1. UKOLN is supported by: The JISC Information Environment Bath Profile Four Years On: whats being done in the UK? 7 th July 2003 Andy Powell, UKOLN, University of Bath a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk www.bath.ac.uk A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk

2. Contents JISC Information Environment technical architecture http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/ –putting Z39.50 and the Bath Profile in a national context JISC IE service registry http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/ –disclosing the existence of Bath Profile targets technical issues –Z39.50/Bath Profile and other discovery technologies

3. Simple scenario consider a researcher searching for material to inform a research paper on HIV and/or AIDS he or she searches for hiv aids using: –the RDN, to discover Internet resources –ZETOC, to discover recent journal articles (and, of course, he or she may use a whole range of other search strategies using other services as well)

6. Issues different user interfaces –look-and-feel –subject classification, metadata usage everything is HTML – human-oriented –difficult to merge results, e.g. combine into a list of references –difficult to build a reading list to pass on to students –need to manually copy-and-paste search results into HTML page or MS-Word document or desktop reference manager or …

7. Issues (2) difficult to move from discovering journal article to having copy in hand (or on desktop) users need to manually join services together problem with hardwired links to books and journal articles, e.g. –lecturer links to university library OPAC but student is distance learner and prefers to buy online at Amazon –lecturer links to IngentaJournals but student prefers paper copy in library

8. The problem space… from perspective of data consumer –need to interact with multiple collections of stuff - bibliographic, full-text, data, image, video, etc. –delivered thru multiple Web sites –few cross-collection discovery services (with exception of big search engines like Google, but lots of stuff is not available to Google, i.e. it is part of the invisible Web) from perspective of data provider –few agreed mechanisms for disclosing availability of content

9. UK JISC IE context… 206 collections and counting… (Hazel Woodward, e-ICOLC, Helsinki, Nov 2001) –Books: 10,000 + –Journals: 5,000 + –Images:250,000 + –Discovery tools:50 + A & I databases, COPAC, RDN, … –National mapping data & satellite imagery plus institutional content (e-prints, research data, library content, learning resources, etc.) plus content made available thru projects – 5/99, FAIR, X4L, … plus …

10. The problem(s)… portal problem –how to provide seamless discovery across multiple content providers appropriate-copy problem –how to provide access to the most appropriate copy of a resource (given access rights, preferences, cost, speed of delivery, etc.)

11. A solution… an information environment framework of machine-oriented services allowing the end-user to –discover, access, use and publish resources across a range of content providers move away from lots of stand-alone Web sites......towards more coherent whole remove need for use to interact with multiple content providers –note: remove need rather than prevent

12. JISC Information Env. discover –finding stuff across multiple content providers access –streamlining access to appropriate copy content providers expose metadata about their content for –searching –harvesting –alerting develop services that bring stuff together –portals (subject portals, media-specific portals, geospatial portals, institutional portals, VLEs, …)

13. A note about portals portal word possibly slightly misleading the JISC IE architecture supports many different kinds of user-focused services… –subject portal –reading list and other tools in VLE –commercial portals (ISI Web of Knowledge, ingenta, Bb Resource Center, etc.) –library portal (e.g. Zportal or MetaLib) –SFX service component –personal desktop reference manager (e.g. Endnote) –increasingly rich browser-based tools – XSLT, Javascript, Java, SOAP, …

14. Discovery technologies that allow providers to disclose metadata to portals –searching - Z39.50 (Bath Profile Functional Area C), and SRW –harvesting - OAI-PMH –alerting - RDF Site Summary (RSS) fusion services may sit between provider and portal –broker (searching) –aggregator (harvesting and alerting) –catalogue (manually created records) –index (machine-generated full-text index)

15. Access in the case of books, journals, journal articles, end- user wants access to the most appropriate copy need to join up discovery services with access/delivery services (local library OPAC, ingentaJournals, Amazon, etc.) need localised view of available services discovery service uses the OpenURL to pass metadata about the resource to an OpenURL resolver the OpenURL resolver provides pointers to the most appropriate copy of the resource, given: –user and institutional preferences, cost, access rights, location, etc.

16. Shared services service registry –information about collections (content) and services (protocol) that make that content available authentication and authorisation OpenURL and other resolver services user preferences and institutional profiles terminology services metadata registries...

17. JISC Information Environment JISC-funded content providers institutional content providers external content providers brokersaggregatorscataloguesindexes institutional portals subject portals learning management systems media-specific portals end-user desktop/browser presentation fusion provision OpenURL resolvers shared infrastructure authentication/authorisation (Athens) JISC IE service registry institutional preferences services terminology services user preferences services resolvers metadata schema registries

18. Summary Z39.50 (Bath Profile), OAI, RSS are key discovery technologies... –… and by implication, XML and simple/unqualified Dublin Core –anticipate growing requirement to transport qualified DC and IEEE LOM metadata access to resources via OpenURL and resolvers where appropriate Z39.50 and OAI not mutually exclusive general need for all services to know what other services are available to them

19. IE Service Registry JISC-funded content providers institutional content providers external content providers brokersaggregatorscataloguesindexes institutional portals subject portals learning management systems media-specific portals end-user desktop/browser presentation fusion provision OpenURL resolvers shared infrastructure authentication/authorisation (Athens) JISC IE service registry institutional preferences services terminology services user preferences services resolvers metadata schema registries IE Service Registry

20. IESR purpose to allow service components to discover and interact with other service components within the JISC IE collection descriptions (describing the content of collections) service descriptions (protocol-level detail about how to interact with service components) Z39.50, SRW, OAI-PMH, RSS, OpenURL resolvers, SOAP services, Web sites, CGI- based services ZeeRex

21. Z39.50 – one among many in the context of something like the JISC IE… Z39.50/Bath Profile is part of a bigger fabric of protocols (SRW, OAI_PMH, SOAP/XQuery, RDF/RDFQuery, …) many are based on XML and DC many developers will work across all the above desirable to have more consistent approaches to use of –XML, XML schemas vs. DTDs, XML namespaces

22. e-Learning and Bath Profile e-Learning seems to be a significant driving force behind cross-domain activity is there an argument that Bath Profile should cater better for e-Learning activities? –support for qualified DC (DC-Education) –support for IEEE LOM (as per IMS Digital Repositories Interoperability Spec.)

23. Conclusions Z39.50 and Bath Profile remains a key component in initiatives like the JISC IE but… it is only one component among many deployment and use is almost always in the context of other available technologies future work needs to be mindful of the way the Web is evolving (XML, URI, RDF, client/server, etc.) should IMS DRI (e-Learning work) be folded into Bath Profile?