Some slightly sketchy notes of Paul Walk’s talk

Paul says: the real challenges are around:
Business case
IPR
etc.

Technical issues not trivial, but insignificant compared to other challenges

We aren’t building a system here – but thinking about an environment … although probably will need to build systems on top of this at some point

‘The purple triangle of interoperability’!:

• Shared Principles
• Technical Standards
• Community/Domain Conventions

Standards are not the whole story

• Use (open) technical standards
• Require standards only where necessary
• Avoid pushing standards to create adoption
• Establish and understand high-level principles and ‘explain the working out’ – support deeper understanding

Paul suggests some ‘safe bets’ in terms of approaches/principles:

• Use Resource Oriented Architecture
• identify persistently – global and public identities to your high-order entities (e.g. metadata records, actual resources)
  • URLs (or http URIs) is a sensible default for us (although not the only game in town)
• use HTTP and REST

Aggregation is a corner-stone of RDTF vision – so make your resources a target for aggregation:

• use persistent identifiers for everything
• adopt appropriate licensing
• ‘Share alike’ maybe easier than ‘attribution’

Paul still a little sceptical of ‘Linked Data’ – it’s been the future for a long time. Tools for Linked Data still not good enough – can be real challenge for developers. However, we should be a
Quote Tom Coates: “Build for normal users, developers and machines” – and if possible, build the same interface for all three [hint, a simple dump of RDF data isn’t going to achieve this!]

Expect and enable users to filter – give them ‘feeds’ (e.g. RSS/Atom) – concentrate on making your resources available

Paul sees slight risk we embrace ‘open at the expense of ‘usability’ – being open is an important first step – but need to invest in making things useful and usable

Developer friendly formats:

• XML has a lot going for it, but also quite a few issues
  • well understood
  • lots of tools available
  • validation is a pain
  • very verbose
  • not everything is a tree
• JSON has gained rapid adoption
  • less verbose – simple
  • enables client side manipulation

Character encodings – huge number of XML records from UK IRs are invalid do to character encoding issues

Technical Foundations:

• Work going on now – Will be a website ETA June 2011
• JISC Observatory will gather evidence of ‘good use’ of technical standards etc
• Need to understand federated aggregation better

Questions for data providers:Do you want to provide a data service, or just provide data?