D2D - a modest vision
(but which ‘D’ is which?)
Paul Walk
Technical Manager
p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk
UKOLN is supported by:
www.ukoln.ac.uk
A centre of expertise in digital information management

a map? an architecture? a vision?

a map? an architecture? a vision?
that’s me at the bottom, scratching my
head....

a map? an architecture? a vision?
that’s me at the bottom, scratching my
head....
being asked to design an architecture is
a thankless task - you're basically
designing the thing which everyone is
going to blame in a few years time and
attaching your name to it....

a map? an architecture? a vision?
that’s me at the bottom, scratching my
head....
being asked to design an architecture is
a thankless task - you're basically
designing the thing which everyone is
going to blame in a few years time and
attaching your name to it....
...however, being asked to present a
vision is a relatively risk-free proposition:
if your vision doesn't come to pass it is
because the idiot person designing the
architecture got it wrong

a map? an architecture? a vision?
that’s me at the bottom, scratching my
head....
being asked to design an architecture is
a thankless task - you're basically
designing the thing which everyone is
going to blame in a few years time and
attaching your name to it....
...however, being asked to present a
vision is a relatively risk-free proposition:
if your vision doesn't come to pass it is
because the idiot person designing the
architecture got it wrong
not convinced that discovery and
delivery fit together in a coherent
architecture

a map? an architecture? a vision?
that’s me at the bottom, scratching my
head....
being asked to design an architecture is
a thankless task - you're basically
designing the thing which everyone is
going to blame in a few years time and
attaching your name to it....
...however, being asked to present a
vision is a relatively risk-free proposition:
if your vision doesn't come to pass it is
because the idiot person designing the
architecture got it wrong
not convinced that discovery and
delivery fit together in a coherent
architecture
3 ideas:
- the broker
- community search ‘memory’
- third party search interfaces

tensions
• amateur v professional
– note that professionalism is not an intrinsic quality in the researcher - it depends also on
context - a person can be either of these at different times
• harvest v (cross)search
– harvesting works (Google, RSS)
• direct v mediated
– we haven’t replaced the librarian with software so much as moved the task to the
researcher
– does the researcher get a service as good as the very best that they might have received
from a subject librarian ten years ago?
• recall v precision
– the perception is that Google is king of recall. But (according to Stuart Weibel of OCLC)
Google and Microsoft continue to invest in metadata. This one will continue to run and
run....
• active v passive / push v pull
– active search versus ‘passive’ subscription

today - what we could be doing already
• making the machine APIs the heart of our services
– a good design principle is to use the machine API as the API used by our own user-
interfaces
– we just can’t know for sure all the ways in which our information services might be used
• reducing barriers to third-parties developing other (competing!?) UIs
– are our UIs really just ‘gateways’ to information (implying that there is a wall around that
information)
– any UIs we develop should add value
– really rapid/agile response to new requirements
• surfacing the expertise of the subject librarian/specialist in the services
we provide
– but....consider exploiting the wisdom of the community where possible
• re-evaluating the ‘harvest’ model
– light-weight harvesting on the rise
– RSS & OpenSearch
• using web protocols
– Z39.50 alone is a barrier to participation in Web 2.0
– SRU - isn’t this a ‘no-brainer’?

a (modest) vision - what we might consider next
• personal harvesting
– subscription and saved searches
– RSS
– the “finely tuned antennae”
– I no longer want to search for information in many cases but to register my interest and
then sit back and wait for results to be delivered.
– searching is an expensive activity I want to reserve for particular occasions
– a growing issue is how to manage and search/mine the information which has already
been delivered (semi-automatically) to me
• filtered delivery - more fine tuning
• an architecture which allows the user (and community) to make
gestures of interest and which is capable of responding to them
– gestures might include:
• explicit registration of interest (saved searches, RSS subscriptions etc.)
• personal profiling (e.g. “this is who I am and what I do - you decide what might be
interesting to me”)
• search history - automatic profiling
• community profiling - ‘hot topics’ and the ‘people who were interested in ‘x’ were also
interested in ‘y’ model

from
discovery -> delivery
to
gesture -> delivery -> discovery