Science Library Pad

tracking your carbon

Data helps decisions.  Humans are visual.  There are a couple services that will help you visualise your carbon emissions:

TheCarbonAccount aims to show a complete picture of all your emissions.

The above graph is from my profile at http://www.thecarbonaccount.com/people/rakerman/

Dopplr has added a carbon profile feature in partnership with AMEE to track carbon from your travels (since Dopplr is a travel site).

Both of them make a lot of assumptions.  For example in Dopplr everything is air travel by default, you have to go in and manually edit each trip one-by-one if you want to change the travel mode, and the only other options are train and car.

In TheCarbonAccount I can't tell it that I buy green power from Bullfrog, or that I offset emissions, or that I take the bus to work.

This is an obvious killer app for Web Services.  For one thing, I should be able to send from Dopplr to TheCarbonAccount.  For that matter, my power consumption data from Bullfrog should also automatically feed TheCarbonAccount.  Individuals should be able to build their own end-to-end carbon footprint chain, using SOA.

The heck with FriendFeed, where's my CarbonFeed?

(I'm pretty sure I Twittered this idea a while back, but I can never find anything in my Twitter stream again.)

Previously:
January 18, 2008  carbon labelling

Microsoft Summit on Repository Interop - notes

April 1, 2008 - I had read the posting by Savas (probably via Lorcan), so it was great to have an opportunity to hear about Microsoft's thinking directly from them.  The most dramatic announcement was that Microsoft Research will be developing entirely on the Linux platform.

UPDATE: Lee Dirks said I almost gave him a heartattack with my little April Fools' prank, and the day is wearing on, so it's time to update and move my text up from the bottom...

Thanks go to Lee Dirks and David Flanders for making my first full day in Southampton a very interesting one.  The Linux platform bit is was my contribution to April Fools.  MS Research Tech Computing are in fact of course entirely dedicated to Microsoft platforms.  ENDUPDATE

For further discussion of the MS Repository Platform efforts, they have created a group

http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/90.aspx

I'm sure it has happened before, but it was the first time I had seen the leads/directors of Fedora (Sandy Payette), Dspace (Michele Kimpton) and Eprints (Les Carr) brought together.

There was a lot about SWORD and also some on OAI-ORE.

Notes on Microsoft Summit on Repository Interoperability event

Lee Dirks
External Research, Technical Computing
- Putting computing into science
- Putting science into computing

Science + computation are not the entire equation
* Microsoft must improve its offerings throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle

Approach: Conduct prototyping projects and proofs-of-concept to evolve Microsoft's scholarly
communication offerings

Five factors Microsoft considers key
* Interop is paramount
* Optimize for data-driven research & science
* Data preservation (and provenance) should be baseline
* Community protocols & conventions
* Social networking & semantic knowledge discovery

when possible IP shared at
http://www.codeplex.com/

Project Execution Models
* internal FTE
* external devel (vendor)
* external devel (institutional partner)
* mixed models

projects 1-2 years

Examples:
* GenePattern for Word 2008
- integrate data and images from GenePattern workflows into research papers
- will move into production in April/May 2008

* Math in Word 2007

* Chemistry Drawing for Office 15
- Peter Murray-Rust et al.
- Chemistry Markup Language (CML)
- proof-of-concept plugin ... but two versions of Office from now, Chemistry will be built-in (we hope)

* PLANETS
- EU project
- preservation of Office documents based on Office OpenXML (OOXML)

===

Savas
"Supporting researchers worldwide"

working towards an "eResearch Platform", a grouping of Microsoft tools that can support research

Flow: Author->Publish->Archive->Discover

Author
* Semantic Annotations for Word
(current target: protein databank)

* NLM DTD plug in - will support SWORD
- export a Word document in NLM DTD -> .nlmx

* Research Ribbon concept - tools relevant to researchers in Office

* can search arXiv from within Word using OpenSearch

Publish
* Conference Management Tool (also SWORD endpoint)
* eJournal - manage peer review (also SWORD endpoint)

Archive
* Research Output Repository (also SWORD endpoint and will support OAI-ORE)
* arXiv (also SWORD support)

? Repository interop/federation

Q: Shibboleth / OpenID support?
A: haven't started looking at it yet

===

Santosh
Microsoft's Research Output Repository Platform

Platform for storing scholarly works and metadata
- papers, videos, presentations, lectures, references...
- enables the development of new funcionality and services on top of the platform
- relationships between stored entitities

* SQL Server 2005 or 2008, Entity Framework, .NET 3.5

* the repository software (but not the servers) will be available to the community for free

Platform Overview
- variety of resource types (publications, tech reports etc.)
- resource tagging
- relationship between resources (triple-based)
- set of well-known predicates (IsVersionOf, Contains, etc.)
- new resource types and predicates through extensibility

Platform
* Core API
* Framework API
* OAI-PMH, Syndication, BibTeX, Search
- UI Web Controls

"A semantic computing platform"
- hybrid between relational database and a triple store

community.research.microsoft.com/forums/90.aspx

===

Stewart Lewis
Update on SWORD Protocol & Future Directions

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD

- Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit

JISC/CETIS end of 2005
- identified lack of standard deposit API as #1 issue

2006: Creation of Repository Deposit working group

November 2006
- JISC call for funding, bid submitted for SWORD
- Julie Alinson
- lightweight and agile project

Workpackage 1: Evaluate existing standards
- WebDAV
- JSR
- OKI OSID
- ECL
- SRW Update
- SPI Google Data API
- ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP)

-> page on wiki examining them all

Workpackage 2: Tech Dev
- DSpace
- Fedora
- Eprints
- intraLibrary
* Java client library
- command line, desktop app, web interface

Workpackage 3: User testing and feedback
- arXiv
- SOURCE
- SPECTRa
- White Rose Research Online
- FeedForward

How does SWORD work?
* Two stages
- Discover
GET a Service Document
- Deposit
POST an item to the URI of the collection

GET
- X-On-Behalf-Of
- get a URI

POST

SWORD extensions to APP
* SWORD level
- 0
  - basic
- 1
  - full implementation

- X-On-Behalf-Of
- X-Verbose
- X-No-Op
- X-Format-Namespace

Discovery SWORD interfaces
* Recommend /sword-app
* Recommend /sword-app/servicedocument
* Recommend <link rel="sword" href="/sword-app/servicedocument" />

Authentication
- Required: HTTP BASIC

What?
- any package supported by the repository
- DSpace/Eprints: ZIP files with a METS manifest in SWAP format, with files
- Fedora: image files / METS documents (pull in referenced data streams)
- OAI-ORE resource maps

SWORD 2
- follow-on project
? more APP
? UPDATE / DELETE
? more clients
? client libraries
? provide support to users

Q: What is relationship with APP?
A: none

Comment: Sandy - We need a basic protocol that supports read and write.
Comment: Michele - We need to get into workflow - Zotero, EndNote etc.

Q: OAI-ORE and SWORD together?

===

Experience implementing SWORD at arXiv.org
Simeon Warner
Thorsten Schwander

1. Background
2. SWORD implementation choices
3. Ideas for SWORD evolution

automating from Microsoft Conference Toolkit

CS unusual in that conference publications very important
- use arXiv to host open access proceedings

work internally at arXiv to present conference proceedings as a whole

http://arxiv.org/help/api

Authority
1. author
2. the conference organizer
3. the CMT system (will use the organizer's authority)

returning errors
- all additional errors returned HTTP 400 Bad Request
- return an Atom document for each error code

3. Ideas for SWORD evolution

* Primary goal should be to reduce pairwise customization

- improved self description
  - self-describe size limits for uploads
  - improved error reporting
  sword:errorcode with namespace (and with description)

Integration with complex workflows
- asynchronous notification

===

DSpace
Michele Kimpton

Interop

* Business
- need defined business case / use case need because there is a small developer community

community will rally around common protocols

* operational
- policy transfer-control
  - embargo, authentication, dark archive...
- metadata loss
- identifier compatibility and acceptance

* technical
- numerous content packages
- representation incompatibilities
- interpretation of standards

Community Efforts

* OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, SWORD, METS, IMS, SWAP
* federation acorss DSpace repositories
* working with key apps
* integration with "content creation" tools to ensure materials are deposited

===

issues: strong standardization of library *DATA*
        weak standardization of repository data

===

Les Carr
Eprints

drawing funny diagrams

user level interop

===

Sandy Payette
Fedora Commons and Interop

2007 Content Model Architecture (CMA)
- Registry of "content model" types for digital objects

Now: Simplicity

2008: Atom Syndication Format, OAI-ORE, simple common web APIs with wide appeal
and adopt other standads where possible

high-end interop (web services apis)
backend interop (Akubra) - various underlying storage - transactional stores, Sun HoneyComb,
Internet Archive PetaBox

* Topaz - application level objects and semantic interoperability

ligh-weight ways to let apps define object types

info objects mapped into triples and persisted in Mulgara triplestore

* Fedora Middleware Projects
- Simple JMS layer with e.g. Gsearch, OAI, Ingest on top

What do users really want interoperability to achieve?

Q (me): heavyweight APIs vs lightweight?
A: light for integration with web apps, heavy inside enterprise

===

Issues
- federation & interop
  - support for delete, update
  - document formats
- content creation opportunities
- content flow -> ingest

discussion of harvesting for search, Google Scholar

how are people providing federated search
- OAI-PMH
- one-off federated integration

Andy said something like "there's fundamental tension between simple and complex".
You can find Andy's liveblogging of the event through his Twitter stream

http://twitter.com/andypowe11

OCLC stuff - NISO Discovery Forum

Very raw notes.  Basically OCLC continues to build out services based on their data holdings, are adding services where organisations can provide additional information, and are aiming to systematize the services with documentation on OCLC DevNet.

Mike Teets
VP Global Engineering, OCLC

identities, xISBN, xISSN

other identifier services are coming...
xOCLCnum service
WorkID service?

-

Worldcat Identities

http://orlabs.oclc.org/identities

-

Worldcat API

OCLC Grid

"invitation only release"

essentially programmatic access to WorldCat

Web Services
- access WorldCat records and holdings
- mashups with WorldCat

Request: OpenSearch & SRU
Response Formats: RSS, Atom (OSS), Marc XML, DC (SRU)
Return holdings based on geographic context

WorldCat Search Web Service builder
(a demonstration application)

-

WorldCat Registry

institution registry

worldcat.org/registry/institutions

unique id for each institution

-

Worldcat OpenURL Resolver Gateway

worldcatlibraries.org/registry/gateway

Allows you to register your IPs and associated resolver.

contacts:
Roy Tennant tennantr@oclc.org
Don Hamparian hamparid@oclc.org *

Developer's Network
worldcat.org/devnet

Amazon S3 outage

Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations.  While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests.  Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.

Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls.  The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place.  In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles.  This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST.  By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.

As we said earlier today, though we're proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable.  As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements.  We are taking immediate action on the following:  (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls.  Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19714&start=75&tstart=0

Code4Lib Journal 1

The first issue of the Code4Lib Journal is up.
There is an article about the NCSU CatalogWS API - Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform.

I think it's great to have a library journal that can focus on more technical topics.

Previously:
November 06, 2007  NCSU CatalogWS API - DLF Fall Forum 2007

NCSU CatalogWS API - DLF Fall Forum 2007 - Nov. 6, 2007

Very interesting presentation by NCSU on their CatalogWS Web Services API they have build on top of their Endeca layer.

Here are my raw notes

Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform

UPDATE 2007-11-08: [PRESENTATION] ENDUPDATE

Next Generation Catalogs

Library Technology Reports - Next Generation Library Catalogs

Examples
* Endeca (NCSU Libraries)
* AquaBrowser
* Encore (UQueensland)
* ExLibris Primo
* WorldCat Local
* Solr (UVirginia Project Blacklight)
* vufind (also Solr powered)

Modern search
- relevance
- faceted
- tag clouds
New content
- user contributed content
? enriched content
? content or context awareness?

Focused on optimizing a single discovery context... the OPAC

Question

Why should the discovery of catalogued library collections be limited to user interaction
with a single catalog application?

Catalog as Discovery Platform, beyond the OPAC

Web Services: CatalogWS API

Platform

"a platform is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers..."

- quote from Marc Andreesssen

Discovery Happens Elsewhere

"No single website is the sole focus of a user's attention."

- quaote from Lorcan Dempsey

Platform Motivation

* move beyond the one-size0-fits all approach
make it easer to reuse and repurpose catalogue data outside the opac
* build catalog interaces optimised for different use contexts

CatalogWS API

Goals
- can we have RSS feeds for the catalogue
- can we integrate catalog results into library website quick search

Final result
* rich API

[diagram of architecture]

API implemented as layer on top of Endeca

Limitations
- subset of catalog data
- read-only
- not real-time

Technical Design
- RESTful
- Java, Tomcat, XOM, Saxon 8.8, JSON

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/ws/

* discovery-oriented
* catalog availability (known item lookup isbn)
* catalog search (both known and exploratory searching)

can pass a style parameter (URL of XSL), for server-side XML transformation, or XML to XHTML

Why new XML schema?
- include as much of data as possible in reponse
- MARC XML and MODS didn't appear capable of capturing the varied data
- XML response includes links

Demo of Current CatalogWS Apps

* integration with external apps
- Quick Search (NCSU library website search)
- iGoogle Widget

* alternative catalog interfaces
- mobiLIB catalog
- facetbrowser

Collection Promotion
- FacetBrowser - ability to easily create blog entries for selected items
- automatically generated "bookwalls"
- RSS feeds for new titles

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/catalogwsapps/

Internet Archive 20th Century Search - DLF developers' preconference - Nov 3, 2007

Before the main event there was a preconference (with a fraction of the main attendees) exploring technical challenges and possible collaborations.  There were also a couple brief presentations, here are my raw notes on Kris Carpenter Negulescu, the Director of the Internet Archive Web Group talking about

"20th Century Find" using Amazon S3 & EC2

Internet Archive stats

3.5 PB
1.5 million downloads/day

this project is about providing full-text search of their web archive for the 20th century 1996-2000, ~22TB

NutchWAX = Nutch + Hadoop
focus moving to Nutch with plugins

Amazon S3
Amazon EC2 (beta)

there are now more EC2 node options: small (default), large, extra large 8 times small performance and better I/O ($0.80/cpu hour)

indexing began in October 2006
1996: indexed via 20 EC2 in ~36 hours
1997: 100+ EC2 nodes
1998: 300+ EC2 nodes

1999 was attempted in September 2007 using cluster of ~270 EC2 nodes but halted due to lack of
consistent CPU/IO across nodes.

deployed (alpha) index is 1.35TB in size, no compression, ~600 mill docs

Enhancements
* multiple instances of a page
* improved ranking of results
* handle dimension of time
* easy UI

Why Amazon Web Services
* pay as you go
* simple to provision
* committed to support
* indeal for indexing Web pages, providing offsite storage, reliable hosting
* great platform for experimentation, iteration
* geographically disperse from Internet Archive ?Data Repository?

Cost Effective, budgeted $20k

* Note: fees can add up fast if not vigilant

Working Well

* APIs
* tech support
* S3
* fee structure
* speed of provisioning
* S3 uniformity of nodes

Challenges - S3

Oct 2006 - June 2007

* (internal?) bandwidth availability
* no specific guarantees for data preservation
* issues related to popularity of the service

Fall 2007

* available bandwidth consistent (~4h to move 7.5TB into EC2)

Challenges - EC2

lots of issues Oct 2006 - June 2007
* location of S3 nodes relative to EC2 was a significant factor for large-scale data processing

July 2007 - present

* working well but hitting IO and CPU constraints on small (basic, default) nodes;
however will continue to use these small nodes

Consider Using AWS When

S3
* need cost-effective backup for data
* multi-provider preservation, geographically diverse

EC2
* if you have spiky computing needs (e.g. spikes in demand)
* you have available R&D resources

Will experiment with AWS for crawling and harvesting, starting Jan 2008, Heritrix/AWS.

tutorial on SOA and Web Services from ICEC06

Several NRC researchers presented a Tutorial on Service Oriented Architecture: (Semantic) Web Services, Business Process Modeling, Software Engineering last year at ICEC2006, The Eighth International Conference on Electronic Commerce.

Slides:

Introduction

Web Services

Formal Methods for Web Services Process Modelling

Semantic Web Services

Wrap-up: Semantic Service Computing (SSC) project in NRC

redesign the library web site as a set of network services

The last three weeks I’ve been thinking a great deal about the role of my department in fulfilling the Libraries mission and where the department needs to go in the next 3 years. Part of getting where we want to go has been this whole site redesign process. But not in the way most of the library thinks.

...

Long term I’d like a site which has a series of web services that can be exploited by my developers but also my the university web developers and who knows who else.

...

For faculty and grad students who want to do known item searching in our catalog, maybe something like LibX is the way to go. Or maybe allowing users to create their own search interface to a set of particular resources that they can embed in their browsers search bar or on their desktop as a search widget.

Ultimately, I feel like it is these kinds of services that will make of break a library’s virtual presence not the library website.

Library Web Chic - The future of Web Services isn’t the Library website - September 16, 2007

Err, ditto.

Previously:
July 16, 2007  Library Journal netConnect - Web Services and the Social Catalogue

software development, staffing and new library technology

Librarian in Black responded to my article in Library Journal netConnect, and Richard Wallis' commentary thereon.  She says

What makes me sad is that both Ackerman [sic] and Wallis have missed a key point: if the future is in web services, how can libraries take advantage of that with their current staff configurations?  How many libraries in the U.S. have a honest-to-goodness computer programmer on staff?  How many have staff with Computer Science degrees?  How many staff do they have devoted to the library's hardware, software, and network?  How many staff do they have devoted to web services?

In the smallest libraries, perhaps all of these are the same one person.

My article is about modern software engineering for libraries, not on how to staff them.  However, in the very same issue of netConnect there's an article by Karen Coombs "Digital Promise and Peril" calling for library staffing to reflect the digital content environment

Many of these digital materials are in jeopardy of being lost because librarians have not yet found adequate ways to collect and manage them. In part, this is because roles and skill sets have been siloed in libraries. Materials preservation issues have typically been the purview of special collections and archives units within the library. In contrast, cataloging expertise has resided in technical services, and technology expertise has typically resided in systems. To collect and manage born digital objects adequately requires these roles and skill sets to come together.

So let me summarize some of the goals and targets of the article, as well as talk about the relationship to promising developments:

• The main focus of the article is to convey to library administrators, managers and planners that the world of networked digital content requires new ways of thinking about developing library systems, and that there are modern software engineering methods and technologies that can support new systems development.
• It may be the case that, as in Sarah's words, the library blogosphere knows that "Of course the future is in web services" but it took years of hard lobbying and education within my organisation to convince my own library leadership - that's why I was happy to have the forum of Library Journal, to reach a wider audience.  I have to believe there are many library managers who have no idea where the technology future lies, and have only a vague notion of web services.
• If I can get one library manager to be able to ask good questions about web services and service-oriented architecture, and even (dare I dream) read one of the books I recommended with more detailed information on the topic, my goal is achieved.
• I recognize that many public libraries don't have the staff for development, and never will.  That's why I have said in the past that librarians should be scripters, not coders.  Most libraries should be using technology developed externally, not trying to do their own custom internal development, or as I said in my article, they should be technology service consumers, not necessarily producers. There are only a few libraries in the world (including mine) which have the size to have a substantial development staff.
• I work at a research library, not a public library nor an academic library.  Research libraries like mine now interact with patrons almost entirely online - our walkin traffic is basically zero.  That means we have to move into the networked information space very aggressively, or basically disappear as a presence for our users, replaced by publisher web sites.
• By moving to standard APIs, using standard modern development methods, and standardizing web services, libraries can take advantage of a much broader development community, and potential staffing pool.  How many software developers do you think know Z39.50, MARC, and SRU/SRW?  That's why we have a tiny community of library hackers trying to make things work.  Now imagine that instead your library software job poster just says "developer needs to work with standard Java tools to develop software using modern methods for standardized APIs".  Getting access to a better, broader staff base is intimately connected to moving library technology into the mainstream of software development.

Where can we look?

Maybe the DLF project on ILS APIs will help.

Maybe the OASIS effort on standardising search services will be useful.

Maybe it happens by using OpenSearch and simple REST interfaces rather than custom library protocols.

UPDATE: There is another important piece, which is about libraries reaching out and speaking the right language.  That's why you need to understand how to express things in terms of SOA, Web Services, and APIs.  There is way more innovation capacity outside your walls than you can ever get inside, even if you have the perfect IT staffing policy and budget.  From your local superpatrons, highschool CS students, and local college and university computer science departments, to, basically, every CS student in the entire world.  You can reach them with contests, with collaboration requests, with invitations to improve your systems... but here's the important part... if you speak their language.  CS people love challenges and programming, but they're not going to learn obscure library jargon and usage like OPAC, Z39.50 and database (which means something completely different in CS).  You can't say "hey, can you help us improve our OPAC because the Z39.50 doesn't federate across our databases".  They're not going to know what the f*** you're asking.  Learn the CS language, and a whole world of programmers will open up to you.

To me one of the single biggest missed opportunities is in the digital library community.  Ever year, lots of computer science groups, flush with energetic grad students, toil away and produce results that are presented at JCDL and ECDL.  And, based on my experience at ECDL 2006, they then present those results entirely to a community of other computer scientists.  Where are the librarians?  Why are you all at library conferences talking to other librarians?  Come to *CDL and ask the computer scientists to build stuff you need.  Yes, it's a difficult transition from research to production, but at least join the conversation.  ENDUPDATE

I don't have the answers and I have certainly asked again and again where people see all these frameworks and groups fitting together, with no response.

The good news is that there are lots of projects out there already - I don't think it's a case that there is no activity.  The fundamental point of my article is that for these projects, we have to use enterprise architecture, service-oriented architecture, web services / standard APIs and the whole toolkit of modern network-based standard-data software development.  Because if we don't, WE WILL BUILD SILO SYSTEMS AGAIN.

That's what I said in my IATUL presentation, and in the short accompanying paper (Scribd), and what I've been saying over and over again in this blog.

[Sidebar on Scribd: be careful browsing around this document hosting site.  Many of the profiles, profile images, and documents are unfortunately very not safe for work.  Scribd really needs to put in a moderation / adult content filtering system.]

Why do I think it's important to talk about these topics?  Because there really are lots of new developments in the library catalogue and OPAC world, including:

• Scriblio - "free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress"
• VuFind - "The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC"
• Evergreen Open ILS - including British Columbia Pines project - "The phased implementation of the Evergreen Open ILS for all of BC ("BC PINES") be implemented over the next 5 years. We hope that eventually all public libraries in BC will join"
• eXtensible Catalog (XC) - "an open-source online system that will unify access to traditional and digital library resources"
• CERN systems redevelopment - build a complete high-energy physics (HEP) information system with full-text, data-mining and demonstrate and deploy Web 2.0 applications in the domain of sciences

There are also some great modular browser tools out there, including

• LibX - a Firefox extension that provides direct access to your library's resources [and] an open source framework from which editions for specific libraries can be built.
• Zotero - a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources

I'm very much hoping that these developments will open libraries up to be better network participants, with a broader community of developers able to build pieces, and with standards enabling libraries with limited development capability to simply plug-and-play.

Some links via The Ten Thousand Year Blog: eXtensible Catalog open source project, VuFind released as open source software.

Previously:
June 29, 2007  Casey Bisson on Scriblio and OpenLibrary

Library Journal netConnect - Web Services and the Social Catalogue

Library Journal netConnect for July is out (July 15, 2007).  The cover theme is the "Social Catalogue".  All of the content is free online as usual.

On this theme are an article I wrote about Library Web Services, advocacy by John Blyberg about the need for open APIs ("Always Pushing Information"), and an explanation of one way to Visualize Your Catalog using Grokker, by Kate Bouman et al.

I want to thank Jay Datema for this opportunity to share these concepts with a wider audience, and in particular for his patience during the extremely long genesis of my article.

I do want to add some supplementary information. 

"web services also refers to one specific technology implementation" - by this I mean the industry Web Services stack, SOAP-based services.  This shouldn't be confused with SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture, which is a conceptual framework.  There is a short version of my sidebar on SOA in the article, but with Jay's permission, the full original version is attached below.

I did a set of supplementary bookmarks for the article, but somewhere along the line I forgot to include them in the article itself, anyway, they're available at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/ljwebservices

UPDATE: As it happens, Jon Udell blogged a plea today for the most basic of catalogue interfaces, a standard ISBN syntax in the URL.  Via panlibus.  ENDUPDATE

I will also try to finish the blog posting of a long-overdue review of the 4 SOA / Web Services books I recommended at the end of the article.

You can of course read more as well in my (sometimes overlapping) blog categories on Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services.

As well, Peter Murray has been advocating for library SOA, and has set up an aggregator to gather various blog postings on the topic:

http://librarysoa.dltj.org/

Finally, here's the full sidebar that I wrote:

Library SOA

In the library world, we are often bombarded with new technology terms and ideas.

In this article, I will discuss Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services, providing a framework for understanding their differences and complementary nature.

In this way, it should become evident which aspects will be of enduring value, and which will change as technology evolves.

Often SOA and Web Services are used interchangeably but they are actually quite different. SOA is a methodology for software architecture and for guiding software development. The library technology landscape is littered with towering monoliths of software and teetering siloed systems. We shouldn't feel too bad about this: when catalogues and digital libraries were being developed, these were reasonable implementations. It is only as the software engineering field has evolved that we have realized the problems caused by developing closed, inflexible systems.

SOA is a way of thinking about software, of breaking it down into appropriately-sized component parts, and minimizing the dependencies between those parts. It also helps to guide your thinking by emphasizing reusability. Having reusability as a core consideration reminds the developers that their code is not ephemeral - it will almost certainly be around for a long time, which means that it is critical to make it maintainable and extendable.

Web Services are a technology that can be used to implement a Service-Oriented Architecture. They have some characteristics that mesh well with the requirements of an SOA. But Web Services are just the latest technology to come, and are sure to be replaced or added to by future developments. As well, there is a potential danger of complexity creep, as more and more WS-* standards are developed.

So the important thing is to take the concept of Web Services, that of providing a well-defined interface, an API that exposes useful capabilities or data from within your organization, and select a technology as appropriate. This may be full Web Services with SOAP, it may be a simple HTTP REST interface, or both, or neither. It’s the idea that’s important, not the particular technology. In fact, what is a service, within an SOA? It’s simply a bundle of functionality with a well-defined interface.

When developing software, regardless of methodology or technology, it is important is to have the concept of sustainability in mind. There is a balance of course between long-term benefits and short-term gain. Many will argue that too much design or planning interferes with organizational agility, that it is better to rapidly deploy something, than to tilt against the windmill of perfectly engineered software.

But the fact that we now have OPAC 2.0 and “new ILS” initiatives tells us that we need to learn the lesson of sustainable software. To put it bluntly: with the library catalogue, we slowly built a software system that no longer meets all of our needs. With mashups and quickly hacked APIs, we run the risk of rapidly building software systems that will not be able to meet our needs.

Service-Oriented Architecture is the latest, and by no means perfect, method of addressing enduring challenges of software design. It is a new way of describing and communicating the concepts behind the software you build; a way of maintaining the essential conceptual integrity needed to successfully build sustainable computer systems.

SOA is a framework that sits above the development process itself. SOA does not require a waterfall model of development. We know a failed approach is trying to do all the design up front and then, perhaps after substantial time has passed in the design phase, writing the code. In fact, I believe the best results will be obtained by iterating the architecture, that is, continuously refining the framework by going back and forth between implementing defined services, and updating service definitions based on the results. I think it is important to remember that modern software engineering is about the development of software as a conversation between design and implementation, not a one-way street.

Like any methodology, there is a risk that SOA can lead to an excess of complexity, and to trying to over determine requirements that may change quickly. Be wary of elaborate SOA processes that are better matched to giant Fortune 500 companies than to the needs of basic library systems. But with all those caveats in mind, the core of SOA is quite simple: define what functions the business wants to perform, and then break those functions down into the smallest useful pieces.

This is the concept of service granularity: identify services that are large enough to provide substantial useful functionality, without being so large that they are in danger of becoming new silos. As luck would have it, we already have a fairly good idea of basic library functions, as defined by our current catalogues. We first need to break those services out of the ILS silos, and then look at adding new capabilities beyond what the ILS could offer.

There is a possibility for us to all escape the isolation of our OPAC islands, by working together to create common library service definitions, so that we move beyond the catalogue and are interoperable right from the start. I believe this is a tremendous opportunity for the library community, because standard services are the very foundations upon which innovation is built. We look to Amazon and want to capture some of the software development energy that builds upon Amazon’s services, but we have to realize that behind the scenes, Amazon has an internal SOA that helps to guide and sustain its service framework.

SOA is, in a way, like infrastructure. We benefit enormously from the fact that electrical, water, and other services in buildings are standardized, with uniform interfaces and attributes. I don’t think many people would want to work in an environment of “agile electricity”, where every wall socket had a different interface and electrical characteristics. That basic foundation of standards is what SOA can provide to the library world.

We all know that there are successful standards efforts, and there are those that languish. This is the moment, as libraries are starting to explore the world of Web Services, for us to work together as organizations to put in place the infrastructure, the simple set of basic standards, the library Service-Oriented Architecture that will form a platform for sustainable innovation for years to come.

SRU/SRW and library Web Services webibliography

Des Bibliothèques 2.0 blog has an extensive list of SRU/SRW and library Web Services articles, postings and documents (including some from Science Library Pad) with a brief explanation of each item in French:

SRU/SRW : Webographie / Webography

SOA video from e-Framework

A slick video (animation) explaining Service-Oriented Architecture from a university and e-Science perspective.  Available in QuickTime or Windows Media, or you can read just the raw transcript.

Introducing the Service Oriented Approach

near the end it talks about the myGrid scientific workflow project.

via David Flanders

Just to revisit a theme that continues to concern me: are major library-related IT architecture groups talking to one another?  Should they be?  We learned not to build siloed systems, are we building siloed architectures?

Initiatives I am aware of include:

• e-Framework for Education and Research
• Digital Library Federation Services Framework
• Rethinking Resource Sharing Policies Committee (buried as a subcommittee of a subcommittee, and password-protected, in typical ALA fashion)
• DEFF XML Web Services (Danish library Web Services)
• Education Commons - SOA in Higher Education
• Fedora Web Services and workflow
• DELOS Digital Library Architecture
• lots of work every year presented at the various Digital Library Conferences
• various grid and e-Science projects
• UPDATE 2007-06-02: California Digital Library (CDL) Common Framework ENDUPDATE

Previously:
December 20, 2006  my presentation on SOA and BPEL for Access 2006
July 16, 2006  library Web Services - are we making any progress

OLA 2007 - next generation ILS presentations

Ontario Library Association (OLA) Superconference 2007 presentations are up.

I haven't checked many of them, but I do highly recommend

ILS, The Next Generation: Modularity and Outward Integration (PowerPoint)

and

The Changing Nature of the Catalogue and its Integration with Other Discovery Systems (PowerPoint)

both by Karen Calhoun

UPDATE 2007-02-13: Since I find myself accidentally in the position of "recommender" (thanks LISnews), here are a couple more that I liked

* Perceptions and Expectations of the [Public] Library Brand (PDF)

An interesting examination of the challenge in extending the perception of the public library beyond books.  I liked this slide:

The term "library" cannot [be] extended to include services other than the circulation of books when there is little public trust in the brand.

The good news is that many public libraries have successfully branded themselves as knowledge providers, going far beyond books.

* Lastly, the obligatory blogwikiflickr presentation, although in 2007 I feel this is a bit like being in 1967 and talking about the marvel of the internal combustion engine, aren't blogs already retro?  Aren't we beyond the "blogs are exciting and new, come aboard, we're expecting you" stage?

Web Tools to Inspire Learning (PowerPoint)

Danish library strategies

DEFF (Denmark's Electronic Research Library) has released a discussion paper that I would characterize as "possible roles for the (digital) library)".

Discussion Paper about Library Development in Denmark

It's a 16 page PDF (in English).  Lots of good background and interesting ideas.

via the DEFF RSS feed which is on their site somewhere

I also noted recently the release of what my mangle-Danish-into-English translation makes out as "new plan for bibliotek.dk"

Nye planer for Bibliotek.dk

It appears to be a fairly detailed technical plan, absolutely none of which I can understand other than by using my aforementioned "that word looks similar to an English or French word" translation approach.

Clearly, the solution is to send me to Denmark immediately.

On which note, Danish library/technology people, feel free to contact me.  I actually sent two emails a while ago but they seem to have gone unanswered.  I want to discuss more about Danish library Web Services.

UPDATE 2007-02-06: My Flickr photos tagged Denmark from when I was at InfoGrid 2005 and Euro Fedora 2005.

SenseWeb data mapping from Microsoft Research

SenseWeb is a research portal that lets users visualize and query real-time data using a geographical interface such as Windows Live Local and allows data owners to easily publish their live data using web service interfaces.

http://research.microsoft.com/nec/senseweb/

events on Web Services and Service Composition

5th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)

and

1st International Workshop on Service Composition and Adaptation (WSCA-2007)

this workshop aims to bring researchers and practitioners from different domains with varying research background and building a knowledge-base cutting across the fields of distributed computing and middleware, software service com, artificial intelligence and formal methods to effectively address problems related to Web service composition and adaptation. Specific topics of interest include:

# Software infrastructure for service composition
# Case studies, and applications (e.g., in e-science and scientific workflows)

Workshop CFP deadline March 16, 2007
July 9-13, 2007. Salt Lake City, Utah.

via Glen

A slightly less technical audience may be more interested in SCC 2007 (same time, same place)

2007 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2007)

SCC 2007 will concentrate on the science and technology of Business/Application Services and the bridging technologies such as Business Strategy and Design, Business Process Integration and Management, Grid and Utility Computing, and SOA Services and Solutions

presentation on library services 2.0

You know it's strange, I don't really browse videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, but I do find all sorts of stuff of interest on SlideShare.  I guess because I am an information junkie.

I found a great presentation Services 2.0 dans les bibliothèques vers des bibliothèques 2.0 ? that covers the various aspects of integrating your library into web browsers and into other web sites, as well as improving your own library site.

The author of the presentation blogs at BibliObsession.net.  It's in French.  Be warned there are some possible NSFW images there.

(If for some reason you're interested in the discovery chain, it was via Mediapolis who favorited my Web 2.0 presentation, to the presentation Blogs et wiki : outils et phenomenes - it was third in the "related slideshows".)

Second Life, Warcraft, and SOA

Yes, I can relate anything to SOA.

I was thinking about the experience that Steve and I had with Second Life, which is, we went in, we wandered around, but we couldn't quite figure out what it was for.  There was no game.  There was nothing to do.  We were homeless and impoverished.  (Well, I was impoverished.  Steve has six dollars.)

I think the answer is that it was the wrong question.

Second Life is platform, not narrative.

We were tripped up by assumptions, based on our previous experiences and background.  Computer Science people of my generation are used to being outside of programming environments.  In Google Sketchup, you also create 3D objects, but you don't create them from inside of a virtual environment, you create them from the outside, Godlike view.

Second Life is like the blinking cursor on a Commodore 64 screen.  READY, it says, and you don't say "what is the narrative" you say "what can I do with this?"  Second Life is like the Tron version of the C64, where you're inside the computer looking out.  The fact that you're inside the SL environment is what threw my thinking askew.  I'm used to programming environments where you're outside, looking in.  In my lifetime, rich visual interaction (well, as rich as was possible on the technology of the moment) has been mainly used for games.

Second Life is a hammer and nails, not a book.  You don't ask "what's the narrative of a hammer?"  Our difficulty with SL was contrasted with our immediate understanding of World of Warcraft.  WoW meets our assumptions, in that it fits into one of the visual game assumption slots, the "Dungeons and Dragons on a computer" one.  There are only a few types of computer games really.  I won't list them all, but here's resource management like in Civilization, there's first-person shooter like Doom, there's abstract shooter like Asteroids, these are all narratives that long-time computer users of my generation understand immediately.

Second Life is not a book, it's a World Processor.  It's interesting that we didn't immediately perceive Second Life as a command-line prompt, because that certainly would have made things clearer.  I don't expect any narrative from the prompt of my terminal application.

There is actually a whole set of relationships to command prompts that I think is interesting to explore.  (And yes, we are getting to SOA eventually.)

David Brin got a lot of attention in the CS community with his article Why Johnny can't code, and certainly those of us from the TRS-80 / Commodore 64 / Apple II era have been wondering how kids get into computer programming these days, without that flashing prompt of the BASIC programming language.  I had been speculating that "the new coding" was designing levels using game editors (many of the Doom / Unreal type games include editors to create new game environments).  Second Life would be a natural extension of this.  So maybe "Johnny doesn't code, he creates in SL?"

The path for my generation of programmers looks quite different.  Flashing READY prompt.  Then maybe an Adventure game (text-based).  They're related in a twisted way.  Most of the adventure games suffered from a limited and extremely specific vocabulary, which turns out to be the same "suffering" that a computer programming language has.  As we were decoding the syntax of C64 commands and lines of BASIC, we were typing stuff into adventure games like

"open the golden cage"
UNKNOWN

"unlock the gilded cage"
CAN'T PARSE THAT

"use heavy hammer on cage"
UNRECOGNIZED OBJECT "ON CAGE"

"get the ^%$^ bird out of the *%&^&*^% cage!!!"

and so on

Eventually that led to MUDs, and MUDs are a clear lineal antecedent of Second Life.  In MUDs you could also create objects and do programming.  However, I think few people embraced the platform aspect of MUDs, most people used the narrative of the D&D type quest game.  Second Life is sort of like a MUD without the game built yet.

This difficulty between the abstraction of an empty platform and the immediate understanding of
a narrative is evident to me when I talk to librarians and others about SOA (you see I told you I was getting here eventually).  They always say "that's nice, but give me concrete examples".  In the context of this posting, I guess I would say, "Web Services are a hammer, not a book, and SOA is the architecture of the house you could build with that hammer".

In a similar way, this illustrates some of the challenges between the catalogue and the idea of a general open library technology platform.  The catalogue has narrative.  I would argue it's the wrong narrative, with concepts mis-adapted from the traditional librarian-card catalogue-patron world of paper, but it is as least something one can grasp.

The attraction of narrative is probably one of the reasons that Steve and I have been spending way too many hours in WoW, while our visits to SL usually last about five minutes.

In my next posting, I will talk more about how assumptions can create challenges and barriers, specifically about how extending analogue library paper world assumptions to digital can lead to incorrect conclusions.

Tapscott: turn your organization inside-out

Ok, the way he puts it is

Part 5: Platforms for Innovation

This is a very important, key concept.
In fact, let me say it again, with colour and size:

This is a very important, key concept.

This is absolutely foundational, in fact, to understand a lot of the issues that I talk about.

The core is as simple as simple can be: you get more from sharing than from secrecy.
But you have to understand the context of "secrecy".  In many cases, anything that is not published on the public Internet, might as well be in a locked box on a high shelf.  In fact, you might as well print it out, send it to the new Library of Alexandria, and burn down the new library.

The benefits of sharing are so enormous, and the extra overhead so tiny, that I have never quite understood why people don't post more information publically on the net.  My thinking has always been "if I do this for myself, maybe there is someone else out there it might be useful for".  Considering that a page I did for myself as a firewall sysadmin gets over a million hits per year, it appears this concept is valid.

During the time of the Clinton Administration, as reported (in passing) in The River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester, they turned classification inside out.  Instead of saying "prove this should be declassified", they said "prove this should be secret".  That led to the author of the book getting a map of China that, I suspect, he would no longer be able to get today.

This is the challenge for your organization.  Don't ask yourself "what's the justification for sharing this information on the net".  Ask "can anyone strongly justify NOT sharing this on the net".

I see the most ridiculous stuff go on.  Librarians (and many others) take written notes at conferences, then labouriously transcribe them to a written report, which is then emailed to like two other people and immediately forgotten/lost.

People don't have crystal balls to see within your organization or within your mind.  If you don't share your information, you might as well be invisible.  How's that for a slogan?  "Share transparently or be Internet invisible".  Additionally, these are not the days of late-1994, early-1995 when I first put up a website.  Then an interesting effort was highly visible, because there were so few pages.

There are now billions of pages.  The good news is, you can still rise out of those "foothills".  The bad news is, if you have a search surface, an acreage (hectarage?) if you will, that is tiny, you have very little chance of being noticed.  If your land isn't continually being expanded and improved, in fact, it will probably get little (search engine) notice.  So here's another concept: "Sharing increases your search surface".  In security, we talk about making your "attack surface" or "vulnerability surface" as small as possible.  Internet presence is the opposite: you want to make your Internet surface as big as possible.

I know this is true, because my website and my blog bring me incredible contacts and opportunities that I could never have imagined, despite the fact that both Internet surfaces are often little more than "stuff that I wanted to research and think about anyway, which I'm sharing because there's no reason not to, and someone else may have similar interests".

Anyway, this posting has grown very long, but that is because it is of such critical importance.  Think beyond container to content.  Think beyond content to sharing content.  That is where everything is going to be happening.  That is going to be the new expectation.  If you've seen the controversy in Toronto and Ottawa about private municipal contracts and secret city meetings, that thinking is mired in the past.  Citizens, young and old, are going to be demanding the end to ridiculous, needless secrecy, from their governments and from all other organizations that they deal with.

So what is library Service-Oriented Architecture about?  It is about no more (and no less) than helping libraries collectively to build an open, shared platform, that enables sharing of containers (e.g. books) as well as sharing of content (e.g. articles).

Here's how Tapscott puts it

A growing number of smart companies are learning that openness is a force for growth and competitiveness. As long as you're smart about how and when, you can blow open the windows and unlock the doors to build vast business ecosystems on top of what we call "platforms for innovation."

Because I am a prideful creature, I must say I wrote this entire posting after having read only the first few sentences of Tapscott's article today, it is therefore heartening synchronicity to read

Jeff Barr, who runs Amazon's Web services program says developers and marketplace sellers are "increasing the surface area of Amazon." They add more and more things to sell, in more and more places on the Web. All of this happens in a completely self-organizing fashion, which makes Amazon's already low overhead even lower.

So let's wrap it up with a final combination: library SOA will increase the Internet surface of all participating libraries.

Web Services for Learning Object Repositories

Via SlideShare I discovered Web Services and Semantic Web for the Next Generation of Learning Repositories by Stephen Downes.  I was attracted to it because it uses one of the NRC presentation templates.  (UPDATE 2006-12-21: The presentation is from 2002, it discusses the creation of eduSource Canada.  I don't know if there has been any work on it recently, after the project finished in 2004. http://www.edusource.ca/ )

Considering that Stephen is working on topics of interest to my group, and the fact that we're in the same organization, we really should probably meet and talk sometime.

Does everyone else have the same experience of only finding out what your organization is doing from surfing the web, not from internal communications?

my presentation on SOA and BPEL for Access 2006

My presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/library-web-services-for-discovery-and-delivery-of-scientific-information

Bookmarks from within the presentation, with some corrections and additions, available at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/access2006akerman

The audio of the presentation is at

http://www.access2006.uottawa.ca/2006-10-13-07-akerman.mp3

Overall, I thought it was well-received, but I still don't think most libraries are thinking beyond adding a few Web Services.  The main focus for library technology seems to be around the catalogue and adding layers on top of it, not breaking it apart into services.  There still seems to be limited concrete action in working on library SOA to integrate with the various frameworks that are out there.

If we can't fix the ILS, maybe we could work on a smaller group addressing issues related to journal article repositories?  I didn't even touch on the Fedora Web Services and workflow support in the above presentation.

I basically continue to be concerned about a lot of diverging wheel-reinvention activities, rather than seeing a lot of unifying activities starting to deliver good models and services.

Previously:
October 15, 2006  SOA BOF - links and thoughts

Sidebar:
This is not as-presented, this is a previous version, the reason being that somewhere between Windows PowerPoint 2000 SP3 and Mac PowerPoint X, the clickable weblinks got completely munged.  Wedged to the extent that even when I try to fix them in Win PowerPoint 2000, it won't let me save the changes.

I don't know if this is related to some bizarre Microsoft limitation, or to some Win-Mac interchange bug, or to a Mac specific bug.

Plus which I got an exciting SlideShare error when I tried to upload: "Camping Problem! SlideLoader::Controllers::Upload.POST"

two perspectives on interoperability and what it could enable

In case you're wondering, I finally managed to clear my Bloglines backlog, including the published literature, D-Lib and Ariadne.  I found two very different, but complementary views on how service standards and standard interfaces can enable an enhanced scholarly workflow or other advanced combinations of services.

In Serving Services in Web 2.0 (Ariadne issue 47, April 2006, ISSN  1361-3200), Theo van Veen of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands explores and explains some fundamental concepts of Service-Oriented Architecture and standard service interfaces.

In this article I discuss the ingredients that enable users to benefit from a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by combining services according to their preferences. ... This concept is an extrapolation of the use of OpenURL and goes beyond linking to an appropriate copy. Publishing and formalising these service descriptions lowers the barrier for users wishing to build their own knowledge base, makes it fun to integrate services and will contribute to the standardisation of existing non-standard services.

In An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains (D-Lib, October 2006, Volume 12 Number 10, ISSN 1082-9873), Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze et al explore how you can build services using an interoperable network of digital object repositories

This article describes an interoperability fabric among a wide variety of heterogeneous repositories holding managed collections of scholarly digital objects. These digital objects are considered units of scholarly communication, and scholarly communication is seen as a global, cross-repository workflow. The proposed interoperability fabric includes a shared data model to represent digital objects, a common format to serialize those objects into network-transportable surrogates, three core repository interfaces that support surrogates (obtain, harvest, put) and some shared infrastructure. This article also describes an experiment implementing an overlay journal in which this interoperability fabric was tested across four different repository architectures (aDORe, arXiv, DSpace, Fedora).

airlines and everything with built-in carbon offset

Will SOA save the world?  We're working on it.
Jon Udell has a fascinating InfoWorld article "The carbon-adjusted supply chain: SOA-enabled optimization can help reduce businesses' impact on the global environment" and accompanying blog posting.

Does Amazon know enough about its supply chain, ... to assign a value to the atmospheric carbon attributable to the manufacturing and shipping of its products? Bezos thought that the answer was no, but he was clearly intrigued by the question. So am I.

...

Economists have a wonderful euphemism for environmental impacts. They call them “externalities,” and we can blithely ignore them until Rhode Island-size chunks of Antarctic sea ice start to vanish. Then we start to realize that, in a closed ecosystem, there are no externalities.

In order for Amazon to be able to measure and report its externalities, of course, Amazon’s suppliers would themselves have to be able to measure and report theirs. That would be a major challenge, to be sure. But it’s exactly the kind of challenge that SOA-enabled supply chain optimization prepares us to tackle.

To my surprise, there are already a number of initiatives to help people offset their carbon from air travel, although I don't know how big the idea is yet in those paragons of carbon production, the US, Canada and Australia.

Anyway, my Big Idea is quite simple and appears to be already underway at various sites: every airline should include, as one of its option fees, a pre-calculated carbon offset cost with a trusted offset vendor.  Air Canada, are you listening?

Ideally, offset providers should have calculation Web Services and payment Web Services that other sites could use.

[UK] DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) - Carbon Offset Scheme Launched - September 12, 2005

British Airways has launched a new scheme, backed by the government, where its customers can volunteer to help to offset the carbon dioxide emissions from their flight by making a contribution to an environmental trust.

The money raised will be used by an organisation called Climate Care to invest in sustainable energy projects that tackle global warming by reducing carbon dioxide levels.

Air travellers can choose to make a donation from today (September 12) via a link from the airline's website, ba.com, for the cost of the emissions created by their journey. For example, the donation on a return flight from London Heathrow to Madrid will cost £5 and a return flight from London Heathrow to Johannesburg will cost £13.30.

You can visit http://www.britishairways.com/travel/climateimpact/public/en_gb for more info.

Silverjet, also in the UK, is building carbon neutrality into their price.

Silverjet, the first British airline to offer a low fare, exclusively business class service across the Atlantic, today announces that it will be the world’s first airline to become carbon neutral on all its flights.

Included within its ticket prices will be a mandatory carbon offset contribution, giving passengers the opportunity to reinvest the “carbon points” thus earned back into a number of climate friendly projects around the world. This still enables Silverjet to offer low fare long haul, exclusively business class, transatlantic flights from as little as £999, return.

The scheme is being set up in partnership with the leading climate change business, The CarbonNeutral Company, and it has been developed in accordance with the CarbonNeutral protocol, which is the leading standard and quality mark for action on climate change.

Silverjet PR - Silverjet is the world's first airline to go carbon neutral - November 26, 2006

In Canada, there is UNIGLOBE Travel's Green Flight Program

UNIGLOBE Travel's Green Flight Program is one of the ways you can achieve your CO2 reduction goals.

UNIGLOBE Travel's Green Flight program is getting much press for its ability to provide companies in Canada with the mechanism that has, for a long time been missing to meet carbon emission offset goals. One way to achieve these goals is to purchase carbon offset credits from UNIGLOBE Travel that are calculated on the number of miles flown in an aircraft generated by companies business, conference or employee incentive travel.

The monies collected from the credits are then invested into environmental programs supported by Environment Canada.

UNIGLOBE's offset provider is Baseline Emissions Management Inc., and the specific site provided by Baseline is

http://www.greenmyflight.com/

Also, via The Great Canadian Carbon Offset 2006, I find a rather roundabout offset arrangement - buy a WestJet ticket via offsetters.ca and offsetters will use their affiliate income to offset some of the carbon. (GCCO2006 link via Treehugger.)

lastminute.com UK also offers this option

Customers using lastminute.com are to be given the option to offset carbon dioxide emissions from flights.

The online retailer claims to have become the first major travel company to make CO2 offsetting an integral part of buying a flight in a Government-backed initiative.

Payments will be invested in sustainable energy projects to reduce the damage done to the environment in a partnership with Climate Care, an o