I spent today at an interesting meeting at Talis headquarters where there was a wide range of talks. Most of the talks were liveblogged by Andy Powell and also by Owen Stephens (who has written a much more comprehensive summary of Andy’s talk) and there will no doubt be some slides and video available on the web in future. The programme is also available. Here I want to focus on Andy Powell’s talk (slides), partly because he obviously didn’t liveblog it but primarily because it crystallised for me many aspects of the way we think about Institutional Repositories. For those not in the know, these are warehouses that are becoming steadily more popular, run generally by unversities to house their research outputs, in most cases peer reviewed papers. Self archiving of some version of published papers is the so called ‘Green Route’ to open access.

The problem with institutional repositories in their current form is that academics don’t use them. Even when they are being compelled there is massive resistance from academics. There are a variety of reasons for this: academics don’t like being told how to do things; they particularly don’t like being told what to do by their institution; the user interfaces are usually painful to navigate. Nonetheless they are a valuable part of the route towards making more research results available. I use plenty of things with ropey interfaces because I see future potential in them. Yet I don’t use either of the repositories in the places where I work – in fact they make my blood boil when I am forced to. Why?

So Andy was talking about the way repositories work and the reasons why people don’t use them. He had already talked about the language problem. We always talk about ‘putting things in the repository’ rather than ‘making them available on the web’. He had mentioned already that the institutional nature of repositories does not map well onto the social networks of the academic users which probably bear little relationship with institutions and are much more closely aligned to discipline and possibly geographic boundaries (although they can easily be global).

But for me the key moment was when Andy asked ‘How many of you have used SlideShare’. Half the people in the room put their hands up. Most of the speakers during the day pointed to copies of their slides on SlideShare. My response was to mutter under my breath ‘And how many of them have put presentations in the institutional repository?’ The answer to this; probably none. SlideShare is a much better ‘repository’ for slide presentations than IRs. There are more there, people may find mine, it is (probably) Google indexed. But more importantly I can put slides up with one click, it already knows who I am, I don’t need to put in reams of metadata, just a few tags. And on top of this it provides added functionality including embedding in other web documents as well as all the social functions that are a natural part of a ‘Web2.0’ site.

SlideShare is a very good model of what a Repository can be. It has issues. It is a third party product, it may not have long term stability, it may not be as secure as some people would like. But it provides much more of the functionality that I want from a service for making my presentations available on the web. It does not serve the purpose of an archive – and maybe an institutional repository is better in that role. But for the author, the reason for making things available is so that people use them. If I make a video that relates to my research it will go on YouTube, Bioscreencast, or JoVE, not in the institutional repository, I put research related photos on Flickr, not in the institutional repository, and critically, I leave my research papers on the websites of the journal that published them, and cannot be bothered with the work required to put them in the institutional repository.

Andy was arguing for global discipline specific repositories. I would suggest that the lesson of the Web2.0 sites is that we should have data type specific repositories. FlickR is for pictures, SlideShare for presentations. In each case the specialisation enables a sort of implicit metadata and for the site to concentrate on providing functionality that adds value to that particular data type. Science repositories could win by doing the same. PDB, GenBank, SwissProt deal with specific types of data. Some might argue that GenBank is breaking under the strain of the different types and quantities of data generated by the new high throughput sequencing tools. Perhaps a new repository is required that is specially designed for this data.

So what is the role for the institutional repository? The preservation of data is one aspect. Pulling down copies of everything to provide an extra backup and retain an institutional record. If not copying then indexing and aggregating so as to provide a clear guide to the institutions outputs. This needn’t be handled in house of course and can be outsourced. As Paul Miller suggested over lunch, the role of the institution need not be to keep a record of everything, but to make sure that such a record is kept. Curation may be another, although that may be too big a job to be tackled at institutional level. When is a decision made that something isn’t worth keeping anymore? What level of metadata or detail is worth preserving?

But the key thing is that all of this should be done automatically and must not require intervention by the author. Nothing drives me up the wall more than having to put the same set of data into two subtly different systems more than once. And as far as I can see there is no need to do so. Aggregate my content automatically, wrap it up and put it in the repository, but I don’t want to have to deal with it. Even in the case of peer reviewed papers it ought to be feasible to pull down the vast majority of the metadata required. Indeed, even for toll access publishers, everything except the appropriate version of the paper. Send me a polite automated email and ask me to attach that and reply. Job done.

For this to really work we need to take an extra step in the tools available. We need to move beyond files that are simply ‘born digital’ because these files are in many ways still born. This current blog post, written in Word on the train is a good example. The laptop doesn’t really know who I am, it probably doesn’t know where I am, and it has not context for the particular word document I’m working on. When I plug this into the Wordpress interface at OpenWetWare all of this changes. The system knows who I am (and could do that through OpenID). It knows what I am doing (writing a Blog post) and the Zemanta Firefox plug in does much better than that, suggesting tags, links, pictures and keywords.

Plugins and online authoring tools really have the potential to automatically generate those last pieces of metadata that aren’t already there. When the semantics comes baked in then the semantic web will fly and the metadata that everyone knows they want, but can’t be bothered putting in, will be available and re-useable, along with the content. When documents are not only born digital but born on and for the web then the repositories will have probably still need to trawl and aggregate. But they won’t have to worry me about it. And then I will be a happy depositor.

Posted: June 10th, 2008 under authoring tools, format, metadata, semantics, tagging.
Comments: 8

And other big words I learnt from mathematicians…

The observant amongst you will have realised that the title of my previous post pushing a boat out into the area of semantics and RDF implied there was more to come. Those of you who followed the reaction [comments in original post, 1, 2, 3] will also be aware that there are much smarter and more knowledgeable people out there thinking about these problems. Nonetheless, in the spirit of thinking aloud I want to explore these ideas a little further because they underpin the way I think about the LaBLog and its organization. As with the last post this comes with the health warning that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Read more »

Posted: April 8th, 2008 under FuGE, data formats, data model, format, indexing, ontologies, semantics, tagging.
Comments: 3

‘No data model survives contact with reality’ - Me, Cosener’s House Workshop 29 February 2008

This flippant comment was in response to (I think) Paolo Missier asking me ‘what the data model is’ for our experiments. We were talking about how we might automate various parts of the blog system but the point I was making was that we can’t have a data model with any degree of specificity because we very quickly find the situation where they don’t fit. However, having spent some time thinking about machine readability and the possibility of converting a set of LaBLog posts to RDF, as well as the issues raised by the problems we have with tables, I think we do need some sort of data model. These are my initial thoughts on what that might look like. Read more »

Posted: March 23rd, 2008 under LaBLog, Uncategorized, data feeds, data formats, data model, metadata, semantics, tagging.
Comments: 6

Following on from (but unrelated to) my post last week about feed tools we have two posts, one from Deepak Singh, and one from Neil Saunders, both talking about ‘friend feeds’ or ‘lifestreams’. The idea here is of aggregating all the content you are generating (or is being generated about you?) into one place. There are a couple of these about but the main ones seem to be Friendfeed and Profiliac. See Deepaks’s post (or indeed his Friendfeed) for details of the conversations that can come out of these type of things.

What piqued my interest though was the comment Neil made at the bottom of his post about Workstreams.

Here’s a crazy idea - the workstream:

* Neil parsed SwissProt entry Q38897 using parser script swiss2features.pl
* Bob calculated all intersubunit contacts in PDB entry 2jdq using CCP4 package contact

This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about as the raw material for the aggregators that would suggest things that you ought to look at, whether it be a paper, a blog post, a person, or a specific experimental result. This type of system will rely absolutely on the willingness of people to make public what they are reading, doing, even perhaps thinking. Indeed I think this is the raw information that will make another one of Neil’s great suggestions feasible.

Following on from Neil’s post I had a short conversation with Alf in the comments about blogging (or Twittering) machines. Alf pointed out a really quite cool example. This is something that we are close to implementing in the open in the lab at RAL. We hope to have the autoclave, PCR machine, and balances all blogging out what they are seeing. This will generate a data feed that we can use to pull specific data items down into the LaBLog.

Perhaps more interesting is the idea of connecting this to people. At the moment the model is that the instruments are doing the blogging. This is probably a good way to go because it keeps a straightforward identifiable data stream. At the moment the trigger for the instruments to blog is a button. However at RAL we use RFID proximity cards for access to the buildings. This means we have an easy identifier for people, so what we aim to do is use the RFID card to trigger data collection (or data feeding).

If this could be captured and processed there is the potential for capturing a lot of the detail of what has happened in the laboratory. Combine this with a couple of Twitter posts giving a little more personal context and it may be possible to reconstruct a pretty complete record of what was done and precisely when. The primary benefit of this would be in trouble shooting but if we could get a little bit of processing into this, and if there are specific actions with agreed labels, then it may be possible to automatically create a large portion of the lab book record.

This may be a great way of recording the kind of machine readable description of experiments that Jean-Claude has been posting about. Imagine a simplistic Twitter interface where you have a limited set of options (I am stirring, I am mixing, I am vortexing, I have run a TLC, I have added some compound). Combine this with a balance, a scanner, and a heating mantle which are blogging out what they are currently seeing, and a barcode reader (and printer) so as to identify what is being manipulated and which compound is which.

One of the problems we have with our lab books is that they can never be detailed enough to capture everything that somebody might be interested in one day. However at the same time they are too detailed for easy reading by third parties. I think there is general agreement that on top of the lab book you need an interpretation layer, an extra blog that explains what is going on to the general public. Perhaps by capturing all the detailed bits automatically we can focus on planning and thinking about the experiments rather than worrying about how to capture everything manually. Then anyone can mash up the results, or the discussion, or the average speed of the stirrer bar, any way they like.

Posted: March 10th, 2008 under LaBLog, blogjects, data feeds, rss, tagging.
Comments: 2

Two things last week gave me more cause to think a bit harder about the RSS feeds from our LaBLog and how we can use them. First, when I gave my talk at UKOLN I made a throwaway comment about search and aggregation. I was arguing that the real benefits of open practice would come when we can use other people’s filters and aggregation tools to easily access the science that we ought to be seeing. Google searching for a specific thing isn’t enough. We need to have an aggregated feed of the science we want or need to see delivered automatically. i.e. we need systems to know what to look for even before the humans know it exists. I suggested the following as an initial target;

‘If I can automatically identify all the compounds recently made in Jean-Claude’s group and then see if anyone has used those compounds [or similar compounds] in inhibitor screens for drug targets then we will be on our way towards managing the information’

The idea here would be to take a ‘Molecules’ feed (such as the molecules Blog at UsefulChem or molecules at Chemical Blogspace) extract the chemical identifiers (InChi, Smiles, CML or whatever) and then use these to search feeds from those people exposing experimental results from drug screening. You might think some sort of combination of Yahoo! Pipes and Google Search ought to do it.

So I thought I’d give this a go. And I fell at the first hurdle. I could grab the feed from the UsefulChem molecules Blog but what I actually did was set up a test post in the Chemtools Sandpit Blog. Here I put the InChi of one of the compounds from UsefulChem that was recently tested as a falcipain 2 inhibitor. The InChi went in as both clear text and as the microformat approach suggested by Egon Willighagen. Pipes was perfectly capable of pulling the feed down, and reducing it to only the posts that contained InChi’s but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to extract the InChi itself. Pipes doesn’t seem to see microformats. Another problem is that there is no obvious way of converting a Google Search (or Google Custom Search) to an RSS feed.

Now there may well be ways to do this, or perhaps other tools to do it better but they aren’t immediately obvious to me. Would the availability of such tools help us to take the Open Research agenda forwards? Yes, definitely. I am not sure exactly how much or how fast but without easy to use tools, that are well presented, and easily available, the case for making the information available is harder to make. What’s the point of having it on the cloud if you can’t customise your aggregation of it? To me this is the killer app; being able to identify, triage, and collate data as it happens with easily useable and automated tools. I want to see the stuff I need to see in feed reader before I know it exists. Its not that far away but we ain’t there yet.

The other thing this brought home to me was the importance of feeds and in particular of rich feeds. One of the problems with Wikis is that they don’t in general provide an aggregated or user configurable feed of the site in general or a name space such as a single lab book. They also don’t readily provide a means of tagging or adding metadata. Neither Wikis nor Blogs provide immediately accessible tools that provide the ability to configure multiple RSS feeds, at least not in the world of freely hosted systems. The Chemtools blogs each put out an RSS feed but it doesn’t currently include all the metadata. The more I think about this the more crucial I think it is.

To see why I will use another example. One of the features that people liked about our Blog based framework at the workshop last week was the idea that they got a catalogue of various different items (chemicals, oligonucleotides, compound types) for free once the information was in the system and properly tagged. Now this is true but you don’t get the full benefits of a database for searching, organisation, presentation etc. We have been using DabbleDB to handle a database of lab materials and one of our future goals has been to automatically update the database. What I hadn’t realised before last week was the potential to use user configured RSS feeds to set up multiple databases within DabbleDB to provide more sophisticated laboratory stocks database.

DabbleDB can be set up to read RSS or other XML or JSON feeds to update as was pointed out to me by Lucy Powers at the workshop. To update a database all we need is a properly configured RSS feed. As long as our templates are stable the rest of the process is reasonably straightforward and we can generate databases of materials of all sorts along with expiry dates, lot numbers, ID numbers, safety data etc etc. The key to this is rich feeds that carry as much information as possible, and in particular as much of the information we have chosen to structure as possible. We don’t even need the feeds to be user configurable within the system itself as we can use Pipes to easily configure custom feeds.

We, or rather a noob like me, can do an awful lot with some of the tools already available and a bit of judicious pointing and clicking. When these systems are just a little bit better at extracting information (and when we get just a little bit better at putting information in, by making it part of the process) we are going to be doing lots of very exciting things. I am trying to keep my diary clear for the next couple of months…

Posted: March 4th, 2008 under LaBLog, data feeds, open notebook science, semantics, tagging.
Comments: 3

I got to meet Jeremiah Faith this morning and we had an excellent wide ranging discussion which I will try to capture in more detail later. However I wanted to get down some thoughts we had at the end of the discussion. We were talking about how to publicise and generate more interest and activity for Open Notebook Science. Jeremiah suggested the idea of a Sourceforge for science; a central clearing house somewhere on the web where projects could be described and people could opt in to contribute. There have been some ideas in this direction such as Totally retrosynthetic but I don’t think there has been a lot of uptake there.

This was all tied into the idea of making lab books findable and indexed in places where people might look for them. I have been taken with the way PostGenomic and ChemicalBlogSpace aggregate blogs, particularly blog posts on the peer reviewed literature and in the case of ChemicalBlogSpace aggregate comments on molecules, based on trawling for InChi Keys (I think). So can we propose that one of (both of?) these sites start aggregating online notebook posts? If we could make these point at peer reviewed papers online it would also be possible to use a modified version of the Blue Obelisk Grease Monkey that would popup whenever you were looking at a paper for which there was raw data online.

It wouldn’t be necessary, or perhaps even advisable, to limit these to people strictly practising Open Notebook Science. People could put up data once a paper was published or after a delay. Perhaps we could not even require that all the raw data be put up. If the barriers are lowered more people may do it. A range of appropriate tags (’Partial Raw Data is available for this paper’, ‘Full raw data is available for this paper’, ‘Full raw data and associated data is available as an open notebook’,) would distinguish between what people are making available. Data could be dropped anywhere online and by aggregation it gains more visibility encouraging people to move from making specific data available towards making all their data available.

Any thoughts?

Posted: November 6th, 2007 under US trip Oct/Nov 07, open data, open notebook science, open science, tagging.
Comments: 10

I am in the process of preparing the talk I am giving at Drexel next month and have been going over the early versions of our Lab Blog and getting a clearer picture of how our usage has evolved. I wanted to record this so will write some notes as I go.

Read more »

Posted: October 16th, 2007 under e-notebook, metadata, tagging.
Comments: 5