{"id":1199,"date":"2011-04-18T14:37:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-18T13:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2011\/04\/opening-data-opening-doors\/"},"modified":"2011-04-18T14:59:19","modified_gmt":"2011-04-18T13:59:19","slug":"opening-data-opening-doors-technical-standards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2011\/04\/opening-data-opening-doors-technical-standards\/","title":{"rendered":"Opening Data &#8211; Opening Doors: Technical Standards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some slightly sketchy notes of Paul Walk&#8217;s talk<\/p>\n<p>Paul says: the real challenges are around:<br \/>\nBusiness case<br \/>\nIPR<br \/>\netc.<\/p>\n<p>Technical issues not trivial, but insignificant compared to other challenges<\/p>\n<p>We aren&#8217;t building a system here &#8211; but thinking about an environment &#8230; although probably will need to build systems on top of this at some point<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;The purple triangle of interoperability&#8217;!:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: disc\">\n<li>Shared Principles<\/li>\n<li>Technical Standards<\/li>\n<li>Community\/Domain Conventions<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Standards are not the whole story<\/p>\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: disc\">\n<li>Use (open) technical standards<\/li>\n<li>Require standards only where necessary<\/li>\n<li>Avoid pushing standards to create adoption<\/li>\n<li>Establish and understand high-level principles and &#8216;explain the working out&#8217; &#8211; support deeper understanding<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Paul suggests some &#8216;safe bets&#8217; in terms of approaches\/principles:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: disc\">\n<li>Use Resource Oriented Architecture<\/li>\n<li>identify persistently &#8211; global and public identities to your high-order entities (e.g. metadata records, actual resources)\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: hyphen\">\n<li>URLs (or http URIs) is a sensible default for us (although not the only game in town)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>use HTTP and REST<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Aggregation is a corner-stone of RDTF vision &#8211; so make your resources a target for aggregation:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: disc\">\n<li>use persistent identifiers for everything<\/li>\n<li>adopt appropriate licensing<\/li>\n<li>&#8216;Share alike&#8217; maybe easier than &#8216;attribution&#8217;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Paul still a little sceptical of &#8216;Linked Data&#8217; &#8211; it&#8217;s been the future for a long time. Tools for Linked Data still not good enough &#8211; can be real challenge for developers. However, we should be a<br \/>\nQuote Tom Coates: &#8220;Build for normal users, developers and machines&#8221; &#8211; and if possible, build the same interface for all three [hint, a simple dump of RDF data isn&#8217;t going to achieve this!]<\/p>\n<p>Expect and enable users to filter &#8211; give them &#8216;feeds&#8217; (e.g. RSS\/Atom) &#8211; concentrate on making your resources available<\/p>\n<p>Paul sees slight risk we embrace &#8216;open at the expense of &#8216;usability&#8217; &#8211; being open is an important first step &#8211; but need to invest in making things useful and usable<\/p>\n<p>Developer friendly formats:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: disc\">\n<li>XML has a lot going for it, but also quite a few issues\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: hyphen\">\n<li>well understood<\/li>\n<li>lots of tools available<\/li>\n<li>validation is a pain<\/li>\n<li>very verbose<\/li>\n<li>not everything is a tree<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>JSON has gained rapid adoption\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: hyphen\">\n<li>less verbose &#8211; simple<\/li>\n<li>enables client side manipulation<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Character encodings &#8211; huge number of XML records from UK IRs are invalid do to character encoding issues<\/p>\n<p>Technical Foundations:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"list-style-type: disc\">\n<li>Work going on now &#8211; Will be a website ETA June 2011<\/li>\n<li>JISC Observatory will gather evidence of &#8216;good use&#8217; of technical standards etc<\/li>\n<li>Need to understand federated aggregation better<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Questions for data providers:<strong>Do you want to provide a data service, or just provide data?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some slightly sketchy notes of Paul Walk&#8217;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&#8217;t building a system here &#8211; but thinking about an environment &#8230; although probably will need to build systems on top of this at some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1200,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions\/1200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}