Posts Tagged ‘quality’

DL.org Tutorial on Digital Libraries Foundation and Interoperability

Monday, February 21st, 2011

DL.org Tutorial at ESWC2011

DL.org announces the Tutorial on Digital Libraries: Foundations & Interoperability during the Extended Semantic Web Conference, 29 May – 2 June 2011, Heraklion, Greece. The half-day Tutorial focuses on the DL.org Reference Model, a conceptual framework for Digital Libraries, coupled with real-world examples and a hands-on session. The aim of this tutorial is to introduce the audience to the state-of the art in Digital Libraries documenting the significant effort towards building a common language to express key issues surrounding interoperability.
The tutorial covers the core concepts characterising Digital Libraries: content, functionality, user, policy, quality and architecture. The tutorial features a rich mix of presentations, interactive discussion, demos and hands-on with comprehensive examples of existing systems that apply semantic technologies to help exemplify abstract concepts. Participants will come away with a conceptual framework and new knowledge on DL.org’s approach to Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices and Modelling Foundations enhancing their research and professional practices.  To ensure maximum impact, DL.org will provide tutorial attendees with a Virtual Reading List and pointers well ahead of the event.
Presenters

  • Yannis Ioannidis, University of Athens
  • Donatella Castelli, Institute of Information Science & Technologies, National Research Council of Italy
  • Leonardo Candela, Institute of Information Science & Technologies, National Research Council of Italy
  • Katerina El Raheb, University of Athens

Target Audience
The tutorial is designed for researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of semantic technologies, specifically Information Scientists, PhD candidates, Engineers, Digital Library Designers and Administrators, as well as Digital Libraries Managers, Librarians and Information Scientists attending ESWC 2011.

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Giuseppina Vullo on Quality Interoperability Survey

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Some pointers on Quality:

Giuseppina Vullo

Quality is associated not only with each class of content or functionality but also with specific information objects or services. Quality is also the degree to which a DL conforms to a specific policy on the goal of a DL. The policy can cover very general guidelines to aspects that are highly technical. Quality is also applicable to either overall or single aspects of any products, services and processes, usually defined in relation to a set of guidelines and criteria. This is often implicit.

Sample of Policy survey participants

German Digital Library, Max-Planck DL, e-prints for Library and Information Science (E-LIS), Europeana,
E-Archivo: Institutional Repository of University Carlos III of Madrid, The European Library (TEL), DRIVER (D-NET) and The World Digital Library (WDL).

Survey focus

Formats, Format compliance checking tools (and results), Metadata standards, Metadata compliance checking tools (and results), Communication protocols, Communication protocol compliance checking tools (and results), Web guidelines/standards in the areas of accessibility, usability, multilingualism, Policies and legal obligations (eg for web standards or Reference Model) in addition to Multi-level guidelines and certifications, User satisfaction, Current interoperations, Quality interoperability and the Reference Model.

Outcomes

  • 60% of respondents have validation tools to check Information object format compliance (eg.Pdf/A Validator).
    80% have validation tools to check metadata format compliance (eg. DC Validator).
    50% have validation tools to check communication protocols compliance (OAI/PMH & DRIVER Validators).
  • 10% have very complete metadata; 60% complete metadata; 20% sufficiently complete and 10% incomplete metadata.

So what are the barriers to metadata creation?

  • Time
  • Accuracy
  • Missing, too complex or contradictory guidelines
  • Not having enough humans involved in the process
  • Not understanding its real value, reason and purpose
  • Review is required by qualified personnel

Most respondents see interoperability as mainly being technical in focus. Quality aspects are crucial for successful interoperability.

Connections to the Reference Model: some DLs are already using the RM for:

  • Design and operation of processes
  • Business and organisational models
  • Changes of institutional repositories
  • Revision of DL policies

Conclusions

  • It’s a metadata-centric world.
  • Role of guidelines (e.g. DRIVER, MINERVA, etc.), certifications (eg. DINI, Drambora) and validators
  • Different meanings of Quality and Interoperability: contexts and objectives
  • Lack of formalised and well-analysed policies
  • Need to be supported
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Hans Pfeiffenberger on Trust, Reliability & Quality

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Hans Pfeiffenberger on RidingtheWave

The building of scientific knowledge needs to be preserved for the long term, so it needs solid foundations. Today’s knowledge is conveyed through articles, papers and events, as well as datasets, which begs the question as to whether datasets can be less reliable than books and articles. Are there any sound reasons for treating them differently? An EC-commissioned report, Riding the Wave – How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data (Oct 2010) writes that challenges related to trust that need overcoming include: How can we make informed judgements about whether certain data are authentic and can be trusted? How can we judge which repositories we can trust? How can appropriate access and use of resources be granted or controlled? On data publication and access, the Report states: How can data producers be rewarded for publishing data? How can we know who has deposited what data and who is re-using them – or who has the right to access data which are restricted in some way? How do we deal with the various ‘filters’ that different disciplines use when choosing and describing data? What about differences in these attitudes within disciplines, or from one time to another?

Sample of initiatives

The International Polar Year is a good example of generating significant amounts of data and of the issues at stake. Its mission is to take a data snapshot of the polar caps for re-use in decades to come bringing together 50.000 participants and 63 Nations with ca. 1 G€.

DataCite is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agency for research data. DataCite is now considering to ask data repositories for some kind of certification (professional organization with some policy to permanently deliver on the technology promise). DataCite will foster global interoperability about a specific policy issue.

ICSU World Data System is about global interoperability on a number of policy issues long-term availability: handover of data in case of default would be so much more helpful, if DOIs were employed

  • Open Access
  • Makes things so much easier
  • What about endangered species, social science data?
  • Operates by accreditation, considers certification
  • Which certification?

The Situation Today

There are lots of data repositories today…

  • Most operate as projects, on a best effort basis
  • They are highly incompatible regarding, e.g. (access) protocols and formats supported, content qualities (QA, granularities, and so on), rights/licensing
  • Interoperability at a global scale is hard/impossible
  • Integration of data (don’t mix high/low quality data)
  • Trust about long term availability

Digital Data Library = a data repository with a policy.

Conclusions
Most important elements for the stability of the knowledge architecture of science:

  • Quality of each building block: quality assurance, encoding of quality indicators, provenance
  • Persistent availability, accessibility of each block: Handover / Mirroring and Persistent IDs
  • Checksums?

The talk is available on the dedicated web page.

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