ORCID Researcher ID

ORCID is a free open access system to provide  persistent digital identifiers for researchers, so that they can easily identify what they published. I signed up for and Orcid: ORCID Entry fro Tom Worthington 0000-0003-4799-8464

The system is still under development but looks promising. Along the way I found a letter to New Scientist I wrote. But I could not find an easy way to upload my other publications, which ORCID did not know about

Is the Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index Worth Paying For?

Greetings from the Hancock Learning Commons at the Australian National University in Canberra, where I am attending a presentation on the Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index. This attempts to add data to the traditional papers and books which academics get credit for producing. Thomson Reuters' offering was released a few weeks ago and ANU has been trying it out. Initially there were 2 million records in 69 repositories, including the Australian Data Archive (ADA). About half the current contents are from the USA, 42% from Europe. About half is from the life sciences.

What was not clear to me is what benefit the academic and research community gain by using Thomson Reuters' service. Presumably Thomson Reuters will charge money for use of their service. The information being indexed is almost all free open access material paid for by the public. It is not clear why academics should then pay Thomson Reuters for accessing free information.

The Australian Government funded Australian National Data Service the Australian Research Data Commons and similar free open access repositories are being linked up around the world.

If Thomson Reuters can add value to this, then the benefits they are offering need to be compared with what they propose to charge and a decision made if this investment is in the public interest.  It may not be a good use of public money for each university in Australia individually buy a subscription from Thomson Reuters.

Thomson Reuters collect up the metadata provided by repositories around the world and provide a global search facility to subscribers. The same service could be provided by others by harvesting this metadata.

The other service which is likely to be of more interest to academics, is that they harvest the citations of the datasets. Academics get hired and promoted partly on how many times their work is mentioned (cited) in published work. It is now possible to cite a dataset in the same way as publications, such as using APA. This will then increase the academics' citation ranking. If a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is used, this makes the collection of the citations relatively easy.

Big Data for Big Science

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Ian Gorton, from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the US Dept. of Energy, is speaking on "Towards a Collaborative Scientific Knowledge Management Platform with Velo". The software has been used for modelling carbon sequestration and climate change. He began by explaining that "Velo" was not an acronym for anything, it just came from one of the french collaborator's interest in bicycles.

Velo is designed for high performance computing. Scientists want to be able to easily get at their data. Large scientific instruments can produce large amounts of data quickly. This requires that the definitions of the data and the requirements ("Scientific Knowledge-Management Requirements") need to be understood by the people building the software. Also new applications need to be able to access old data and applications.

Traditionally, a new software tool would be built for each area of science. However, this is becoming prohibitively expensive. Just as is using more package software, so is science.

Velo uses open source software, including MediaWiki and the Alfresco Content Management System (CMS). These are tools normally though of being used for e-publishing (the Australian Computer Society uses Alfresco for keeping its course content).

Originally ontologies were used for defining the data, but this was found to be to complex for scientists and now a spreadsheet is used.

The Velo approach is an interesting one as it goes some way to unite the document and data repositories which universities, such as the ANU are now building. The Australian National Data Service (ANDS), location at ANU, is building a system for cataloguing and allowing sharing of research data. But this is separate from the repositories used for the research papers about the same data. Essentially the same technology is used to describe the data and the papers and so there is no reason why they need to be kept separate.

At question time I asked IAn when the software would be freely available. He replied that the interfaces are now being documents and the software should be freely available online as open source in ten weeks time.

The rival product to Velo is "Hub Zero" from Purdue.

There is a set of slides with an overview of "Velo: Knowledge Management for Collaborative Science available. Unfortunately, this is a large file, so here is the text (minus images):

Velo:
Knowledge Management for Collaborative (Science | Biology) Projects



A framework to support collaborative

1

Scientific Knowledge Management (KM)

• Knowledge Management
• systematic strategy of creating, conserving, and sharing knowledge to increase performance and innovation
• Capabilities required for a collaborative scientific KM Platform
• Associating disparate information
• Questioning data and results
• Experimenting with data
• Sharing hypotheses, data, results

2

Velo Overview

• Velo supports common knowledge management needs across science domains
• Carbon sequestration
• Climate Modeling
• Bioinformatics
• Subsurface modeling
• …..
• Easily customized to specific science needs
• Data types
• Analysis/simulation tools
• Pluggable, extensible architecture
• Robust and scalable – built on widely used open source technologies
• Built to support collaboration across multi-disciplinary teams

Knowledge Management in Velo

• Knowledge = data + models + results + provenance
• Scientific Data
• Manage empirical/observational/derived data used to set up and parameterize models
• Velo can be easily customized to handle different data types
• Models and Simulations
• Manage multiple versions of models and associated results
• Launch simulations and data analysis on HPC/cloud platforms
• Results
• Automatically retrieve and store outputs associated with specific model versions
• Incorporate visualizations of simulation/model outputs
• Provenance
• Automatically and manually create links between related inputs and outputs and computational processes

4

Velo: Data Management

• Ingest any data types into Velo
• Incorporate scripts and tools to visualize and analyze data
• Extensible programmatic framework for new data types
• Examples:
• Incorporating well bore data logs for subsurface modeling
• Managing genome data for bioinformatics

16

Models: Model Setup and Simulation

• Manage conceptual models
• Launch simulations on remote HPC platforms
• Extensible to incorporate tools for model creation
• Examples:
• Conceptual model worksheets for subsurface models
• Simulation launching
• Mesh visualization

17

Results: Management and Analysis

• Retrieve simulation results from execution platforms
• Automatically visualize results
• Framework for incorporating analysis and visualization tools
• Examples:
• Plots for climate simulation outputs
• Visualizing plume extents for contaminants

18

Tool History

1. Velo gives option to the user to record
• Inputs
• Outputs
• Control parameters

2. Automatically loads the last saved inputs in tool’s input form

• Current Development plan – Browse and re-run any earlier invocation

19

Provenance

• Ability to link related artifacts for forensic investigations
• Both manually and automatically
• Examples:
• Link input data sets to models
• Link conceptual model versions to results
• Associate comments and analyses to simulation outputs

20

Next Steps

• We’re keen to work with others
• To deploy Velo to support scientific communities
• To partner on proposals
• To collaborate on projects
• To enhance the technology
• We’ll open source the Velo technology mid-year
• Downloadable
• User documentation
• Programmer documentation

22

Online Scientific Collaboration Software

Ian Gorton, from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the US Dept. of Energy, will speak on "Towards a Collaborative Scientific Knowledge Management Platform with Velo" at the Australian National University in Canberra, 11:30am, 10 July 2012. The software has been used for modelling carbon sequestration and climate change:

ANU College of Engineering & Computer Science

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING SEMINAR

Towards a Collaborative Scientific Knowledge Management Platform with Velo

Ian Gorton (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, US Dept. of Energy)

DATE: 2012-07-10
TIME: 11:30:00 - 12:30:00
LOCATION: Engineering Lecture Theatre (Building 32)

ABSTRACT:
Facilitating transformative improvements in the collaborative practices of the scientific community and their ability to share, manage and analyze massive data sets represents a software engineering challenge of immense magnitude. State-of-the-art collaborative platforms are examples of discipline-specific, stovepiped solutions, which have extremely limited utility for other science communities. Given the immense costs of building and maintaining such customized solutions, continuing down this path is unsustainable given the need to build even more sophisticated collaborative systems and accomplish wider scale deployment. Achieving a quantum leap in the utility of collaborative platforms to meet future requirements necessitates new approaches to designing and constructing their underlying software foundations.

This talk will describe our Velo software platform, which is designed to meet these future scientific collaboration requirements. Velo is designed to be highly customizable and scalable to meet a broad range of software requirements. Veloas architecture will be described, and the mechanisms adopted to address various quality requirements will be presented through examples from existing Velo deployments.

BIO:

I'm a Laboratory Fellow in Computational Sciences and Math at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I manage the Data Intensive Scientific Computing group, and was the Chief Architect for PNNLas Data Intensive Computing Initiative. I'm also Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society. Until July 2006, I led the software architecture R&D at National ICT Australia (NICTA) in Sydney, Australia. My passion is analyzing and designing complex, high performance distributed systems, and embodying useful design and architecture knowledge in methods and tools that can be exploited by architects in other projects.

Australian Research Online

The Arrow Discovery Service has been renamed Australian Research Online. It provides an index to Australian university, non-government and government research repositories. This includes items from the Australian National University and The Australian Computer Society, as well as more than 30,000 Digital Theses.

Digital Library and Digital Education in China

Greeting from the School of Computer Science at the ANU in Canberra, where Professor Zhendong Niu is visiting from Beijing Institute of Technology. One of his areas of interest is Digital Library and Digital Education. SOme projects of interest are the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, National Cultural Information Resource Sharing Project, China Academic Library Information System, National Foundation Education Grid (for k12 education resources for schools). The Professor also has an interest in legal portals.

What I found of most interest was work on integrating digital libraries with education. That may sound an obvious combination, but not much has been done in this area. The builders of document repositories work very separately from those of learning management systems. One aspect which doesn't arise as an issue is language; the software tools can work in Chinese and English, using the same ontology. An example is the Olympic Games (which BIT was involved in software for), the same concepts apply, even where different words are used in English and Chinese (I suggested using pictograms for the Beijing Olympics).

It was interesting to see the similarities with the issues of technology for education for China with the "Supermarket of E-learning" by China TV and India's use of satellite TV.

With the development of digital library, social networks, and user-generated content, need for trust and reputation models become prime. In this paper, we propose a user reputation model. As an encouraging and sanctioning mechanism, it has been applied to the DLDE (Digital Library and Digital Education) Learning 2.0 Community that is developed by our lab based on digital repositories management etc. The model combines user's individual activity analysis approach and collaborative activity analysis approach. Individual activity analysis approach is used to analyze the activities in which users participate individually and give its evaluation method. Collaborative activity analysis approach is used to analyze users' collaborative activities; three different categories of users' collaborative activities and corresponding evaluation methods were proposed in this paper. Experiments show that the proposed reputation model can accomplish the mission of encouraging good behaviors and differentiating the ability of students. Therefore it can fit well in our Community. ...
From: A User Reputation Model for Digital Library and Digital Education DLDE Learning 2.0 Community, Jin, F., Niu, Z., Zhang, Q., Lang, H., and Qin, K. 2008. , In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Asian Digital Libraries: Universal and Ubiquitous Access To information (Bali, Indonesia, December 02 - 05, 2008). G. Buchanan, M. Masoodian, and S. J. Cunningham, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 5362. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 61-70. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89533-6_7

Office of the Information Commissioner

Special Minister of State, Senator John Faulkner has announced draft laws to establish an Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) The Minister invited submissions via the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet website by 15 May 2009. But unfortunately the invitation did not include a copy of the documents to be commented on, nor any information on how to obtain a copy, making comment difficult.

In October 2007 I set the design of a computer system to speed FOI requests as a workshop exercise for students of Electronic Document Management at the Australian National University. The problem is that the volume of material could overwhelm manual FOI processes in the relatively small OIC. A system using XML and web technology could be used to speed the process.

The standards established in the National Archives free open source "XML Electronic Normalising of Archives" (XENA) and "Digital Preservation Recorder" (DPR) software tools could be used to process electronic records extracted from agency systems, such those based on Tower Software's Trim.

The OIC staff could use an online system to coordinate requests with agencies. OIC staff could then automatically check the conformance of agency staff with the new laws.

The CSIRO developed FunnelBack search system has already been interfaced to Trim to allow the searching of records in an agency. This and similar tools should make it possible for agencies to deal with FOI requests. If those requests use a common electronic format across government, it will considerably speed the process, reduce costs and simplify compliance monitoring.

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) provide a useful service where they chart how many new entries there are in open access repositories. The information is presumably automatically extracted from the repository. As an example, for the ACS Digital Library:

ACS Digital Library (410 records)

Running Other softwares (various), based in Australia and is registered as e-Journal/Publication
Registered on 2006-12-05
Cumulative deposits: 410 total [table] [graph]
Daily deposits in last year: 1 days of 1-9, 1 days of 10-99, 0 days of 100+ [table] [graph (PNG format)] [interactive graph (requires SVG format support)]
OAI Interface: Identify List Metadata Formats List Sets [harvest status]
100% freely accessible fulltext (* estimate)

The ACS Digital Library provides international quality magazines, journal articles and conference papers, covering innovative research and practice in Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). This service is provided free to the ICT profession by the Australian Computer Society (ACS) as part of its commitment to ensure the beneficial use of technology for the community. It includes: Australasian Journal of Information Systems (AJIS), Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology (JRPIT), and Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology (CRPIT).

Recordkeeping for government web information

Archives New Zealand have issued a Request for Proposal for "Development of Web Information Continuity Guide". There is a four page description of the work, available for download from the NZ Government website.

Information produced and maintained on the web as part of public sector business is covered by the Public Records Act 2005. This includes information on public websites, intranets, shared workspaces, wikis, blogs and other types of sites, as well as information in the administrative systems used to run these sites.

Archives New Zealand is receiving increasing requests for advice on recordkeeping for web information. Current guidance contained in the Continuum Recordkeeping Resource Kit was largely developed in 2003 and needs to be updated and expanded to provide more useful support to public sector agencies on strategies and tactics for current web information management that will support the aims of the Public Records Act.

Archives New Zealand is looking for a contractor to undertake the project over the period to 31 June 2009:

Interested individuals or consultancies are invited to submit an expression of interest along with a proposal outlining how you would approach the work and details of relevant experience by Friday the 21st November 2008. ...

From: Development of Web Information Continuity Guide, Archives New Zealand, 21/11/08

Twelve Canoes

Twelve Canoes is a multimedia web site following on from Rolf de Heer's film 10 Canoes . It features short multimedia works with the Yolngu people of the Arafura swamp. Wile the audio and visual content is breathtaking, the site is let down by poor web design. The designers shopuld implement accessibility features for the site and correct the errors in the HTML code to allow the site to be more widely used for education.

The site assumes a high spped Internet connection and even in Canberra on my wiless Internet link I had diffciulties. The web site has some text for display (excerpts below) to those who are unable to see the video. However, this is not normally apparent to the viewer, who will have to wait for video to download, unless they are using a text only or specially adapted web browser. It would be better if the site offered a text menu which allowed skipping the video rich content, for those on a slow link.

Some years ago I was invovled in projects to provide indiginous ciolutural content online,. Those suffered from taking too academic and textural approach to web based content. Twelcve canoes goes to other extreme and suffers from too little thought as to text and indexing inforamtion.

Unfortunately the web site has invalid HTML markup and some accessibility problems. When I attempted an accessibility test of the site, all I got was the message "Parked Page for 12canoes.com.au".

We are the first people of our lands.

These are some of our stories from where we have lived so long.

We welcome you to know about us, about our culture, this way.

---

12 Canoes

This website is built for us, for everyone.

There are 12 stories here about where we live, about how we came to be, about our history and about how we live now.

• Creation
• Our Ancestors
• The Macassans
• First White Men
• ThomsonTime
• The Swamp
• Plants and Animals
• Seasons
• Kinship
• Ceremony
• Language
• Nowadays

---

Gallery

There are many artworks (by many artists), photos and music here about where we live, about how we came to be, about our history and about how we live now. ...

Gallery > People & Places

There are over 60 photos here about where and how we live.

...

About > Meanings

Yolngu: The literal translation of Yolngu is simply, "the people", but it is used nowadays as a term to describe the group of Australian Indigenous people (Aboriginals) living in or originating from central and eastern Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Territory.

Balanda: A word meaning "white person(s)", derived from the word "Hollander"...the Dutch were the first white people to come into contact with the Yolngu.

Macassan: The Macassans, from the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia began visiting the north coast of Australia centuries ago. Their trade made the Yolngu a very powerful grouping economically. Such trading was stopped by the government in the 1906-07 season, and the economy of the region was destroyed by the imposition of Balanda law. ...

About > The People

We are the Yolngu people of Ramingining, in the northern part of Central Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Territory.

Ramingining is a town of about 800 of our people. More of our people live on outstations different distances from town. Also about 50 Balanda live here.

The nearest other town is Maningrida, more than two hours drive away except in the rainy season, when we can only fly there.

In Ramingining we have a store, a clinic, a school, a new police station, an arts centre, a resource centre, houses and not much else.

But we have history and culture here, that our ancestors have been growing for more than forty thousand years.

They passed that culture on from generation to generation. Now it's our turn to pass it on, not just to the next generation, but to people everywhere, all over the world.

That's because our way of life is changing fast now, and what you're going to see is for every generation to remember and keep our culture alive.

About > Where In The World

Ramingining is in the northern part of Central Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Territory.

Ramingining is a town of about 800 of our people.

About > Study Guide

This section coming soon. ...

---

Share

We are proud of our community. We are proud of our history and our present.

We are proud of our children, and our artists, and our songmen, we are proud of our whole place.

Because we are proud of all these things, we are sharing them with you. We are glad that you are interested enough to be here.

We hope that if you like them, the paintings or the stories or any of it, that you will share them with other people who are interested in learning about us...

From: Twelve Canoes: Introduction, Indigemedia Incorporated, Christensen Fund, South Australian Film Corporation and Screen Australia, 2008

Government electronic document policy

Do you have an e-document policy? Later in the year I will be facilitating a workshop on government electronic document policy with people from Australian and New Zealand state and federal governments. We will aim to come up with some guidelines for Government CIOs. But first I need to get an idea of what is out there now. Any pointers to policies, relevant standards or other documents would be most welcome. I will then collate the results and make it available.

My thinking is that most e-document and e-archiving policies are misdirected. Records managers and archivists need to stop being passive receivers of whatever junk they are given. Instead they need to start with the new "killer applications" such as social networking for business, mash ups and the like and build the policies in there. But I would suggest a more cautious approach than that of the UK Government's "Power of Information TaskForce".

Please include a web address where the policy is available, if possible. After all who would be silly enough to distribute their e-document policy on paper? ;-)

By the way the intention is to use a similar computer assisted format and some of the content from the Electronic Document Management course I ran last year. This used a computer equipped lab and a Moodle based system for content and exercises.

Here is a quick list of items I found with a web search:

1. International: Recommended Practice - Analysis, Selection, and Implementation Guidelines Associated with Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS), Association for Information and Image Management International, April 12, 2006.
2. Australian Federal: "Improving Electronic Document Management: Guidelines for Australian Government Agencies", Office of Government Information Technology, Commonwealth of Australia 1995
3. NT: Position Statement on Electronic Recordkeeping in the NT Government, Northern Territory Archives Service, September 2004
4. Queensland: Digitisation Disposal Policy, Queensland State Archives, April 2006
5. NSW: State Records NSW has an extensive set of documents and references one-documents:
   
   
   

   • Policy on digital records preservation
   • Policy on electronic recordkeeping
   • Policy on electronic messages as records
   • Standard on Recordkeeping in the Electronic Business Environment
   • NSW Recordkeeping Metadata Standard (NRKMS)
   • Checklist for assessing business systems (RIB 42)
   • Strategies for documenting Government business: The 'DIRKS' manual
   • Introducing recordkeeping metadata (RIB 18)
   • Selecting records management software (RIB 2)
   • Guidelines on keeping web records
   • Managing the message: Guidelines on managing formal and informal communications as records
   • FAQs - Emails and recordkeeping (RIB 49)
   • Desktop Management: Managing electronic documents and directories (RIB 30)
   • Email and other templates for creating digital records
   • Destroying digital records: When pressing delete is not enough (RIB 51)
   • Future Proof: Ensuring the long term accessibility of equipment / technology dependent records
   • Archives Advice: Protecting and handling magnetic media (NAA)
   • Archives Advice: Protecting and handling optical disks (NAA)
   • Information rights management and recordkeeping (RIB 36)
   • Digital records preservation in the NSW public sector: A discussion paper
   • Digital Records Advisory Group
   • Australasian Digital Recordkeeping Initiative (ADRI) website

By the way the new ISO/IEC 38500:2008 Corporate governance of information technology, based on AS8015-2005, includes a requirement for records management for IT systems. There is also a requirement for record keeping in the Australian Standard on Good Governance Principles (AS 8000-2003), as State Records NSW points out.

OAK Law Academic Authorship Survey

The OAK Law Project Team at Queensland University of Technology are conducting a survey on publishing agreements which ends 5pm 2nd November.

The OakLaw project (Open Access to Knowledge or OAKL), people are doing good work and have already produced an Australian version of the Creative Commons license. (Prof. Brian Fitzgerald from QUT talked about it at the National Scholarly Communications Forum 2007). It was suggested that the Queensland Government was looking to use CC for government data. This then could be applied to Commonwealth data, including Geosopatial data.

... The project is undertaking a survey of academic and scholarly authors within Australia to obtain an understanding of authors’ knowledge of publishing agreements and their experience in dealing with publishers in order to provide an accurate perspective on current academic publishing practices. The results received from the survey will be used in developing model publishing agreements, toolkits and training materials for academic authors and publishers.

If you are an academic or scholarly author within Australia, please click on this link to complete the survey: http://qutsurvey.webcentral.com.au/OAKsurvey/OAKsurvey.asp

We know that your time is valuable, yet we encourage you to complete the survey as we are confident that the results will allow us to develop practical tools which can be used by you to better manage your copyright.

Alternatively, if you would like more information about the OAK Law project please visit our webpage: www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au; this page also contains a link to the Author Survey.

We thank you in advance for your consideration of this request.

Paul Armbruster
On behalf of Professor Brian Fitzgerald

Research Assistant
The OAK Law Project
Legal Framework for e-Research Project
Queensland University of Technology
Level 1, 126 Margaret Street
Brisbane, Queensland, 4001
Australia ...
www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au
www.e-research.law.qut.edu.au

CRICOS NO.: 00213J

Office of the Information Commissioner Online?

I wrote 14 October 2007, that a group of academics and politicians had suggested Australian government documents in electronic format should be released by default. That was an idea which was not likely to be approved, but I set it as a workshop exercise for students on my Electronic Document Management course. The Australian Labor Party then announced its policy for the reform of Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, creating a new Office of the Information Commissioner. So I set that as an examination question. Most of the students on the course are public servants and if the ALP is elected they will likely have to implement whatever they proposed.

The problem is that the volume of electronic records will overwhelm the current manual FOI process. The proposal from academics was to go to the other extreme, by making all electronic government records available automatically. That proposal has its own problems, which the class pointed out in their answers to the exercise.

One of the class suggested setting up a new government agency to handle the release of records. Coincidentally, during the course the ALP released its policy proposing just such an agency: The Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC). So for the examination on Saturday, I asked the class how to implement the IT system for the OIC, using XML and web technology.

The obvious way to do this is to use the same tools and techniques as now used for transferring electronic records from agencies to the National Archives, but speed it up. The National Archives free open source "XML Electronic Normalising of Archives" (XENA) and "Digital Preservation Recorder" (DPR) software tools are now used to process electronic records extracted from agency systems, such those based on Tower Software's Trim.

The OIC staff could use an online federated system to search the records of all agencies. OIC staff would then place an automated request for relevant records with each agency for retrieval. It would only need a few seconds for the system to extract the records, but perhaps a day would be allowed for the agency to review the records and release them to the OIC. XENA and DPR would catalog and format the records.

The OIC staff would need to be security cleared and their systems would need to be secure. However, this is something that oversight commissions already have to deal with day-to-day in government. When at the Commonwealth Ombudsman's Office I had to look after IT systems for dealing with with sensitive materials from agencies, including security agencies.


ps: Today I bumped into one of the staff from FunnelBack, who mentioned they had already implemented an interface to allow searching Trim. Their approach would need some tweaking for a government wide service, due to security issues, but would be a start.

Government electronic documents released by default

A group of academics and politicians have made the interesting suggestion that government documents in electronic format should be released by default. The idea is that releasing electronic documents is cheap compared to the cost of having someone go through and check them:

There are other reforms that we believe should be considered as part of a wider review of the Act’s operation. Modern information technology (ICT) enables the large scale disclosure of government documents to be achieved at very low cost. ICT allows all documents created by government organisations to be automatically uploaded and published on websites at the time of their creation. There is no reason why this should not be done for all documents except those protected by privacy legislation and the specific, narrow legislative xemptions.

By default, electronic documents would be released to the public, leading to large cost savings in the administration of FOI legislation. Contests would be limited to those few cases in which non-disclosure was based on claims that a document’s disclosure would be contrary to the public interest. ...

From: Be Honest, Minister! RESTORING HONEST GOVERNMENT IN AUSTRALIA, Accountability Working Party, Australasian Study of Parliament Group, 2007

One catch with this proposal is that the cataloging of the information would have to be correct to prevent any privacy or security breeches. Previously public servants could write relatively freely in an internal file, on the assumption most of it would never be made public and what was would be carefully checked before release. If electronic records are freely available, they can be pured over by millions of eyes (and automated search programs) looking for embarrassing, or financially useful, information.

See also books on:

• Public Sector Information Management
• e-Government

ICT Standards for Civil Society, Commerce and Government

In the next few weeks I am giving eight talks in NSW, Tasmania and the ACT and a three day industry course. In the next week I will try to bring together some common themes for these, as I did in 1996 with "Three months on the InfoBahn looking for the on-line future".

The talks:

1. Reducing Australian ICT Carbon Emissions, 9 September 3:30pm at Influence 2007, Hunter Valley Crowne Plaza, NSW.
2. Why Max? Demystifying Broadband options for Tasmania: For the ACS Tasmanian Branch, at Burnie, Tasmania 1:00PM , Devonport 4:00PM on 10 September 2007, Hobart, 12:30PM 12 September 2007 and Lanceston, 4:00PM 13 September 2007.
3. Locating Tasmania in the Global Information Economy, address to the Annual General Meeting of the ACS Tasmanian Branch, Hobart, 12 September 2007, 5:30PM.
4. Government services via the web in regional Australia, for the 4th Annual Web Content Management for Government, marcus evans, Hyatt Hotel, Canberra 17 Sep 2007, 11am
5. Metadata and Electronic Document Management for Electronic Commerce, for COMP3410, ANU, 19 Sep 2007
6. Standards for eCommerce, for COMP3410, ANU, 20 Sep 2007
7. The Digital Library, for COMP3410, ANU, 10am to 11am 26 Sep 2007
8. Electronic Publishing, for COMP3410, ANU, 27 Sep 2007
9. Electronic Document Management, for ANU Centre for Science and Engineering of Materials.

ICT Standards for Civil Society, Commerce and Government

What are we trying to accomplish with the Internet, web and broadband? In a series of talks and training courses over the next few months I will discuss how to reduce carbon emissions, sell goods, publish and preserve information using ICT. The Internet now provides a common wired and wireless platform for communications and the web a platform for publishing and, increasingly, for data applications.

Increasingly computer systems are using a common set of Internet and web based standards for publishing, commerce, government business and personal communications. What these have in common is that it is to allow people to work together more efficiently and creatively. The application might require a commercial business plan, a government policy, a communial agreement, or just an nod from friends having lunch, but they will all use similar technology with similar ways of working and aims.

Sustainability of Research Data in Australia, Canberra, 15 March 2007

Recommended:

ALIA URLs (ACT) is delighted to announce that our first speaker of 2007 will be Dr Markus Buchhorn, Director of Information and Communication Technology Environments in the Division of Information at the Australian National University. Markus will talk on "The Preservation and Sustainability of Research Data in Australia", based on his recent talk to Information Online in Sydney in January.

In 2006, Markus worked with Paul McNamara of the ANU Library on the Australian eResearch Sustainability Project (AERES). The AERES report was mentioned favourably in the December 2006 Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) Working Group report - From Data to Wisdom: Pathways to successful data management for Australian science.

When: Thursday March 15 4:30 - 5:30pm

Where: Baume Theatre, Australian National University ...

Margaret Henty
National Services Program Coordinator
Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories
W. K. Hancock Building (#43)
The Australian National University
Canberra, ACT, 0200, AUSTRALIA

See also:

• APSR Presentations
  
• Quality e-Publishing Support for the ICT Profession
• Books on Preserving Digital Information

ACS Digital Library now in Arrow Discovery Service

The ACS Digital Library papers are now included in the ARROW discovery service. Arrow provides an index to scholarly materials from Australian universities, professional, scientific and cultural organisations.

This includes papers such as Dr. Roger Clarke's "Key Aspects of the History of the Information Systems Discipline in Australia".

Arrow reads an OAI standard XML metadata file created by the ACS Digital Library. Thanks to the National Library of Australia for arranging this.

Currently only one issue of the Australasian Journal of Information Systems is available. We are working on getting about 1,500 papers from Australasian Journal of Information Systems and Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology into the system.

ps: How to do this was set a an assignment question for ANU IT for E-Commerce (COMP3410/COMP6341) Question 1, August 2006. But the students had to work it out from first principles, whereas I just used a open source package <http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/qpublishing.shtml>. ;-)

Research and writing tools

There are tools for searching and arranging information in a diagrammatic way. But these are not used much by non-specialists. What is becoming more common is the use of text labeling (tags) as an aid to finding and arranging information. Perhaps diagrams and tags can be combined in more creative ways for use by authors.

Typically you can display information as a network diagram, with items of information (documents, web pages, scholarly papers) represented by nodes in the diagram (usually circles or squares) and the relationships between them by connecting lines. Sometimes the lines are labeled with text captions and have arrows indicating the direction of the arrows (in which case it is technically known as a directed graph).

Some forms of diagrams have more restrictions, for example the diagram showing the hierarchy of sections and chapters in a book or the site map showing web pages on a web site. Part of the process of composing written work may be seen as taking a spaghetti diagram of seemingly randomly connected information and turning it into a neat hierarchy suitable for publication.

In teaching web site design I suggest to the students that they can think of trimming the directed graph of interconnected web pages into a site map. This is not to say that all the other links which don't fit in the neat tree structure are deleted, just that they are considered less important by the designer. These extra links will become hypertext links within the text of the document, whereas the main links are usually in menus on separate web pages or sections. In a printed document the main links are represented by the table of contents and by the physical ordering of the content; other links by cross references, indices and the like.

Web search tools work in part by making automated decisions as to how to arrange blocks of information. They partly use the hypertext links inserted by the author, but also use the text itself to make connections the author could not see.

While there are document creation tools for web designers and writers which allow direct manipulation of diagrams, my impression is that most authors have difficulty conceptualizing information this way. They see information as strings of words and are more comfortable cutting and pasting text, than moving icons and links. But this might be a bias introduced by "word processors" being the tool they are first introduced to.

KartOO is a search engine which displays the results as a diagram. Collections of documents at each web site are shown as icons (with size representing importance). Web sites are linked by lines labeled with words indicating what they have in common. In the background are shaded regions showing general concepts. When you place the pointer over a document, the links to other related documents are highlighted. This can be useful for seeing relationships between information, people and organizations. But I don't find it much use for day to day web searching.

As an example, searching with Kartoo for "Tom Worthington" shows the largest collection of documents at my web site tomw.net.au and a smaller collection at my professional body acs.org.au these are related by the words: technology, Industry and committee. Placing the pointer over the largest document, which is my biography, shows links from it.

Flickr and Del.icio.us provide a Folksonomy, with items of information manually tagged by any contributor. A diagram typically displays the relative impotence of tags by the size of the text. This might provide some insights into to content, but I have not found it that useful.

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A folksonomy is an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.

The process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easier to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to its primary users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and Del.icio.us, although it has been suggested that Flickr is not a good example of folksonomy.[1]

From: Folksonomy, Wikipedia, 2006

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site came online in late 2003 and was founded by Joshua Schachter, co-maintainer of Memepool. It is now part of Yahoo!.

A non-hierarchical keyword categorization system is used on del.icio.us where users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.

From Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, 2006

Library of Alexandrina Virtually Rises from the Ashes

The Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire around 48 BC and opened again for business in 2002 AD. Some ways libraries and publications work have not changed in 2000 years, despite the use of computers, but the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has gone hi-tech:

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina intends to become an active member among the leading digital institutions in the world. Towards that goal, the BA has embarked on a whole array of ambitious projects, in partnership with world class institutions. These range from hosting a mirror site for a significant part of the Internet Archive, participating in the Million Book Project, organizing the digital archive of the Gamal Abdel Nasser collection, presenting the first ever complete digital version of the Description de l'Egypte, to participating in advanced research such as the Arabic component of the UN-sponsored Universal Digital Language computerized multi-language translation program and offering the most advanced 3D virtual imaging techniques in an virtual immersive environment for Science and Technology (S&T) applications. Thus, despite being barely four years in existence, the BA has already a substantial record of achievements.

From Born Digital The New Bibliotheca Alexandria, Ismail Serageldin, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 01-10-2006, http://www.bibalex.org/english/Publication/Attachments/Files/BornDigital_links.pdf

How to Create On-line University Courses in Electronic Archiving: Part 5 - On-line Courseware

In Part 4 I discussed if e-records as part of decision making in eGovernment and eBusiness. The program of courses entitled "System Approach to Management of Government Information" are now being offered, so I tought I should look at tidying up my content to get ready.

One option I would like to try is using a course management system (CMS). Not because the students will be studying on-line remotely, they will be on the campus at live sessions, but because it might be a useful way to make sure the material is well structured.

The Moodle product looks like a good option; it is Australian developed, free Open Source, and people keep mentioning it to me. The ACS use it for their new Computer Professional Educational Program and appears to be going well (thankfully as I am in charge of Professional Development at the ACS as of 1 January 2007).

The Moodle people claim it is based on "sound pedagogical principles", specifically "social constructionist pedagogy". Which they say involves: Constructivism, Constructionism, Social Constructivism, Connected and Separate.

Constructivism says you have to integrate what you are learning into what you already know. Constructionism says you learn better if you have to do something with the knowledge. For example I am writing this as I read about Moodle and so I am learning by having to write about it. Social Constructivism is about a group assembling ideas. As an example when people respond to what I have written and suggest changes. Connected and Separate is about understand the person's other point of view versus being "right": people will point out spelling errors in what I wrote (Separate) and others will suggest better ways to word it (Connected).

I am not sure how widely accepted these concepts are (it is all new to me), but it seems these are really two ideas: Learning through doing and working together.

Most computer based learning systems seem to be designed to support an isolated individual learning "facts". This would be Separate non-Constructivism in Moodles' language.

With that out of the way, lets look at Moodle, the software. It is released under a GNU General Public License, so it can be freely used and modified (free as in beer and speech). It is written in PHP and requires an SQL database to hold the content.

There are roles defined for admin, course creators, teachers , non-editing teachers (ie: adjuncts and tutors) and students. Moodle uses much the same software and philosophy as Open Journal Systems for e-publishing. There the roles are administrators, editors, reviewers and readers.

CMS systems are mostly about administering a course, not creating learning content. The CMS is used to keep track of the students, learning materials and activities (such as assignments). They are not about creating the actual materials the students read. This is much the same as e-publishing systems don't help you write a document, just publish it.

The current release of Moodle was 1.7, but Version 1.8 is just out (January 2007). This is supposed to have improved web accessibility features. They are specifically aiming for compliance with Italian Legislation on Accessibility. I am not exactly sure what that legislation covers, but it is likely to be much the same as Australian requirements under the Disability Discrimination Act and involve use of the W3C WAG, as used worldwide.

The Moodle developers are also aiming to implement XHTML Strict (after some debate). Use of XHTML Strict will help with accessibility and make for very clean and efficient web pages. It should also make it possible to use them on hand held devices, such as my proposed learning PC for developing nations and for different languages.

There is a Wiki with extensive documentation about using Moodle. Each Moodle course created has a course homepage, which is the place the students first come to. The home page has a typical Wiki style with blocks of mostly text laid out in columns.

The course can be formed of sections, usually in an order which the students work their way through (each week for example). Moodle has its own web based editor, including a "Clean Word HTML button" to remove extranious code from HTML which has been generated by Microsoft Word.

A course consists of essentially of resources and activities. A resource will typically be a web page with some content on it, a link to some content web based content somewhere else. At this point you realize the CMS doesn't write the course for you: the actual content you are teaching has to be somewhere. It might be on web pages, in PDF documents, or Powerpoint slides.

The content might be in an IMS content package. This is a standard format for learning content which is also supported by other CMS systems such as Web CT. An IMS Content Package is a Zipped directory of XML files, much like the OpenXML and Open Office word processing formats.

Exactly how you create a package, (with Moodle?) or how standardized they are between different CMS systems I am not yet clear on. But it appears to work as the government funded Australian Flexible Learning Framework has dozens of IMS content packaged learning objects in its Flexible Learning Toolboxes. These can be previewed online.

There are a bewildering array of standards underlying these systems, most of which the user never has to know about. As an example IMS uses a different metadata format to describe its learning objects to the IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata IEEE Std 1484.12.1-2002 (which I get a mention in, as I was on the balloting group). So IMS provide a set of Guidelines for Using the IMS LRM to IEEE LOM 1.0 Transform
to turn IMS metedata into IEEE metadata using XSLT transformations.