Discovery: Implementing a vision for a 'virtuous' flow of metadata across the Web

Joy PalmerMimas, University of Manchester

Key points

– Discovery: A Metadata Ecology for UK Education and Research

– What makes data (or metadata) open? – What’s the business case for opening data?

A national initiative, funded by JISCIncludes major research universities, The National Archives, British Library & Collections Trust….

Libraries, Archives & Museums

There was agreement on the Vision. But not how to get there….

Agreement over metadata

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/4970297633/sizes/m/in/photostream/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/yesiamisme/3629393406/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Disagreement over services…

One infrastructure to bind them all?

Increasingly compelling –shared services & cloud platforms

But then there’s the way the web works (and users behave)

(Can we really control this?)

Or could work…

With the introduction of data cycles we have a real ecosystem not a one way street and this

ecosystem thrives on collaboration, componentization and open data…

(Rufus Pollock, OKFN blog, March 31 2011)

How do we achieve this?

By working on a national level to:

– Open up metadata about institutional collections– Achieve further clarity and advocacy over licensing

(especially around opening up data for reuse)– Provide sustainable technical guidance – Develop core standards guidance for metadata

–Engaging the key stakeholders at every level throughout the process

What makes data open and reusable?

Getting the legal stuff right…

Your data’s not open unless it has an explicit open licensing statement

We the people…

discovery.ac.uk/principles

In short…

• Adopt an ‘open by default’ mindset• All metadata releases should adopt standard

open licenses• In the vast majority of cases ODC-PDDL, CC0

are appropriate• Avoid home grown variations

And it means being open to machines

The Discovery ecosystem is…

• Heterogeneous• Resource-orientated (not service)• Built on aggregations of metadata• Distributed• Reliant on persistent global identifiers• Striving to work well with global search

engines

This is all very well in principle…

The next year is about animating the principles on the ground…

user demand, benefit, added-value = sustainability

Where‘s the business case?

Beyond rhetoric and hype….we can:

• Support institutional efficiencies• Provide more complete signposts to support

richer discovery• Increase discoverability of hidden collections• Leverage aggregators to exploit data for us• Leverage the technical creativity of others &

innovate

And maybe recast the value chain

New business modelsNew value propositionsNew purpose?

Thanks for listening….