Towards a (meta)data ecology for UK education and research

Joy Palmer, @joypalmer Mimas, University of Manchester

Our business drivers vary and use cases are distinct, but our ultimate aim is the same. We want our content and services to be instrumental in teaching, learning and research.

And to achieve this we need to make sure they are discovered…

…given the paradigms of the web, that aim is most likely to be achieved if content is discoverable through popular search engines as well as through specialised services and aggregations, and if they can be exposed through social platforms ranging from scholarly reference management systems to Facebook and Twitter.

From ‘infrastructure’ to ‘ecosystem’

Big Data

…and the end of metadata?

Linked Data

…the end of Linked Data?

microdata“it’s not about whether microdata is going to win, but that semantics published along with our html is going to drive new functionality in the applications we use everyday” (Ed Summers, 2012)

Open Data & MetadataA tactical approach

'Open metadata creates the opportunity for enhancing impact through the release of descriptive data about library, archival and museum resources. It allows such data to be made freely available and innovatively reused to serve researchers, teachers, students, service providers and the wider community in the UK and internationally.'

How do we achieve this?

By driving a shift in ethos to 'open' in institutions, services and

funding bodies

And being clear about what makes data ‘open’

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

Getting the legal stuff right…

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 machinesTechnical PrinciplesThe 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…

Openness is a means and not an end…

Open data is of no value to the ecosystem if it isn’t used

Recasting the value chain

New business modelsNew value propositionsNew paradigmsNew purpose?

Thanks for listening….

http://discovery.ac.uk