1 DSpace Progress and Challenges Navigating the Standard Seas Robert Tansley Google Inc. 21 September 2006

2 Overview State of the DSpace Nation – New Developments Standards The China Digital Museum Project Future needs

3 State of the DSpace Nation Well over 150 institutional users 9 committers, very active developer and technical lists New features, bug reports, fixes pour in Large technical community with deep understanding of system Architecture largely unchanged for 4 years “Chaotic” OSS community great for incremental feature/UI development; architectural developments more difficult Committer group (and everyone else) have day jobs Perception that some centralised team somewhere is taking care of it (committers? MIT? HP?)

4 New Developments DSpace governance advisory board formed, first met March 2006 Decision made to form a 501(c)(3) non-profit DSpace architecture review group formed, charged with advancing the platform’s architecture (“community-ratified” decision making)

5 DSpace Architecture Review Technical scope of the project: Application or middleware? Data model, versioning Modularisation, network vs local APIs “Scalability” Managing complexity Interoperability Key aspect is trying to make DSpace less "monolithic” – while retaining "out of the box" usage

6 Which standards does DSpace use? Dublin Core OAI-PMH Handle System METS PREMIS

7 Which standards does DSpace use? CSS DC DTD HTTP HTTPS Handle System Harmony/ABC LDAP METS MIME MODS MPEG-21 DIDL OAI-PMH PDF PREMIS RDF RDFS SMTP SQL SRW SSL TLS URI + URL UTF-8 WebDAV X.509 XHTML XML XML Schema XSLT

8 So why aren’t all those enough? Need a blend of standards Standards don’t answer the hard questions – “Implementation issue” Many, radically different data models Standards can become an obstacle rather than a help

9 The China Digital Museum Project Many universities in China have a museum Many objects of historic, cultural, educational and research value Due to space requirements, and size (geographic and population) of the country, museum contents are not optimally utilised Additionally, some physical objects are deteriorating Therefore objects are being digitised Improve access Preserve HP, China Ministry of Education, Beihang university project Results will be added to OSS DSpace

10 Architecture

11 Possibilities

12 Data Model Challenges Modelling object types/classes Relationships (containership, other) Representation information – File formats – Complex objects – “Semantics” (e.g. how to interpret columns in dataset) – Derived, converted, “equivalent” or lossy inter-representation relationships Serialisations of all the above

13 China DM Project Data Model

14 How to address More aggressive standards – Data models – Representation information (beyond file formats) – Make tradeoffs – Don’t just “leave as implementation detail”; massively reduces standard’s utility, potential for impact

15 Summary Standards are too “visible” We need to make standards “disappear” And be willing to accept tradeoffs Flexibility isn’t always a good thing!!