will have to stretch the traditional practices to embrace the capacity of new information technologies. This will require schools to forfeit some control over the learning processes, but will once again put the latest tools for improving learning in the hands of public institutions (as opposed to the hands of families and learners who can afford access.) (145)

As schools, we are going to have to “forfeit some control,” as we well should as the learning opportunities outside the classroom become more ubiquitous and effective. But we have to make sure that those opportunities are equitable and open as much as we can. That’s the real urgency of the debate right now, how do we use these new (and old) technologies to lift everyone up instead of just a few.

Hiatus

2011-01-31T18:11:56+00:00

I post infrequently enough that I probably don’t even need to tell anyone edtechpost is going on hiatus, but there it is. Not sure if it will be back. Not looking for sympathy or comments. Mostly just feel done with all of this.

Hello world!

2011-01-15T23:41:28+00:00

Welcome to Scott Leslie Sites. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Some Resources on How To Meditate

2011-01-11T01:11:40+00:00

I just got a DM in twitter from someone asking me for pointers to some resources on how to meditate, and thought I’d post my reply here in case these were of any help to others.

First off, to be clear, I am offering these not as any great expert but simply as things I have used in the past that I’ve found helpful. As they say Your Mileage May Very. Second, there are many, many different forms of meditation, traditions and rituals. I do not intended to go into those details. I sit with a Buddhist Sangha (community of practitioners) that practices in the “Plum Village Tradition” developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, but also have sat in the Vispassana and Zen traditions. It’s all good. I tend to not be overly dogmatic about these things, trying to find what works for me ,but I expect there are many more experienced practitioners who would chastise me for this as being lazy.

In any case, for some very brief reading you could try

One of the ways I got started was by listening to guided meditations. Two of the collections I like are

BuddhaNet Audio (especially the ones from Malcolm Huxter)
Audio Dharma (I like some of the Gil Fronsdal ones quite a lot)

I guess the biggest pieces of advice I would have are

Don’t give up. I use the phrase “Firm but Gentle” to describe the attitude I need to have towards my practice and myself – I need to be firm in my resolution to keep practicing, but gentle both in my practice and with myself when my mind wanders or when I find a few days have passed without sitting.
Let go of expectations – don’t expect a flash of lightning or a dramatic transformation to overtake you. That is not what it’s about, in my experience. But if you are consistent in sitting, starting with maybe 15 minutes a day and expanding as you go, you will start to notice subtle changes and benefits from cultivating mindfulness. But don’t even attach to those! Just sit.
Find a sangha or others to practice with. This can take some time, and don’t worry if at first you don’t find one that jibes with you. Eventually you will, and it feels wonderful once you do, to simply sit with others.

That’s it. I’m happy to talk to anyone who has questions but I’m really no expert, just someone also trying to find his way along the path. – SWL

Cool Hand Luke in 5 Animated Gifs

2010-12-14T20:05:47+00:00

I don’t do MOOCs. I am not a big joiner to begin with. But heck if the proposed assignments for Jim’s upcoming Digital Storytelling 106 didn’t sound like fun. So much fun that I had to do one myself, actually combine 2 of the assignments into one, using my favourite movie of all time, Cool Hand Luke. Predictable, probably, but I can watch this film over and over again. So, without further ado, here’s “Cool Hand Luke in 5 Animated Gifs”:

All I can say is – you know you have an amazing course when non-participants are submitting assignments, for fun! And one thing we definitely don’t have here is a failure to communicate – SWL