Science Library Pad

my review of The World is Flat

NOTE: This 2006 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.

Despite having a huge stack of books to read, I found myself on vacation without anything to read, so I ended up getting The World is Flat (Updated Edition) mostly by accident.

I had rushed into the mall to get the Globe, which no one was selling, so on a quick scan of the bookstore, I thought, hmm, if I'm going to sling around the term I should probably actually read the book.

At 566 pages, it's no light read, but Thomas Friedman presents a comprehensive framework for understanding the impact of technology on our societies.

I had assumed the book was mostly about outsourcing, but it actually covers a wide range of current developments in work and technology.  Friedman describes our society as experiencing "Globalization 3.0".

I was once again surprised, particularly given that he was even using "3.0" terminology, that there was no mention of Toffler's The Third Wave but other than that, the book is very strong.

It covers technology change with explanations that are both clear and comprehensive.  The last thing I would have expected in a book about globalization would be to get a good discussion of underlying technology change, but lo and behold, I read

"But then," added Microsoft's Mundie, "we said to ourselves, 'Geez, if we really want to automate everything, then we need to make it much easier not just for people to talk to people, but for machines to talk to machines -- for machines to interact with other machines about any subject without any humans involved at all or any a priori relationship between the different companies whose machines are communicating."  This was the next work flow breakthrough.

Technically, what made it possible was the development of a new data description language, called XML (extensible markup language) and its related transport protocol called SOAP (simple object access protocol).  Together, they allow any two computer programs to exchange formatted data or documents that contain any form of information.

(from "The Ten Forces that Flattened the World - #3 - Work Flow Software" - page 82)

Issues

"globalization" is missing from the index.

There is no comprehensive reference list or bibliography.  While he does a great job of citing things within the text, it would be nice to have them all gathered together at the end as well.

myExperiment - share scientific workflows

This is really cool.

myExperiment makes it really easy for the next generation of scientists to contribute to a pool of scientific workflows, build communities and form relationships

"as seen at SciFoo"

collaboration workflow for researchers

I think this work could be summarized as "research workflow is complex".

Scott Wilson's Workblog has a presentation and paper on Collaboration workflow for researchers.

via http://del.icio.us/destarrow/collaboration-research-workflow

undersea cyberinfrastructure

Some interesting Canadian science sensor workflow achievements, albeit with a typically complex IBM solution

In September 2005, [VENUS] Data Management Archive System (DMAS) was awarded a grant from the CANARIE Intelligent Infrastructure Program (CIIP) for a project called: “Toward a Service Oriented Architecture and Workflow Management for VENUS and NEPTUNE”. The goals of this project were to provide these two high profile Canadian Cabled Ocean Observatories with an integrated scientific instruments management system, the capability to deliver event information to users, as well as integrated access to distributed compute and data resources through the use of innovative technologies.

The initial draft of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was proposed by IBM Canada, one of the largest R&D investors in Canada. This architecture was later refined by the DMAS team. It is worth mentioning that this is also the approach taken by Alcatel for the interaction with the NEPTUNE backbone.

This style of information systems architecture enables the NEPTUNE Canada and VENUS DMAS to be built by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services. The IBM Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with its underlying message system WebSphere MQ provides the features such as point-to-point data delivery and message publish-and subscribe to implement the DMAS SOA.

Bill St. Arnaud - Cyber-infrastructure for undersea instruments and networks - in CAnet News - February 20, 2007

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

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).

ECDL 2006 - DLSci06 - DILIGENT grid-based DL

Leonardo Candela, Donatella Castelli, Christoph Langguth, Pasquale Pagano, Heiko Schuldt, Manuele Simi and Laura Voicu
On-Demand Service Deployment and Process Support in e-Science DLs: the DILIGENT Experience

http://www.diligentproject.org/

(Also see notes from tutorial Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Libraries.)

Motivation

* research is multidisciplinary and co-operative effort
* may use a virtual resource organization that doesn't last a long time or have DL expertise
* but the DL is an important tool

DELOS view: from DL to Knowledge Commons
* from content-centric to person-centric
* from info storage to communication and collaboration support
* from centrally-located text to distributed and heterogenous data sources

New DL development model
* DL built by dynamically aggregating the needed resources
* new functionality combined in user-defined workflows

Service-Oriented Architecture over Grid Framework

[complex diagram]

* New functionality delivered by workflows of services

Services Overview

* Mediation
* Information Space Management
* Access
* User and Resource Management
* Presentation
  - user-oriented access point to the DL
  - plug and play community-specific tools
  - [something about JSR168 portlets and other stuff]
* Enabling
  - monitoring, other operations domain functions

Service Detail

* the Keeper Service
  - deploy and monitor user-defined virtual DLs

* the Information Service
  - gathers, stores and supplies information about the resources constituting DILIGENT
    and needed to the other services
  - XML-based resource profiles
  - push and pull modalities i.e. query and subscribe/notify

Process Design and Validation

Implement complex services by combining existing ones, a.k.a. "programming in the large"
* control flow
* data flow
* transaction behavior and execution guartees for concurrency and failure handling
* XML, SOAP and WSDL as technologies
* BPEL as a foundation for process specification

[diagram of tool]

Process Execution

* built on top of OSIRIS
* runs BPEL tasks?

ECDL 2006 - DLSci06 - eSciDoc

eSciDoc - a Scholarly Information and Communication Platform in the Age of eScience
Matthias Razum

This was a very good presentation.  I particularly appreciated the silo diagram.

http://www.escidoc-project.de/homepage.html

Scholarly Communication - Rip, Mix, Burn

* Scholarship inherently recursive
* Therefore scholars are both information consumers and information producers at the same time
* Referencing or reusing material of all times enables scholars o weave a knowledge network of related information objects
* Good scientific practice requires provenance data for objects and versioning

Example: Knowledge Network around cuneiform tablet

* Metadata
* Transcription - Metadata
  - Translation - Metadata
  - Annotation

[wonderful silo diagram]

What should an institutional repository be?

* institutional memory
* allow for reuse - allow for associating information objects in novel contexts
* support interdisciplinary work
* open, application-independent and flexible,
  thus laying the ground today for repurposing the information in future applications

Turning Static Objects into Living Knowledge

* e-Scholarship ( = e-science = e-research ) allows to publish all intermeidate results of knowledge
  generation from first ideas, theories, discussions with peers to final results
* need to support users early in their work process, so they can share immediately with peers
* leads to interactive authoring environments with support for collaboration and annotations
* objects lose their static nature and become 'active nodes' in a network of knowledge

Q (Rachel): How to connect from a wiki to an institutional repository?
A: Maybe it is possible.  There was a project - NSDL - wiki based on Fedora.

eSciDoc
* 6 million euro five-year grant (2004-2009)
* aim to build an integrated information, communication and publishing platform for web-based
  scientific work
* NOT a research project, aims at stablishing an innovative production system

[diagram]

* Repository at the core
* layer of services
* layer of security
* build apps on top of these
  - publication management
  - scholarly workbench
  - eLib
  - eLab Journal

  helper apps: user management

ideally, the scientists should be able to build apps on this platform

Publication Management

* Workflows
  - very complex - every institution different
* Metadata
  - everyone has their own idea what the correct scheme is

Scholarly Workbench

* collaboration, for humanities

eLib

* dark archive of all commercially-licensed content
(postponed)

eLabJournal

(postponed)

Services
* Object Manager
* Content Type Modeler
* Metadata Modeler
* Formats Manager
* Workflow Manager
* Data Interopability
* Search & Browse
* License Management
* Personalization
* Basket Manager

Q (me): To what extent does it depend on Fedora?
A: In theory the services deal with the repository as an abstract layer, but in practice currently
   you must have Fedora

Framework Services

* The framework is an enabling technology
  - scholars can focus on domain-specific application logic
  - enable scholars to focus on their "business logic" / "scholarly logic"

Content Model

Q (Rachel): Are you using RDF containers?
A: Conceptually we are using METS containers.
Comment (Jane): Fedora uses RDF internally.

* some generic object patterns

* ability to attach licenses to content items

* ability to manage content item versions

Microsoft eScience workshop at JHU

Microsoft eScience Workshop at the Johns Hopkins University
October 13 - 15, 2006
Bloomberg Center
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland

looking for contributions in the following areas:

• Novel scientific applications using information technologies
• Web Service-Based Applications
• Science data analysis, mining, and Visualization
• Smart Clients and novel user interfaces for scientists
• Healthcare Informatics
• Scientific Workflow Management
• eScience Interdisciplinary Curriculum Development
• Innovations in publishing scientific literature, results, and data

The deadline for abstract submission is September 11th 2006.

via Microsoft eScience blog

Service-Oriented Data Mining

• 2006-07-07: Anteater: A Service-Oriented Architecture for High-Performance Data Mining
  Data mining focuses on extracting useful information from large volumes of data, and thus has been the center of much attention in recent years. Building scalable, extensible,and easy-to-use data mining systems,however,has proved to be difficult. In response, the authors developed Anteater, a service-oriented architecture for data mining that relies on Web services to achieve extensibility and interoperability, offers simple abstractions for users, and supports computationally intensive processing on large amounts of data through massive parallelism.
• 2006-07-07: Service-Oriented Distributed Data Mining
  Data mining research currently faces two great challenges: how to embrace data mining services with just-in-time and autonomous properties and how to mine distributed and privacy-protected data. To address these problems, the authors adopt the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services in a service oriented distributed data mining (DDM) platform to choreograph DDM component services and fulfill global data mining requirements. They also use the learning-from-abstraction methodology to achieve privacy-preserving DDM. Finally,they illustrate how localized autonomy on privacy-policy enforcement plusa bidding process can help the service-oriented system self-organize.

in IEEE Internet Computing July/August 2006, special focus on Distributed Data Mining

via Digital Library related RSS news feeds

EDUCAUSE workshop: Workflow Models and Technologies

Workflow is an important new way of thinking about software design and integration.
To some extent, thinking about workflow helps one to design composable services.

EDUCAUSE has a workshop starting tomorrow.

Advanced CAMP: Workflow Models and Technologies
June 28-30, 2006
Wyndham Burlington, Burlington, VT

The Advanced CAMP: Workflow Models and Technologies provides a chance for attendees to explore the requirements, models, and needs for workflow in a highly interactive setting. The sessions will 

• cover the security usage patterns in workflow, including the role of document digital signatures,
• examine emerging technologies, including web services, associated with workflow,
• discuss current and ongoing deployments in higher education and
• explore how middleware such as directory services, Signet, Grouper, and Shibboleth projects can be enhanced by workflow and could be used to facilitate the use of workflow deployments in your organization.

My main interest in this area is WS-BPEL workflows, particularly ones related to scholarly communications or e-Science.

presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation

Dr. Liz Lyon has been doing a lot of work in the areas of research data linking to publications, e-Science, and integrating with research workflow.  I saw her present at Info Grid 2005 on Developing e-infrastructure to support new research and learning paradigms.

Here are two of her recent presentations:

1 a very interesting presentation that talks about library integration with workflow, both e-Science and e-Business flows

Digital Libraries and the business process: reflections on a theme
BL/JISC/UKOLN Workshop, British Library, March 2006
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/bl-jisc-wshop-mar06.ppt

from

The Digital Library and its Services
The British Library, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and UKOLN
The British Library Conference Centre
6-7 March 2006

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/bl-jisc-conference-2006/programme/

2 a presentation with a lot of overlap with the previous one, but with a specific focus on research data and digital curation / preservation

Supporting Digital Curation to safeguard research data:
adding value today and ensuring long-term access
JISC Conference, March 2006
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/jisc-conf-mar-06-final.ppt

from

JISC Conference 2006
14 March 2006
International Convention Centre, Birmingham

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=conf06_home

- you can find links to all of Dr. Lyon's presentations at

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/presentations.html

via ResourceShelf