The JISC funded SNEEP project (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints) – part of the original JISC rapid innovation programme – aimed to provide a set of social networking tools for EPrints repositories. It ran for 6 months and ended in May 2008. Since the rather low key publication of the resultant EPrints plugin interest and uptake has been slowly but surely gathering momentum.

Today I am pleased to announce a couple of significant SNEEP related developments. Firstly , thanks to my colleague Ben Wheeler here at ULCC, SNEEP 0.3.2 released this week offers an automagic installer. This does away with the (slightly tortuous) manual install procedure that we suspect discouraged all but the hardier EPrints hac… I mean administrators.

You can download SNEEP 0.3.2 and/or read Ben’s post to the EP-tech mailling list. The download page is also a good place to see SNEEP in action.

PICT

I am also pleased to announce a new project (funded as part of the 2009 JISC rapid innovation programme) that aims to build on the SNEEP work to provide SNEEP-ish services to a broader range of web resources. The goal of the PICT project (Platform Independent Community Toolbox) is a lightweight javascript tool that can be deployed across an number of web resources (not just a repository) to encompass the web-based real estate of a given research community and provide that community with collaborative tools available at the on-line research coalface.

Effectively PICT will allow resource owners to offer

• tags
• comments
• notes
• other goodies

from their web page. The data gathered by these tools will be managed by a PICT server (probably run by a community-minded resource owner) and be available for cross referencing with other resources in a PICT community.

If all that is a bit difficult to picture, rest assured that demos will appear throughout the course of the project that should help to clear the murk.

As usual, a JISC gathering is a great opportunity to meet others working in the field – plenty of familiar faces and some new ones. JISC-sponsored innovations move on at a head-spinning pace in all the areas we are directly or indirectly involved in, from digital preservation and archives to repositories and e-learning. With JISC-PoWR in mind, I was especially interested to meet our former ULCC/RSC colleague Sarah Sherman, who is now working on the APT-STAIRS project, investigating the use of Google Docs for students, teachers and researchers. Definitely a preservation angle here, that I hope we’ll be able to follow up.

Plenty about the conference, and more, on the JIF08 blog; if contemporaneous twittering is your bag, check out twemes.com/jif08.

You don’t need to hear any more about me and SNEEP, but the other presentations offered interesting insights into work with Institutional and Learning Object repositories, thesauruses – and even a bit of Web 2.0 mashup.

Peter Kilcoyne from Worcester College of Technology demonstrated their JISC-funded Mr Cute project. This has developed a Moodle extension which considerably extends the functionality of the VLE as a repository of IMS Learning Object packages (hence the acronym: Moodle Repository Create Upload Tag Embed). Tangentially interesting (in the light of recent discussions chez nous) was seeing the way Peter’s institution has embedded Moodle in Sharepoint: a fiendishly simple but elegant way to make an open-source web app work more-or-less seamlessly with enterprise and admin systems (reminds me also we should revisit our plan to embed MediaWiki in Eprints). We also learned from Peter that Moodle now has an estimated 60% share of the VLE market in FE (according to a recent ILT Champions survey by Rob Englebright): a useful statistic to know.

Roger Greenhaigh from Harper Adams University College described the National Rural Knowledge Exchange, a resource centre for specialists in agriculture and related matters. With laudable aims of brokering joint projects, consultancy, events, reviews, bespoke training, lab and field trials, visiting speakers, graduate placements, etc., the system has nevertheless had to address a real need for simplicity in order to be of use to much of its target community. Roger described how a huge range of taxonomies was researched – from DEFRA to Dewey to business directories – in order to arrive at the best ways of arranging and classifying the information.

National Rural makes extensive and effective use of many powerful Web 2.0 tools, including RSS/Atom feeds, Google Maps and Flickr. It also tries, where possible, to shortcut established publishing cycles and schedules. The speed with which government organisations, in particular, release information, is not always conducive to timely dissemination: “what’s hot in pigs”, or up-to-the-minute information about avian flu, can’t wait weeks or months for DEFRA’s web publishing process to release it. This enlightened approach seems very reminiscent of the approach of mySociety and IdealGovernment that I described elsewhere.

I was pleased Michael Emly’s presentation reminded me about MIDESS, which was a wide-ranging and ambitious project researching many aspects of repository implementation. Of particular interest to us (in the light of PRIMO and TPYF) is its work on multimedia repositories and IPR issues.

MIDESS also experimented with using METS and OAI-PMH as metadata transmission standards: interesting to hear their conclusion that METS is too flexible to be readily usable. I’m reminded of our work with EAD, a format in which it is very easy to create metadata, but not so easy to reliably interpret others’ uses of it, unless an explicit subset is identified: MIDESS similarly concluded that there is a need for more work on application profiles. Michael also highlighted the issue that current platforms are lacking functionality for multimedia: how can we get that functionality built in?

John Robertson briefly told us about HILT , the High-Level Thesaurus project, unifying many classification schemes. A quick look at one of the HILT demo sites suggests it might be very useful, if ontology is your bag. Creating and maintaining such unions and cross-walks is not for the faint-hearted.

After my SNEEP spiel, Phil Barker explained how JORUM is now moving to a model of open access and deposit.

The closing discussion and questions and comments passim were all very constructive and thought-provoking, particularly regarding the differing expectations of repositories for Learning Objects and Scholarly Works. How real – for example – are the benefits of sharing LOs through an OAI-PMH type service? Sharing Learning Objects/Resources, it was convincingly suggested, is still likely to be hampered by a “why should I?” attitude, by fear of criticism, and by the commercially competitive environment in which many teaching institutions operate. Nevertheless, sharing aside, it’s clear that institutions need better control and management of their learning resources , and for this reason a repository-based approach – whether exo like JORUM or an IR, or intra like MR CUTE – is likely to be essential.

Finally it was a pleasure to meet other colleagues in the field, particularly Shirley Yearwood-Jackman from Liverpool University, who showed me their very nice looking Research Archive (using Eprints). They might be interested in SNEEP Comments too, though Shirley felt her contributors might like more control over which users or groups of users can comment. Although we’re close to having to button up SNEEP 1.0, Rory might have some bright ideas (he usually does).

This release also includes the Notes feature: this creates private comments visible only to the logged-in user who created them.

For more information about the SNEEP project, see the SNEEP wiki.

We’ve completed functional specifications for the Comments, Bookmarking and Tagging plugins. These describe the minimum functionality we expect from the plugins, and provide a meaningful benchmark to test the finished products against. As usual I’d welcome any comments and suggestions, either here or on the Wiki discussion pages.

Also, the Interim Report on the project has been signed off by Andy at JISC. We’re expecting that the project will overrun its original completion date by about 4-6 weeks, which means that we probably won’t have a finished product ready in time for OR08. Mind you I’ve seen enough projects not-quite launched at conferences (no names!) to think this is probably not exceptional.

Oh, and a bit of messing around with the Gimp finally yielded a logo I can live with.

Ben, John, Chris, David, Joss, Ian, Sebastien, Les, Nina, Steve and Tim discussing the social side of repositories.

After lunch we had fascinating demos of, and discussions around, Southampton’s Rich Tags/mSpace, Nature’s Connotea, and our own progress to-date on SNEEP. Rory’s presentation was impressively clear and confident, given that we hadn’t actually prepared anything, and had to hijack Ian Mulvany’s laptop (thanks Ian). Having missed a chance to see it in action in Bristol, it was great to see a live demo of RichTags, which is a very impressive visualisation tool (the sort of thing that, like Gapminder, can totally change one’s ideas about data and metadata – check out the mSpace movies).

Trying to take in all permutations and implications of Web 2.0 is to risk an overload of total perspective vortex magnitude, so I’ll mostly restrict the rest of my thoughts to SNEEP’s and my own interests, and look forward to reading elsewhere how others interpreted the conversation. (There’s a section at the Eprints Wiki.)

It seems to me that one of the most important things we can achieve is to maximise the degree to which Eprints is susceptible to Social Networking. That may be in an “exo” way – (Rich Tags, Del.icio.us, CiteULike, Connotea, etc.) or from within the repository, a la SNEEP. But I’m reassured that, even within its modest scope, SNEEP has a part to play (and isn’t likely to be superseded by anything in EPrints 3.1). How it’s, in the end, used, remains to be seen. Web 2.0 Social Networking is what-you-make-of-it: some things fly, some flutter, others sink without trace (so long Eduspaces!), nevertheless it’s amazing what can be achieved with a few RSS or Atom feeds.

Apropos Bookmarking – as we’ve seen, it has many behaviours in common with Eprints search results. Good advice from Chris on reusing the Saved Search export functionality.

Commenting: Joss was right about the need to put on a little more style. Rory’s promised to embed plenty of CSS hooks, and it might be worth having a less skeletal default, based on standard Eprints livery.

Tagging implementation has some overlap with the Bookmarking, as Rory has already identified. We should also ensure if possible that SNEEP tags play nicely with Rich Tags (or at least are no more than an XSLT template away). Rory’s posted elsewhere his ideas on tagging: worth noting also that WordPress 2.3 seems to have a competent implementation of tagging (you’re looking at it!)

Of the other discussions, I’m particularly keen to follow up David Millard’s work on Learning Object repositories, with both my other projects and my E-learning studies in mind.

But I still haven’t got to the bottom of why some Web 2.0 sites grab me (Del.icio.us, LibraryThing, CiteULike…) and others don’t (BlueDot, Connotea). Not that Connotea’s not impressive: perhaps it is simply, as Ian Mulvany explained, that the strength of its “community” has a strong affinity with Nature’s readership – other SN sites are stronger in social sciences and humanities. Ian also confirmed that Connotea does not support the “save personal copy” feature, in the way CiteULike does: this is a deal-breaker for me, as I’ve found it invaluable to have quick and easy access to my MSc reading list from anywhere – work, home, laptop, desktop. In fact anything that didn’t make it to my CiteULike bookmarks probably didn’t get read!

This gives an idea of how the comments will work in conjunction with an EPrint abstract. It allows simple non threaded comments which can be displayed, added or updated within an abstract (or other page).

And now that’s out of the way I’ll give an idea of features that I would like to add. Some of these have arisen from the recent pow wow event and others were already stumbling around my mind. The existing interface is unlikely to change drastically most of the new features listed are tinkering under the hood.

• Comments as dataset – recode comments as an EPrint::Dataset and add the appropriate EPrint::DataObj::Comment
• Threading – implemented either by allowing comments on comments or by using some sort of stored threading data within each comment record.
• Better handling of markup – HTML Parsing is performed by default but failure is not well dealt with. Also would be good to offer a repo admins the opportunity to define an allowed subset using the sneep.xml config file.
• Comment on anything – Update the DB table structure so that the thing that is being commented on can be any other EPrint::DataObject. Also – with little or no work – allow for the possibility of commenting on external objects (might be useful where EPrints is running alongside other systems)
• Comment privacy (Notes) – Allow comments to be set as private so only the owner of the comment can view it (and re-badge as a note). Look into using EPrints security model for this as that will be neat and hopefully add some extra functionality.
• Object owner veto – Give the owners of various objects the ability to disallow comments being made on those objects (defaulting to permissive).

That’s the contents of my brains on this subject at the moment. If I have missed anything obvious or if anyone has any suggestions for the less obvious please feel free to add a comment.

The tagging feature has been recognised as a vital part of any self respecting set of web2.0 extensions. We’ve already had requests for them from the Linnean Society who would like to see them alongside the prototype comments and bookmarks already on their site. Consensus on the importance and usefulness of tags seemed to be one of the (many) themes to have arisen from the EPrints & Web2.0 pow wow.

It was also suggested that tags can be and are used in varying ways (eleven apparently!). For example bookmarks can be thought of as a tag under which an arbitrary set of references to things can be stored for the use of a single person. If bookmarks are implemented as a ‘view’ of the tagging system they immediately gain all the extra good things that tags offer (sharing, etc). Other uses mentioned were ‘rating’ (by tagging an item as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘terrible’) or even as a way of organising tasks (‘to read’, ‘to buy’, ‘to review’).

With this in mind I want to make sure that the SNEEP.tags database structure is as flexible, extensible and scalable as possible. A bit of effort on the DB side of things should hopefully mean that when it comes to producing views and interfaces for the tags the various uses can be easily accommodated and if appropriate (as in the case of bookmarks) re-branded as a new feature.

One resource on database design for tags is this webinar. I haven’t seen it in action as it appears to be significantly awkward to get hold of a Linux version of the Webex software needed to view it. I have attached the slides which seem to give a good gist. It is written from the point of view of MySQL so it is very much about how to get the most out of the DB no matter the amount of content.

Web 2.0 Tags and Folksonomy: Schema Design for Scalability and Performance

The examples in the slides correlate to a tagging system for a blog, so tags are related to posts. This approach, tagging elements by id in a closed system, is not difficult to map to EPrints where tags can be related to items (eprints) or indeed anything with a unique id (documents, comments, users).

One aspect of this approach that struck me is whether it might be difficult to do searches which combine the various item types. My approach so far has been to maintain an ‘all’ counter in the stas table. Any thoughts on the merits or otherwise of the approach outlined here would be welcome.

The agenda is flexible. This is an informal event, but it would help if anyone wishing to come could notify Richard Davis or Les Carr . A list of expected attendess is being maintained here: http://tinyurl.com/36sc9r

We’re extremely grateful to the London Knowledge Labs (Institute of Education/Birkbeck) for letting us use their excellent facilities in Holborn for this event.

EPrints Web 2.0 Pow-wow

December 13th 2007, 10:30 – 17:30
London

Agenda

Before lunch:

• Who we are, what projects we represent.
• What do we understand by “Web 2.0″?
• What do we want Web 2.0 to do for our repositories?
• What progress have we made so far?

Lunch arrangements TBC.

After lunch:

• A look at EPrints:
• What’s the easiest way to achieve our goals
• Overlaps between our projects & activities
• Co-ordinating activities and sharing outcomes

Followed by a chance to network further at a nearby hostelry.

Location

London Knowledge Labs
23-29 Emerald Street
London WC1N 3QS
http://www.lkl.ac.uk

LKL travel info: http://tinyurl.com/ywmsvc

Contact

Richard Davis, ULCC
r.davis@ulcc.ac.uk 020 7692 1350

Les Carr, Southampton University
lac@soton.ac.uk