Transcript JISC Standards: A Presentation To The JISC Date: 15 June 2005 Location: West Wing Committee room St Thomas’ Hospital Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath Email [email protected] URL http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ UKOLN is supported.

JISC Standards:
A Presentation To The JISC
Date: 15 June 2005
Location: West Wing Committee room
St Thomas’ Hospital
Brian Kelly
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
Email
[email protected]
URL
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
UKOLN is supported by:
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Contents
This brief talk will cover:
• Background to use of standards in JISCfunded activities
• Limitations of previous approaches
• Layered approach developed by QA Focus
• Doing the work
• Supporting the work
• Building on the work
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Background
JISC development work:
• Traditionally based on use of open standards to:
 Support interoperability
 Maximise accessibility
 Avoid vendor lock-in
 Provide architectural integrity
 Help ensure long-term preservation
History:
• eLib Standards document (v1 – 1996, v2 – 1998)
• DNER Standards document (2001)
which influenced:
• NOF-digi Technical Standards
• ..
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Lessons Learnt
Experiences of the QA Focus (and NOF-digi Technical
Advisory Service) revealed problems:
• Lack of knowledge of standards
• Lack of resources
• Immaturity of standards
• Failure for standards to take off
• Difficulties when building on existing work
• Uncertainty of what to do if standards not
implemented correctly
• …
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Need For Flexibility
There is a need for flexibility in the standards
infrastructure:
• Learning the lessons from OSI networking
protocols (the great networking standard of the
1980s!)
Today:
• Conveyor belt of great new Web standards is
slowing down
• Questions as to whether Web (for example) is
becoming over-complex
 "Web service considered harmful"
 The lowercase semantic web / Microformats
• Lighter-weight alternatives being developed
• Responses from the commercial world
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Compliance Issues
What does must mean?
• You must comply with HTML standards
 What if I don't?
 What if nobody does?
 What if I use PDF?
• You must clear rights on all resources you
digitise
• You must provide properly audited
accounts
 What if I don't?
There is a need to clarify the meaning of must and
for an understandable, realistic and reasonable
regime
Acompliance
centre of expertise in
digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
The Context
There will be a context to use of standards:
• The intended use:
 Innovative / research
 Mainstream
 Key middleware component  Small-scale deliverable
• Organisational culture:
 HE vs FE
 Service vs Development
 Teaching vs Research
 …
• Available Funding & Resources:
 Significant funding & training to make use of important
new standards
 Minimal funding - current skills should be used
• …
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
The Standards 'Framework'
Owner
xxx
JISC
3rd
Parties
OSS
JISC /
project
The policies should be modular – i.e. the standards policy
should Anot
accessibility
centredefine
of expertise
in digital informationpolicies,
management etc.
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Scope Of The Standards Work
The Standards Catalogue will:
• Cover JISC's development programmes
• Cover other JISC-funded development work
• Cover JISC-funded services
• Cover JISC itself
• Be available for others (e.g. institutional work)
Content areas will include:
• Web
 File formats
• Metadata
 Resource discovery
• E-learning
 Addressing
• Alerting
 Authentication
• E-Research
 …
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Implementation
How might this approach be used in practice?
Development Programme
Committees
Report
JISC Service
Advisers
Programme
Team
Programme XX Call / Contract
JISC
Manager
JISC
Manager
Contract
Contract
Proposals must comply with XYZ standard
Proposals should seek to comply with XYZ
Proposals should describe approach to XYZ
Report must
be in MS
Word / … and
Projects audited to ensure compliance with … use JISC
Projects should develop self-assessment
template
procedures and submit findings to JISC
…
Projects should submit proposed approach
for approval/information
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Service must …
Services must
self-assess …
and highlight
significant
deviations from
…
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Collating The Content
We are using a Wiki to
collect information about
the standards:
• Being used by a small
groups of trusted
individuals
• Avoids bottleneck for
uploading and
maintaining content
Note: the Wiki is used for
creation & maintenance
of the data and will not be
the final repository
At this stage, a simple template will be used.
This can
be ofenhanced
ininformation
future management
iterations.
A centre
expertise in digital
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Publishing The Content
The Standards Catalogue:
• Needs to be available as a document which can
be easily read
• Data should be reusable and interoperable:
 JISC Framework environment
 For CIE
…
Plans:
• Version 1 available as document
• Data ported to CETIS's Framework software
We are currently talking to CETIS about this
• Is it possible?
• What are the resources implications
A centre
www.ukoln.ac.uk
• of…expertise in digital information management
Quality Assurance Infrastructure
Will projects and services implement standards as
required? How will we know?
Compliance checking:
External checkers: Approach used in NOF-digi. But:
• Concerns over big brother
• Does big brother have expertise?
• Alien to HE culture
• Standards not embedded into working practices
(done because funders want it)
Self-assessment:
• Approach recommended by QA Focus (and
should be done even if external checking)
• Need for projects/services to define their QA
processes
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Support Infrastructure
Need for a support infrastructure which covers:
• Why the standards are needed?
• Pros and cons of deployment strategies
• Ways of ensuring standards are being
implemented correctly
We're looking to build on QA Focus work:
• 80+ briefing documents and 30+ case studies
published
• Licensed under Creative Commons
• UKOLN and AHDS will continue to publish new
documents (new documents on Folksonomies,
Persistent Identifiers, Wikis, etc. published
recently)
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Building On The Work
The JISC work will form the basis of similar
work for the CIE (Common Information
Environment):
• Working with MLA, BBC, BECTA, …
• Pooling existing resources
• Identifying areas of agreement and
diversity
Note that the CIE work will not aim to reconcile
differences, but to identify those areas
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Standards Catalogue Process
There's a need for developing and enhancing the
standards catalogue in order to:
• Update with new standards
• Learn from feedback and experiences
Context
Policies
Compliance
Review
Framework
Standards
Standards
…
Support
Infrastructure
QA
Framework
User
Experiences
Funder's
Experiences
The Standards
caninformation
be integrated
with the JISC's 'Framework'
A centre ofCatalogue
expertise in digital
management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Conclusions
To conclude:
• Approach to developing standards catalogue
based on QA Focus's experiences, and its review
by Jon Duke/Andy Jordan
• Acknowledges importance of context
• Allows for hard-line implementation (which is
needed in some areas)
• Will be developed within a CIE context
• This will be an ongoing process
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk