Adrian Stevenson (Mimas) discusses work using Linked Data as means of opening up and connecting library and archive collections. Recorded at Dev8D 2012, this interview  calls attention to some initiatives based on Linked Data approaches to opening up access to important datasets and resources.

Conducted in support of the JISC Observatory and as part of our Interviews with Innovators series, this interview is available in video as well as audio format. See below our interview transcript.

Adrian Stevenson is Senior Technical Innovations Coordinator (as part of the libraries and archives team) at at Mimas, a national centre for technical innovations and data hosting based at the University of Manchester. Adrian currently works on Open Data and Linked Data projects, including: the ’Linking Lives’ project, which uses archival Linked Open Data to build an interface based around names; the ‘Discovery‘ initiative, which is promoting aggregated open data for libraries, archives and museums.  For more information, see http://www.slideshare.net/adrianstevenson.

Transcript: Lightning interview with Adrian Stevenson

My name is Adrian Stevenson and I work as Technical Innovation Support Coordinator at MIMAS, which is a data centre and innovation centre based at University of Manchester. In terms of recent technology that interests me, I’ve done a lot of work in the Linked Data field which has been very popular over the last number of years. I’ve been working on a number of projects outputting Linked Data from libraries, museums and archives (particularly libraries and archives) data areas. It’s an interesting space and seems to be offering some benefits.

Q: Why do you consider this to be important?

I think Linked Data is part of the whole thing of getting data out of its silos, where it has often been trapped in websites and databases. Whilst there are lots of challenges in the Linked Data area, it’s potentially a way of getting stuff out on the web and using the web as a database of sorts: a large database. It also goes hand-in-hand with the Open Data movement, and people often talk about Linked Data and Linked Open Data (LOD) as very much being the same thing — which they’re not, actually, though they do work hand-in-hand. When you put your data out there in RDF, in Linked Data form, it makes very much sense for it to be open in terms of getting the benefits from it by doing it that way.

Q: What promising developments have you seen in this area?

JISC is funding lots of really good stuff in this area. I’ve worked on a project called LOCAH, which has been producing Linked Data, and at the moment we are working on a project called Linking Lives, which is essentially taking our archival Linked Data and trying to mesh it up with other Linked Data sources that are out there. Very typically this is often Wikipedia, which remains very much a hub in the Linked Data space. But we are really trying to link it up with anything else we can find, from JISC-funded projects.

Q: Where do you see benefits from this work?

Benefits come from recombining data sets in interesting ways. It helps mutually to enhance those data sets: instead of archival data being just about archives. If for example we can link to the BBC then we can potentially link to a movie and we can point to an interview and point to whatever archive holdings are to be found across the country. Generally, by bring these things together that enhances their individual value and it gets more out of the data really.

Q: If you had a magic wand, what would you change?

It’s still challenging and people talk about it being hard to do, which begs the question of what is hard. It still feels like it is quite slow-moving. There are not that many tools and you tend to have to be hand-coding things quite a lot of the time. And when you are bringing data sets together often there are challenges: for example, Linking Lives is very much about people’s names so if we have stuff on Bertrand Russell or Beatrice Webb and we want to link to stuff that DBpedia have got or to another service, we have to deal with the incompatible ways that names are used as names are very messy, so matching up data is actually quite tricky. Licensing of data is also another very typical issue I suppose and this is where the whole Open Data movement is trying to move things forward. So the more open the data is the better really. Yes, there are obstacles. Yet although it seems like it’s quite slow there seems to be a moving in the right direction. We saw recently that Library of Congress is looking at Linked Data solutions potentially to replace MARC as the way to go with bibliographic data. So it does look like it may stay the course.

Q: Could you say something briefly about the First World War project that you have been working on?

The First World War project is a bit more about Open Data and about the whole ethic of trying to promote that. Basically, we have just started this project so we are very much in the process of working out how we are going to do things. But the idea is that we will be looking at what open APIs are available for resources that have Open Data about World War I. At the moment we are in the phase of really looking into what’s out there ourselves. We are also working with some people at King’s College and in fact phase one of the project is called ‘Contemporisation’ and that’s really about finding out what’s out there. From our perspective, MIMAS  are working on phase two and that’s about specifically focusing on Open Data APIs. So it’s going to be interesting to see what data and what things we can find in relation to World War I. We might be surprised: there could be more than we expect, and that could be quite a challenge. We will then create a meta-API. Though we’re trying to avoid that word meta-API, we are basically trying to build an aggregation layer on top of what we find. So that is called the World War I Aggregation Exemplar Project and it’s part of the JISC-funded Discovery Initiative and that’s very much about Open Data and aggregating Open Data. We are attempting to build a layer over the top that brings information about World War I and the last stage of the project will be to build a couple of interfaces. We are going to be working with some external suppliers to build those interfaces. So it’s a very interesting project and timescales are very tight: we’re intending to have everything done by July this year so there are certain risks there you might say. It looks to be a very interesting area and there’s quite a lot of interest in the whole World War I space and I’m excited to be a part of that.

For more discussions of technical innovation in Higher and Further Education, see our Interviews with innovators and our complete list of podcasts available from UKOLN Innovation Support Centre. Subscribe to our podcast feed to hear the latest from innovators discussing technical developments relevant to Higher and Further Education.

David Shotton (University of Oxford) discusses work extending semantic publishing to enrich research literature and research data. Recorded at a EuroCRIS workshop, this interview calls attention to developments to enrich research communications, including machine-readable metadata with “links to related data resources and mashups with other data that’s available on the Web”.

Conducted in support of the JISC Observatory and as part of our Interviews with Innovators series, this interview is available in video as well as audio format. See below our interview transcript.

David Shotton (University Emeritus Reader and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College) is based in University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology and leads the Image Bioinformatics Research Group (IBRG), which is dedicated to research and the development of best practice for the sharing and reuse of biological research data (particularly images). Current interests and R&D activities include developing services for managing research data (DataFlow Project) and work in semantic publishing (developing exemplar articles and the SPAR Ontologies for describing all aspects of publishing, bibliographic entities and citations). Recent developments include creation of the Open Citation Corpus (containing the bibliographic citations from the reference lists in all the Open Access articles within PubMed Central) and MIIDI (Minimal Information standard for reporting an Infectious Disease Investigation). For more information, see: http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/people/view/shotton_dm.htm

Transcript: Lightning interview with David Shotton

My name is David Shotton and I work in the Zoology Department of the University of Oxford. I am a lapsed cell biologist and I spend all my time these data trying to get biological data onto the web but one of my other key interests is in semantic publishing: how we can enrich the literature.

Q: Which recent innovation in technology most interests you and do you consider this important?

Well the things that have been involving me most over the last little while have been developing ontologies for this semantic publishing domain and then extending those to cover research data and, most recently, data management plans so that the whole area of research endeavour can be described in machine-readable metadata.

Q: Where have you seen promising developments related to this?

One of the nicest things over the last year has been a series of meetings that have surrounded the future of research communication, which has brought together technologists and researchers and publishers and other interested parties. This culminated in the publication of the Force11 white paper last October and was sent to the UK government and to the Royal Society to inform their data collection activities.

Q: What do you see as the ultimate benefits?

Well what we are trying to work towards is research communications that are more expressive than the static PDF, which just replicates the printed page, so there would be user interactivity and there would be links to related data resources and mashups with other data that’s available on the Web and all sorts of things like that.

Q: And does this very much rely on openness?

Yes, another thing is the increasing openness for research publications but also for data sets and improved links between datasets and publications. Just so people can find their way around research outputs more easily and that datasets can be more easily reused. This helps get more value out of the research that was commissioned in the first place.

Q: If you could wave a magic wand, what obstacles would you remove?

Well I would remove the copyright barrier to text-mining of published journal articles. And I was very encouraged by the fact that someone from Oxford University Press phoned me very recently saying they had read the Force11 white paper and would like me to address them to discuss how they should change their working practices. That would be one of the things I would like them to consider: make their open access journals truly open, with the content to be re-used and not just read, and to make their literature citations open so they could be integrated with other peoples’ literature citations and things like that.

For more discussions of technical innovation in Higher and Further Education, see our Interviews with innovators and our complete list of podcasts available from UKOLN Innovation Support Centre. Subscribe to our podcast feed to hear the latest from innovators discussing technical developments relevant to Higher and Further Education.

Andrew Laughland (University of Hertfordshire) discusses the potential for academic researchers to transform data-gathering via smart phone technology. Recorded at Dev8D 2012, this interview explains how the rapidly increasing availability of smart phones presents researchers with opportunities to improve the reliability and scope of research data.

Conducted in support of the JISC Observatory and as part of our Interviews with Innovators series, this interview is available in video as well as audio format. See below our interview transcript.

Andrew Laughland is currently a doctoral student at University of Hertfordshire in the School of Psychology (with a first degree in Physics and Masters in Medical Physics). Previously he worked in the pharmaceutical industry and as a consultant assisting non-profit organizations and businesses with IT infrastructure, web presence, Web 2.0, Social Networking, RSS, podcasting and cloud computing.

Transcript: Lightning interview with Andrew Laughland

My name is Andrew Laughland and I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Hertfordshire in the School of Psychology. My first degree is in Physics and a Masters in Medical Physics and then a career in Health Physics, Health Information, and then the pharmaceutical industry with an IT focus.

Q: Could you tell us about an innovation that you believe will be important over the next 3 to 5 years?

My interest is in mobile phone technology, and some people would argue that’s not a new innovation. But my interest is in a new use of smart phones and smart phone apps. Typically the smart phone apps from the iTunes store or from Google are delivered to the customer and it’s about giving the experience to the customer in a game or in an app that helps the customer book something or find something. What I am interested in is an app that helps the researchers in the university to get information from people using the apps. So we use the fact that people are carrying smartphones around with them all the time, that they’re in their pockets and they can whip them out and give us some sorts of information, but rather than in being for their benefit it’s for the benefits of the researchers at the university.

Q: What do you see as the potential benefits of this?

A lot of what I have come across in Psychology has been done on paper, so there are studies looking at memory or experience of depressions, feelings or anxieties, and those typically require people to carry a little book around with them, and a pen in their bag and the risk there is that people don’t always record things or they record them without immediacy about when they record their information. So my thesis is that people carry phones around and they’re in their pockets; for eample, mine’s in my pocket at the moment, so I can just whip it out if there’s something that happens relevant to the study that I’m in. So I’m arguing that people can record data more quickly and have some benefits of a time-stamp on the data and I’m hoping that people will record more information as it’s made more convenient. And from a researcher’s point of view, researchers know that time that data was recorded and can be certain that it’s not recorded later in the evening or the day before they go in to see the researcher to hand the information back.

Q: Do you see examples of this happening now?

I think this is fairly novel. I think that, with thousands of apps out there, they all seem to be delivering the experience to the consumer and I have not seen a great deal of people using this to deliver the benefits to anyone of than the person using the app.

Q: What challenges do you foresee in the next few years?

I think the challenges at the moment are in the deployment to different platforms: the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and then perhaps the Windows mobile phone. There’s quite a lot of work to deliver to multiple platforms but there are initiatives to make that easier. And I think that disappointment is that a lot of the mobile companies and the manufacturers seem to be suing each other and I think that’s constraining innovation and delaying the deployment of new technologies and ideas.

Q: If you have a magic wand, what would you change?

I think it comes back to that: make the legal patent issues go away and reduce the barrier to the development of the apps and the deployment of the apps. There is still quite a high learning curve in terms of delivering to an Android and then delvering to an iPhone, with different programming languages to learn and different gatekeepers and different things you have to get past in terms of the certification and approval process. The ideal is to make that much reduced and make it easier for researchers who are not IT professionals to create their data-gathering tools without having to go through a huge learning curve or pay a third party to build applications for them.

For more discussions of technical innovation in Higher and Further Education, see our Interviews with innovators and our complete list of podcasts available from UKOLN Innovation Support Centre. Subscribe to our podcast feed to hear the latest from innovators discussing technical developments relevant to Higher and Further Education.

Dr. Mark Cox (King’s College London) explains how mobile devices are re-shaping support for e-learning in Higher Education.  Recorded at a EuroCRIS workshop, this interview discusses how student uptake of mobile devices is radically changing technology planning on campus.

Conducted in support of the JISC Observatory and as part of our Interviews with Innovators series, this interview is available in video as well as audio format. See below our interview transcript.

Dr. Mark Cox is ISS Customer Services Research & Learning Development Manager at King’s College London. He oversees development and maintenance of the King’s research management system (the Research Gateway), and is the Project Manager of the College’s VRE Project. As part of the JISC R4R project, he has gained an extensive knowledge of CERIF, and has worked with developers to construct a ‘CERIF wrapper’ for the Research Gateway. He is also a member of the REF Data Collections Steering Group, and of the JISC RIM expert working group. For more information, see: http://mice.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/?p=21

Transcript: Lightning interview with Dr. Mark Cox

I am Dr. Mark Cox, my job title is Research and Learning Development Manager, and my role is at King’s College London as part of the ITS Department.

Q: Could you tell us what you see as especially interesting and important over the next five years in technology?

I think the biggest thing, and unusually considering what I am actually here for today which is about research, I actually have a responsibility for e-learning at King’s College at the moment. And I think one of the issues that is likely to be quite dramatic over the next three to five years is the amount of learning that gets done on mobile devices. The whole iPad and tablet explosion I think it would be fair to say has probably changed the way that students are actually going to learn in the future. That’s what I think is one of the biggest things.

At the moment we are implementing a new e-learning system and we are looking at that rather in an ‘old-fashioned’ way though it’s not really that as it is only a couple years old: the model of students going into a student computing room and sitting in front of a PC and working with the technology that way. Of course that’s going to move to a completely different set-up now with the mobile and tablet devices.

Q: What are the challenges now that model is changing?

The challenges are keeping up-to-date with that change. There’s a big issue around cost because if you actually want to try to work out how students are going to use those devices you actually have to purchase those devices yourself. And that’s still not generally seen as something that’s almost legitimate at the University. Spending money on iPads is still seen as questionable (why are you doing that why are you buying yourself a toy?).

If the students have all got them and they’re able to connect to our e-learning system, then we’re already talking about apps on the mobile devices part of which would be to act as part of the e-learning system. Again, how do you test all these things? How do you actually deal with that?

Just keeping up with technology with technology is a challenge: three years ago we didn’t know much about iPads, and certainly not about other tablet devices, so how can we predict what the next steps will be?

Q: What do you see changing in the next three to five years, and what do you expect?

Two things I suspect will change. One is about the way that academics teach: what does this mean for the material they are going to put in place? Secondly, chances are the amount of support that we need to provide: this is now ‘bring your own technology’ and this is not something that we can control and this is not just a student computing room where is something goes wrong you just wipe the machine and re-image it. This is your own technology and if you cannot actually make it work what do you do? How do you support the student? How do you know about and deal with an Android browser vs Safari vs Firefox etc. There are lots of issues around how to keep the support for those things current.

Q: Who is involved with this sort of work at King’s College or elsewhere? Is it very diverse in terms of who is involved in looking at these sorts of challenges?

It’s fairly diverse yet moderately well linked. Certainly the IT Department effectively deal with the back-end system, the e-learning system. We’re looking at how we deal with support for the mobile devices, which is very difficult. Obviously we’re looking at what type of apps we could put in place and that potentially gives us a way to at least put some semblance of structure around this area because if you have one app that students will access then that’s at least one consistent thing that you can hold onto.

Around e-learning we have something called the Technology Enhanced Learning Forum, which is chaired by our Vice-Principal for Education so she has a big involvement in that. She has just created an new Technology Enhanced Learning Centre for which there is a director starting soon. They are going to pick up the issues around the way that you teach with technology. So I think they are looking more at what’s good practice area. Obviously we look after technology and they look after good practice.

Then each of the academic areas, each of the schools, they all have people who would be classified as learning technologists and they are the people who help their academics to make sure that the materials they put up are there in the first place and hopefully be given some sort of steer on what’s good and what’s bad.

Q: If you have a magic wand, what would you do?

I think about the finance issue, and if I could wave a magic wand and say ok we are going to buy an iPad for everyone in the University that would be one great thing. We tried to actually entertain that and buy iPads and then had them stolen, which is not good, as they are desirable objects so that’s a bit of a problem. I think I would like there to be a considerably larger amount of support for technology-enhanced learning. In the college, it tends to be a few experts and particularly people who have done it for a while and know a bit about it. What you tend to find is that sometimes they can frighten off the beginners. And these people who have done it for years say “Oh, this is the way forward: you need a repository for this”. They blind them with science. Better support across the board is something that I think would be useful.

For more discussions of technical innovation in Higher and Further Education, see our Interviews with innovators and our complete list of podcasts available from UKOLN Innovation Support Centre. Subscribe to our podcast feed to hear the latest from innovators discussing technical developments relevant to Higher and Further Education.

Thom’s current interests include:

• content management technologies supporting consumption and production of dynamic data sets
• automated generation of metadata from large collections of content
• sharing of content and data across systems
• visualisation tools capable of producing interactive, data-rich infographics

These interests build on Thom’s previous experience with leading-edge Web, digital TV, and mobile technology developments, within commercial and academic contexts.

As part of a recent development project Thom has created a new platform for the UKOLN online magazine Ariadne, which makes it easier to find connections and track trends across more than 1,600 articles published from 1996 to date. Based on Drupal, and featuring Highcharts JS functionality, this new version of Ariadne includes a tagging system to generate rich sets of metadata and highlight emerging trends across a broad range of content.