Transcript Ideology Or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites Author & Presenter Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath Co-Authors Marieke Guy, UKOLN Alastair Dunning, AHDS Lawrie Phipps, TechDis Email: [email protected] URL:

Ideology Or Pragmatism?
Open Standards And Cultural
Heritage Web Sites
Author & Presenter
Brian Kelly
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
Co-Authors
Marieke Guy, UKOLN
Alastair Dunning, AHDS
Lawrie Phipps, TechDis
Email: [email protected]
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/>
UKOLN is supported by:
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Contents
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Background
Why Use Standards?
What Are Open Standards?
Surveying Our Communities
The Difficulties With Open Standards
An Open Standards Culture
The QA Focus Project
Conclusions
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Background
Cultural heritage digitisation programmes normally
insist on use of open standards
But it would appear that there is little policing of
compliance with open standards
Many argue for more rigourous policing
But issues are not always clear-cut:
• Uncertainty of the meaning of open standards
• Immaturity of standards
• Lack of support from tools
• Flexibility of marketplace solutions
• Costs
This paper seeks to address these challenges and
provide
an achievable
approach
A centre of expertise
in digital information
management
Examples
JISC & UK HE Digital Library Programmes
• Standards document produced for eLib
programme (1994) and updated to support recent
digital library programmes
The NOF-digitise Programme
• Standards document written to support the NOFdigitise programme for providing access to UK
cultural heritage resources
UK e-Government
• Standards framework developed to support eGovernment work within central and local
government
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Why Use Standards?
In many digital library programmes there has been a
philosophy based on use of open standards to:
• Avoid application lock-in and platform dependencies
• Minimise migration costs
• Provide long-term access to scholarly resources
But in eLib programme (~1994-2000):
• Little policing of compliance with open standards
• Adoption of "let a thousand flowers bloom"
This approach:
• Probably sensible approach in mid-1990s (Gopher?)
• Not desirable now:
 Web is the killer application; XML is killer format
 Need to maximise access; support M2M apps; ...
 Need to protect investment from public funding
A centre of expertise in digital information management
What Are Open Standards?
But what are Standards and Open Standards?
Do Adobe PDF format and Sun's Java language count?
Can we agree on the following characteristics:
• Standard ratified by recognised neutral standards
body.
• An open standards-making process.
• Documentation is freely available on the Web.
• Use of the standard is uninhibited by licensing or
patenting issues.
Note that not all open standards bodies will comply with all of these
features. The standards-making process within the W3C, for example, is
initially restricted to organisations which are members of the W3C and a
small number
ofexpertise
invitedin experts.
A centre of
digital information management
A Spectrum For Standards
If we have defined open standards do we treat
everything else (proprietary formats) equally bad? (And
how should we regard PowerPoint users!)
A Spectrum For Ownership:
• Is there a community process for standard
development?
• Has the standard has been published openly
• Has the standard been reverse-engineered
Java:
Owned by Sun (open standardisation attempts aborted by Sun).
However Community Process for development to language.
PDF: Owned by Adobe. However specification has been published.
Word: AOwned
by Microsoft.
Specification
has been reverse engineered.
centre of expertise
in digital information
management
Surveying Our Communities
Various surveys of Web sites have been carried out in
order to monitor compliance with standards:
Survey Of W3C Member Organisations
• The majority of W3C member home pages do not
pass the W3C's test for compliance with W3C
recommendations (Survey in Feb 2003)
• See <http://news.com.com/2100-1032-985941.html>
Survey Of Digital Library Programme Project Web
Sites
• A survey of 50+ home pages for JISC's 5/99
programme was carried out in Oct 2002
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Surveying Our Communities
Initial set of findings available from
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/surveys/web-10-2002/>
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Difficulties With Open Standards
Why do bodies which seek to use open
standards experience such difficulties?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Lack of awareness of importance of standards
Difficulties in implementing standards
Difficulties in checking compliance
Immaturity of the standards
Limitations of the standards
Lack of support from tools
…
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Can We Trust The Standards Guys?
RSS
• A light-weight syndication standard?
• Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary or Real
Simple Syndication?
• XML or RDF?
XHTML 2.0
• Two years ago XHTML 1.0 was promoted by W3C
as the killer format: an XML application which was
backwards compatible with browsers and similar
to HTML
• Now W3C have acknowledged the problems will
XHTML 1.0 and are promoting XHTML 2.0 as the
answer
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Standards Or Guidelines
W3C WAI
• Are W3C's Web Accessibility guidelines
guidelines (which help to inform us on best
practices) or standards which we must implement
(with accompanying legal threat)
• How relevant are the guidelines to (say) elearning resources (in which we may wish to
make the answer difficult to find?)
• Is universal design a realistic goal?
A centre of expertise in digital information management
What Do We Do?
What approaches should we be taking?
Surrender To The Proprietary World
• Should we allow our cultural heritage resources to
be developed in proprietary formats?
Stronger Promotion/Enforcement Of
Standards?
• Groups such as W3C's QA activity and the Web
Standards projects, … feel we should be
promoting standards-compliance work more
forcefully
• But such bodies seem to be very single-minded
and ignore complexities of the real world
A centre of expertise in digital information management
An Open Standards Culture
There is a third way!
The development of an open standards culture:
• Promote the benefits of open standards
• Promote exemplars showing best practices in use
of open standards
But:
• Recognise difficulties of compliance
• Recognise challenges of resourcing, technical
expertise, …
A centre of expertise in digital information management
QA Focus
JISC has funded QA Focus project to:
• Support its Information Environment digital library
programmes
• Develop a QA (quality assurance) methodology
which can be applied to future programmes
QA Focus takes a developmental approach:
• Explains reasons for standards & best practices
• Provides lightweight methodology for supporting
use of standards and best practices
• Encourages community to share its approaches
• Seeks to encourages uptake of its methodology
within institutions as well as by projects
An important aspect of QA Focus's work is to make recommendations
on
the approach to standards taken with the programme
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Developmental Culture
Possible approaches towards QA and compliance with
standards:
• Policing approach
• Developmental approach
QA Focus takes a developmental approach:
• Explains reasons for standards & best practices
• Provides lightweight methodology for supporting
use of standards and best practices
• Encourages community to share its approaches
• Seeks to encourages uptake of its methodology
within institutions as well as by projects
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Policies
How do you know what you should do if you don't
have documented polices?
Policy example
Policy: Web Standards
Standard: XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0
Architecture: Use of SSIs and text editor
Exceptions: Automatically-derived files
Ownership: The project manager is responsible for
this policy
Checking: Use ,validate after update
Audit Trail: Use ,rvalidate monthly and
document findings
You may find it useful to develop similar policies
yourself – for example, a policy of the accessibility of
A centre of expertise in digital information management
your Web site
A Broad Spectrum Of Choice (1)
As part of the broad spectrum we have the
following factors:
• Ownership and openness of standard (open,
neutral body; proprietary but community process;
community but spec publish; proprietary and
reverse engineered; proprietary and closed)
• Availability of viewers (multiple platforms;
available for free; available as open source)
• Availability of authoring tools (multiple
platforms; available for free; available as open
source)
A centre of expertise in digital information management
A Broad Spectrum Of Choice (2)
• Architectural Integrity (developed as part of
broader framework – cf W3C specs)
• Fitness For Purpose (is the standard designed
for the purpose envisaged)
• Expertise (does the organisation have the
necessary expertise available in-house)
• Maturity of Standard (is the standard mature and
well-proven)
• Local Culture (does the organisation seek to
make use of emerging standards or prefer to use
proven technologies)
• User Needs (does the standard satisfy the
requirements of the user)
• Preservation Needs (is the standard appropriate
for
long-term
preservation)
A centre of
expertise
in digital information
management
Bidding Process
We will recommend that projects bidding for funding
should demonstrate their acceptance of the open
standards culture by describing :
• The standards they expect to use in their work
• The technical architecture which will be used
• The technical expertise they have to support this
• The QA procedures they will use in order to
assess their compliance
• Their justification for use of proprietary solutions
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Reporting Procedures
We will recommend that projects which have been
funded should demonstrate their use of open
standards by providing the following information in their
periodic reports:
• The standards they have implemented
• Use of proprietary formats
• The QA procedures they have implemented
• Audit trails showing compliance with standards
• Explanations of changes to original proposals
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Conclusions
To conclude:
• Open standards are important for the
cultural heritage community
• However use of open standards is not
necessarily easy and may be costly
• Rather than abandoning open standards
there is a need to adopt an open standards
culture, which is tolerant towards use of
proprietary solutions
A centre of expertise in digital information management