“I read the Panlibus blog - I note Talis has another house blog called Nodalities - why is this and why/who should be reading it??”

One of the major recurring themes from myself and others in Panlibus postings is Library 2.0 and its more general cousin Web 2.0. If you followed the links I provided to their descriptions in Wikipedia you will have discovered that they are both labels for a collection of attributes as against specifications.

I have yet to read a complete concise definition of what Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 ‘is’ [and probably never will], nevertheless it is far simper to look at an application or service and pronounce to the world that it is very Web 2.0 and be fairly confident that people will understand what you mean.

Web 2.0 is virtually all about technology, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture, Social Networking tools, etc. etc., whereas it’s Library relative mixes all of that with a heavy dose of using those Web 2.0 tools and the customer handling & social skills of the library community to provide a better service to library users. - Debates about the use of mobile phones, and the provision of coffee, in a Library environment are often found in the Library 2.0 world.

We at Talis are the ‘Technology Guys’ in the Library equation, and although interested in all that is debated, our motivations are all about how new and emerging technologies [currently labelled Web 2.0] can be beneficially applied in the Library world. To this end you will find me and my colleagues evangelising on the subject both here and at conferences around the world such as these: Access2006, Internet Librarian International, Stellenbosch Symposium, Internet Librarian 2006, and the Charleston Conference.

The Talis Platform is an excellent example of applying Web 2.0, Semantic Web [to mention another ‘label’], SOA, and other technologies to provide innovative solutions to the liberating of library data, functionality, and services for the benefit of all.

In the process of proposing and delivering those [currently library specific] solutions, we are pushing both the theoretical and practical boundaries of web technologies and the theories and standards that are behind them - especially in the World Wide Web Consortium where you find Talis involved with several comittees. In doing this we are very active members, with much to contribute and say, of the world community driving forward these technologies.

This is where Nodalities comes in. You will note [today] that there is a posting from me picking up points from the blogs of Ian Davis and Sam Tunnicliffe, from our Platform Team, who are currently at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. If you are interested, like I am, in the way that all things Web are [and are being predicted to be] moving, you will find what they are reporting most engrossing.

Reading between the lines of what is being presented it is clear that the advances already being demonstrated by the Talis Platform are only the first step in a massive change in the way large sets of data and metadata (often only linked by semantics), can be marshalled, related together, and combined to change the way information is used in the future.

Dependant on the context, you will find Talis people attending and/or speaking at both Library and more general conferences across the world. Our knowledge, and understanding, of the issues surrounding the library and information industries is very valuable input into the wider technology world. As we have demonstrated this is a two way street. It is absolutely certain that our knowledge and understanding of the Web 2.0 world is already adding unique value to the world of libraries.

So to answer the question at the start of this posting…..

If you are in the library community and want to keep abreast of technology advancements - read Panlibus. If you are in the wider web community and are interested in what we are doing, and have to say about, applying these technologies as a Platform in real world situations - read Nodalities. I suspect most people, although with concentration on one, will find postings of interest in both Panlibus and Nodalities.

Technorati Tags: Talis, Talis Platform, Library, Library 2.0, Web 2.0, SOA, web2summit

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I published my posting about the announcement of Project Cenote, when Paul Miller was up talking about it at Access 2006 in Ottawa. Whilst I was doing it I was monitoring the #code4lib IRC chat channel, which seemed to be totally populated by people in his audience. I could tell when Paul mentioned Cenote for the first time - the following comment appeared in the channel “wow, a project named after a deep water-filled hole where humans were tossed as sacrifices…“

I could do a whole posting about the idiosyncrasies of Talis project naming, but you are safe I’ll refrain for the moment. Still there is a tenuous connection between a deep water-filled hole and the distinctive application that is Project Cenote - ‘hidden depths’. (I said it was tenuous!).

Underpinning the sleek black Cenote UI are a set of new powerful Talis Platform APIs, joining those already driving things such as Talis Whisper, LibraryThingThing, and Herefordshire’s LibMap. These APIs are so new that the documentation for them is not yet published in TDN

So pin your eyelids back here comes a pre-documentation sneak preview.

Anyone who has played with APIs before is probably sceptically wondering how I can sensibly talk about an API without the documentation. Well, these APIs were designed and written with ease of discovery in mind. Like all APIs you need a base URL to start from. This URL for the API to search UK Bibliographic items is http://api.talis.com/bf/stores/ukbib/items. Also like most APIs you need to add some parameters to get the call to work for you, but where these Platform APIs differ is what they do when you don’t supply such parameters - no ‘page not found‘, 404, or other unhelpful html error. What you get is a helpful html page giving you direct access to the API - go on, click the link and see. Once there, type in a query and click search.

You should have ended up with a page that looks like this - yes I know it looks like XML gobbledygook, but if you scroll down a bit you will see the bibliographic results nicely wrapped waiting for an application to pick them out.

The default page you are presented with has a single query prompt, type in a search and click search and you will be presented with two things. Firstly, the XML/RDF formatted results and secondly in your browser address prompt the API call that returned them. For the bibuk store you can enter keywords or by using terms prefixed by a search type (eg. ‘title:war and peace’, ‘author:rowling’, ’subject:history’, etc.). There are other stores wikipedia containing Wikipedia article abstracts; holdings contains holdings details for libraries which have contributed to the Platform (currently ISBN is the only search query for holdings); and cnimages for book jacket images (again ISBN is the currently supported search).

Pretty cool, but thats only the half of it.

With applications like Cenote you want to add value to the bib results with information such as book jackets, holdings information, etc. Yes you could call the Wikipedia abstract store API with the id for each item, but that would be a bit long-winded. Click on this link. You should be looking at the default page for the augmentation service for the Wikipedia abstracts store. Copy this URL http://api.talis.com/bf/stores/ukbib/items?query=pirates in to the prompt - click ‘Augment’ and see what you get. I squint at the returned XML should reveal that the bib results now have wikipedia abstract data included with them. The same effect can be obtained from the augment service of the book jacket images and holdings stores. - now that is impressive.

Here are the results from augmenting bib results with library holdings information. - Very cool!

I know I work with the guys who are producing this stuff, but I can’t hold back from a hat tip in their direction. This is how APIs should be built - designed to be easily understood and with the consumer in mind. You should be able to test out and see the results of what you want to without having to write a single line of code.

I’m sure someone out there is thinking, How do you argument a set of results with data from more than one store?. Well that has been thought of, and the orchestration of such things is part of another Platform API set which is well on its way to being released. You’ll just have to be a little patient.

For the XML averse among you this posting might have been a bit technical for you [sorry] but hopefully you will see that the people who produced Cenote only had to worry about how it looked and felt, leaving the heavy lifting bit of searching the data and augmenting it from other sources to the Talis Platform. An I think you will agree, only having to concentrate on the UI shows in the resultant application.

For the Talis Project name spotters reading this, you have probably identified that these APIs come from a Platform component called Bigfoot. Suffice to say the vision behind Bigfoot is:

“Bigfoot is a zero-setup, multi-tenant content and metadata storage facility capable of storing and querying across very large datasets.”

Anyway I’m all API’d out now. I’m hoping to expand this in to a TDN API user guide, so watch out for that. If in the meantime you want to know more, post a message on the TDN <a href=”http://www.talis.com/tdn/forum/75″Talis Platform Forum or drop me a line.

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One of the joys of watching and commenting on technology is the great sport of new acronym spotting. Only rivaled in its field by new acronym inventing. Lately there has been a small series of acronyms forming with the suffix ‘aaS’.

First we had SaaS - Software as a Service. To quote Wikipedia Software as a Service (SaaS) is a model of software delivery where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation, and support for the software provided to their client. SaaS is a model of software delivery rather than a market segment; software can be delivered using this method to any market segment including home consumers, small business, medium and large business. The best know example of SaaS being Salesforce.com In simple terms, Salesforce’s business is based upon companies large and small renting a CRM system as a service over the Internet. For the customer this means no investment in hardware or software or the associated overheads - they just get on and use it

Following Amazon’s announcement of their Electronic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, where you can rent time as and when you need it on a virtual computer for as little as 10 cents an hour, Jeff Barr (Amazon Web Services Evangelist) coined the term Hardware as a Service (HaaS). In the presentation I first saw Jeff use the term, he also talked about the Amazon Mechanical Turk service. Mechanical Turk is a way of interacting with people to get done things that only humans can do such as image recognition, sheep drawing, and the like. This got me to thinking that this was really People as a Service - PaaS.

Well now, following an announcement from Medialab, the Dutch company behind Aquabrowser, we have OaaS - OPAC as a Service. This may be stretching the point a little as what they are proposing to deliver could be described as providing OPACs using a SaaS technique and business model, but if others agree that OaaS is a god acronym I would like to stake my claim to its creation.

The announcement of AquaBrowser OnLine is featured in Library Technology Guides. From the AquaBrowser OnLine site:

AquaBrowser Online is a unique web based library catalog search service. All your library needs is an Internet browser. Without any investment in software or servers, this is a whole new paradigm in library search solutions.

and

AquaBrowser Online brings the best features from AquaBrowser Library to the budget conscious libraries with up to 150.000 titles in their catalogs. No longer will smaller libraries have to compromise their wishes on search and web-accessibility.

So let the guys from AquaBrowser Online have access to index your catalog, and you can have a new whizzo OPAC interface for as little as $99/month. All without having to jump through all the usual hoops of justifying the purchase of hardware and software to run it on.

This is not the first example of being able to obtain some/all of your library via a service, but it is a high profile one. Building on their reputation of providing new OPAC interfaces for old monolithic Library Systems, or to echo Roy Tennant’s words putting lipstick on pigs, this initiative may gain some traction.

A Library wishing to dip it’s toe in this water will be probably be taking a low risk decision. No hardware investment, they are not committing their whole Library Service to this as yet untested option, if they don’t like it they can pull out and go back to what they are doing now, or even move on to other OaaS solutions that undoubtedly will appear in the future.

I note that there is currently a limit of 150,000 titles (at $256/month) it would be interesting to see how this could/would be scaled for larger systems.

Back in April I predicted [again] that the future of the monolithic library system was uncertain. The Library System of the future would consist of many specialized components loosely coupled by Web Services to deliver a whole solution relevant to a specific library’s requirements. Joining some early shoots in this very different way of providing and purchasing the technology to run your library AquaBrowser Online will be very interesting to watch as it moves form announcement through to a live service.

Even the most casual reader of the TDN, and this blog will know that here at Talis we are convinced that this sort of approach to delivering library services and software is the way forward. So much so that it is benefiting us and our customers in everything that we do. No matter how certain that you are in something, it is always gratifying to see others who also ‘get it’. We will be watching AquaBrowser Online with great interest.

(Waiter photo taken by vanillasky displayed in Flickr)

Technorati Tags: Talis, Talis Platform, Cataloging, Library, Library 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS, Aquabrowser

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The Disruptive Library Technology Jester [Peter Murray] in his post Services in a Service Oriented Architecture(SOA) “the second in a series about the application of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) system design pattern to library services” uses a Hypothetical Use Case ‘Reflection of Local Library Holdings in Open WorldCat’ to demonstrate how SOA could add great value to Libraries and Library Systems.

For those of you who are not avid players of Buzzword Bingo or who are not familiar with the term SOA, the proceeding paragraph is probably totally obscure, and you are probably wondering what on earth this has got to do with libraries. Stick with me for a while and I will try to explain.

Firstly I would recommend a read of the first post in Peter’s series, ‘Defining “Service Oriented Architecture” by Analogy‘ which uses a transportation scenario to help enlighten the reader about what is meant by a Service Oriented Architecture. - Is it more efficient to just get in your car and drive from your home in Cleveland, Ohio to a hotel in Denver Colorado, or do you use the car, bus, plane, and taxi to achieve your goal. Never having driven that journey (except once in 1976 via Austin Texas, Phoenix, LA, San Fransisco, and Seattle - but that is another story!) I don’t know if that was the right analogy for me, but nevertheless it does work.

Having done that you should have an idea that in the emerging SOA world, bits of functionality will be provided by service providers. What they use, and how the use it, will be hidden from you - all you need to know is how to send a request to their service & the format of the response they will send back, and have the confidence that they are going to do this reliably. There are well know examples of this for all to see:

• Users of Amazon Web Services(AWS) - send a URL to Amazon containing an ISBN, and get some XML back containing book information, pricing, and a link to a book jacket image.
• Web site designers send a bit of XML to Google Maps which then pops a very powerful mapping application in to their web page, complete with map pins relevant to their site.
• Send an ISBN to OCLC’s xISBN service and you receive an XML formatted list of all the FRBR related ISBNs.
• Send a URL in a standard format containing a Library Code and a search term to the Talis Deep-linking service API and find yourself redirected in to that Library’s OPAC displaying the results of that search

The key for the adoption of SOA in any environment is standards either commercial[Google & Amazon’s standards are just there & published and people are using them] or open. Take for instance PatREST(pdf), the standard being floated by the Mashing up the Library Competition Winner John Blyberg of Ann Arbour District Library.

PatREST (Patron REST) is an XML specification developed at the Ann Arbor District Library for the purpose of providing a simple and easy method of accessing various data and methods.

This is a standard for accessing data from an individual local Library System and using it, like John does in his winning entry, to drive another application. PatREST is the application programmer interface (API) for a library service.

So how does this fit with the WorldCat analogy in Peter’s latest posting? Well, if each Library had got a System Manager who was capable of implementing PatREST on their local system, it fits very well. Unfortunately, the world does not have a massive population of John Blybergs working as Library System Managers.

Those who read Panlibus regularly, and have digested some of our white papers, will know that we are passionate about getting the library’s services and data to where the users ares spending their time - not usually inside a library system interface.

We are already showing the power of this with the Talis Platform and the open Platform APIs which we have released, and will be adding to in the none too distant future. We also recognize that providing APIs to the local library system is the key stone in enabling those systems to become services that can participate in a SOA world. Watch this space for more news soon on this front as well!

We also recognize that no one organization in the library sector can solve the problem, of delivering Library [regardless of vendor, location, or institution] as a service to be consumed by all, on its own. We are doing all we can to promote dialog on this, but to be successful for the benefit of all we need to be joined by the promoters of the technology such as Peter, the likes of OCLC, our fellow system vendors, and the open the source community. We have, and will continue to, invite all of you to join in the duologue with us.

Knock on the door of your local system vendor (as many of them don’t appear to be bloging, except for a few notable and welcome exceptions), and your bibliographic service provider. Ask them how they are going to enable you, your users, and your/their data, to take your rightful place in the open distributed community emerging as a result of SOA being adopted globally.

I could go on about issues around Open Data need to be addressed to facilitate this, but that is a whole other story which I will return to in future postings.

Peter closes his posting with the following:

But What of the “Integrated Library System”?
If you read closely and have your internal sensors calibrated to such things, you may have noticed the juxtaposition of “inventory control system” with “local catalog system” in the descriptions above. That is no mistake — in the next posting of this series we’ll take a look at the disaggregation of the traditional integrated library system in a SOA environment.

Peter, come talk to us - we are not only aware of this but are actively working towards enabling it.
technorati tags: Amazon, Libraries, Library 2.0, Talis, Talis Platform, Service Oriented Architecture, SOA

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Returning to the office for a rest after a relaxing [if you can call negotiating 140 canal locks in a narrow boat in a week relaxing] week away I’m struck by several things that highlight the way that Web 2.0 is weaving its way in to our daily lives.

• Firstly, my posting from the deck of a canal boat shows that things like 3G enabled laptops, and the whole mobile revolution that is taking place, is getting the network to where we are.
  
• Secondly, the entries in to the [now being judged] Mashing up the Library Competition have shown that orchestrating services together has the potential to add massive value to user experiences.
  
• Then there is what Amazon is up to with their web services…..

  As a practical solution, to a combination of laziness and a concern about the vulnerability of the data on my home PC, I downloaded the beta [but already excellent] Jungle Disk and signed up to an Amazon S3 account. Now I have a copy of all my files, and more importantly my family’s files!, safely secured on Amazon’s spinning platters.  All for an estimated $2 for the first month (allowing for the 5Gb upload) and about $1/month there after.  - No more ‘why should I ‘ blank looks from the children when I ask them if they have backed up their work - and all at negligible cost.

  Then there is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The [very] limited beta hit the streets whilst I was afloat [with 3G card turned off] so I missed my invitation to join before it was full.  This is reminiscent of Sun’s Grid but somehow Amazon seem to have got their approach better, not to mention the price [$0.10 per instance per hour - Sun’s is currently $1.00 per CPU per hour]

  So, as I have mused before …
  

  
  

  The SOA Operating Platform is starting to emerge. Get your CPU cycles from a supplier like Sun [or now Amazon], get your network attached storage and queuing infrastructure from someone like Amazon, get your mapping application services from someone like Google, get your payment services from someone like PayPal, get your Library Domain specific Web Services from someone like Talis. Who, other than the core utility processing, storage, and queuing service providers, needs to invest in infrastructure anymore? 

  …it is getting to the stage where it will only be the Sun’s, Google’s and Amazons that will be running data centers.  The rest of us will just use them to run our services.  

• Also there is Worlcat.org an open site for you to search for items stocked by libraries which have invested in an OCLC subscription.  Complete with it’s downloadable search prompt, to put on your web page, it is yet another very small but significant step to get what people want to where they are when they need it.
  
• And finally, there is the tool I’m using to compose this blog entry.  Thanks to Lorcan for giving me the heads up on Windows Live Writer at last a tool that lets me type my blog entry in to a page that looks like my blog.  There be a few wrinkles that need ironing out of this beta tool, but if you had told me only a few moths back that I would be praising a Microsoft tool to edit my Movabletype blog entries I would have said you were winding me up.

Each of these examples, and many more, in their own right are not earth shattering in their impact.  Taken together, and compared with the landscape from this time a year back, shows a massive shift in what is possible, and more important an acceptance by others [not Web 2.0 & Library 2.0 anoraks like myself] that this stuff should be there by default and just should work.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Web Services,
Library 2.0,
Web 2.0,
MUTL06,
Amazon S3,
Talis, Talis Platform

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In a comment to my previous posting - about how the failure of the xISBN web service, provided by OCLC’s Office of Research was at the beginning of a series of issues that rippled through LibraryThing and LibraryThingThing, which even led to highlighting a defect in the current version of the Firefox web browser. - Eric Hellman gave an insight in to OCLC’s plans for this widely used useful service.

I direct the business unit at OCLC that has been charged with taking the xISBN prototype and developing it into a production-quality service.

Eric also gives an indication of the terms that the service will be made available under:

The current level of xISBN service will remain free; there will be enhanced levels of service and support that we feel confident will deliver excellent value for reasonable subscription fees.

In tune with my posting; If you want to use the service as it is now, it should be free; If you want to depend on a service you would expect enhanced levels of service and support. It remains to be seen what is meant by reasonable subscription fees. As would be expected, Eric doesn’t provide a release date for the new service - in his place I wouldn’t either.

When the production-quality service does become available, it will be a welcome addition the growing set of distributed dependable Library specific Web Services along side the Talis Platform APIs

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, xISBN, LibraryThing, LibraryThingThing, OCLC, Talis, Talis Platform

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Locan Dempsey mused in his post No User Interface

What would it be like to design library services with no user interfaces at all, with no direct web presence? To design them in such a way that they could only be consumed by other applications. These application might be prefabricated workflow managers, like course management systems, or the various tools which which we are self-assembling our work and learning environments, such as RSS aggregators, my.yahoo, and so on.

Well thats how to do it in a Web Services world - divorce the designers/developers of the functionality away from the concerns of how that functionality might be used or even look in front of the eventual users eyes. If they want to see the data, give them the XML display capability of IE - that should suffice!

Personal experience has taught me that if you design in this way you will end up a useful web service on top of which you can build your new OPAC, browser plug-in, etc. If you don’t you are very likely to end up with a new OPAC and very little else.

Lorcan closes his post

I am not at all suggesting that we not expose services through user interfaces: this would not make sense. I am suggesting that imagining that we have no user interfaces would make us work through some interesting questions about where and how people would benefit from being able to interact with library resources.

So I recommend that developers enforce upon themselves the discipline of delivering services to no user interface, and only when they are satisfied with that output should they start trying to make it look pretty for the end users. I am obviously assuming that end-user requirement will have been assessed prior to this - guessing functionl requirements can be a very inefficient approach to software development.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Library 2.0

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The E-Learning Framework is a major international initiative that has important implications for libraries. The UK part of it is the JISC e-Learning Programme supported by CETIS. Where could the international e-Learning Framework be in five years’ time? Some of the key international partners have outlined their vision.

Dan Rehak of the Learning Systems Architecture Lab, Carnegie Mellon University in the US

… hopes that in five years time there will be sufficient web service alternatives in each of the ELF service definitions or ‘bricks’ to allow institutions to choose the services most relevant to them and their institutional e-learning infrastructure. We mustn’t lose sight of the ultimate aim which is better learning opportunities for students.

Kerry Blinco and Neil McLean of the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) in Australia

… have an air of confidence that the service oriented approach will succeed. That confidence is probably built on the experiences of working with the Tasmanian Education Department who have successfully built a service based education environment. The Learning Architecture Project (LeAP) is delivering a number of interoperable online applications to enhance teaching and learning in 218 schools and colleges across Tasmania. …

Neil thinks that the framework is now at the cottage industry phase where academics, software developers and policy makers are involved in its development. In five years time Neil predicts that open source web services will have taken off and there will be a proliferation of teaching applications for people to use. At this stage it is important to keep both academics and software developers involved by using an iterative development process for the ELF that everyone feels that they can be part of.

Neil McLean co-authored, with Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information, a key white paper on Interoperability between library information services and learning environments.

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Following on from last Friday’s post I googled for ’service oriented’ and opened up a massive new vista on service oriented architecture and web services. Once again it’s that experience of trying to take a light drink from a fire hydrant. After a few minutes the most concise and informative article I found is http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/09/30/soa.html, which is part of a much larger site full of good related technical stuff that is generally at the right level to inform business thinking.