The Web as infrastructure for scholarly research and communication

@hvdsomp #idcc13

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog – Caspar David Friedrich (1818)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog

Herbert Van de Sompel
IDCC 2013, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, January 16 2013

The Scholarly Record is Changing

•  The scholarly record is extending with a wide range of non-
traditional assets emerging from eScience and eHumanities
•  e.g. datasets, software, ontologies, workflows, online debate,
slides, blogs, videos, etc.

•  Many of these non-traditional assets:
•  Have a wide range of relationships with and dependencies on
other assets – grouping assets
•  Are becoming increasingly dynamic, and do not have the sense
of fixity that traditional assets such as journal articles or books
have – versioning assets


grouping assets

versioning assets


discovering assets


•  OAI was a heroic effort to fundamentally
transform scholarly communication
•  By promoting communication via
preprints, non-peer-reviewed papers

•  The OAI took a technical approach to
1999 achieve the goal
•  Make preprints easier to discover,
access – Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting


Don’t trust HTTP

HTTP GET on record identifier

An HTTP link

Just another
HTTP baseURL


•  OAI-ORE observation: Scholarly assets are
rapidly becoming compound, consisting of
multiple resources with various:
•  Relationships
•  Interdependencies

•  How to convey this compound-ness in an
2007
interoperable manner so that applications
can access, consume such assets?


See e.g. http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/interoperability-
for-the-discovery-use-and-re-use-of-units-of-scholarly-communication/8/
index.html


•  Memento is about the Web and time:
•  Resources evolve over time
•  Only the current representation is
available from a resource’s URI
•  How to seamlessly access prior
representation, if they exist?

•  Memento looks at this problem for the Web,
in general 2009

Digital Preservation Award 2010


•  Memento has potential consequences for
scholarly communication

•  Observation: Scholarly assets are
becoming increasingly dynamic, and do not
have the sense of fixity that traditional
assets such as journal articles or books
have
•  Even traditional assets are becoming 2009
increasingly dynamic and dependent on
other assets, which may themselves be
dynamic


Scientific Workflows, Services, Data, Workflow Engines

Carole Goble, JCDL 2012 Keynote https://dl.dropbox.com/u/617206/JCDL2012keynoteGoble.ppt


From The Version of Record to A Version of the Record

•  The ever-evolving nature of some assets challenges the notion of
fixity as “forever frozen” and begs considering the notion of the
“state of the scholarly record at a specific moment in time”

•  It will become essential to be able to determine what the state of
related and interdependent assets was at certain moments in time


Two Perspectives on Memento

Web Archive

URI-M - http://web.archive.org/web/20010911203610/http://www.cnn.com/

URI-R - http://www.cnn.com/


Two Perspectives on Memento

CMS

URI-M - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=September_11_attacks&oldid=282333

URI-R - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks


•  How to get to the time-specific resources
from the generic resource?

•  Memento addresses the problem in a
resource-centric way:
•  Resource, URI, state, representation,
link, content negotiation

2009


Access Versions via the original URI and datetime

Select Date
Today Sep 16 2010
Sep 12 2010

From
BL Archive

Recreating a Version of the Record
•  Is it possible to reconstruct the Web-based scholarly record as it was at
a certain point in time?

•  Consider a special case: Given a paper can one see the referenced
materials as they were the time of publication of the paper?
•  ti: Time of publication
•  Relationship: Cited resources


Published
September 15 2004


Domain Gone


Archived copy
December 5 2003


Current version


Archived copy
December 11 2004


Resource gone


Archived copy
unavailable


Pilot Study at Scale with Memento

•  Papers from arXiv: 400,000 papers => 144,000 unique URIs
•  Papers from UNT ETD repository: 3,600 papers => 18,000 URIs
•  Referenced URIs of established scholarly repositories removed (e.g.
http://dx.doi.org), i.e. focusing in on the periphery of the scholarly record

•  Study looks into:
•  Does the referenced resource still exist?
•  Are there archived versions of of the referenced resource?
•  From around the time of publication of the citing paper?

•  Study does not look into dynamic aspects:
•  If the referenced resource still exists, is its content same as at ti?
•  Does an archived version have the same content as at ti?

Sanderson, R., Phillips, M., and Van de Sompel, H. (2011) Analyzing the Persistence of Referenced Web
Resources with Memento. Open Repositories 2011; Arxiv preprint. arXiv:1105.3459 ; http://arxiv.org/abs/
1105.3459


UNT


arXiv


The Good News ™

•  Despite there not being a pro-active effort to archive those
resources, a considerable amount were
o  Because they had HTTP URIs and hence were archived as
part of ongoing web archiving processes
o  In The Wild archiving comes for free with the web
infrastructure

•  404 resources exist in web archives and Memento can access
them via their original HTTP URI
o  Does that make an HTTP URI a PID?


The Bad News ™

•  Many resources were not archived

•  For many resources there were no archival versions around ti


Automatic Creation of Archival Snapshots

•  There is a need for a more pro-active approach to archive
dynamic, interdependent assets, e.g.:
o  Web Archives as infrastructure

o  Use CMS, wikis, datawikis with solid versioning mechanisms

o  Archiving linked context at the time of publication

o  Archive at the moment of use (social interaction,
downloading, annotating, etc.)
o  Delineate which resources are considered in/out of a
scholarly assets (OAI-ORE) to understand what needs
archiving


•  ResourceSync is about allowing 3rd party
systems and applications to remain
synchronized with a server’s evolving
resources.

•  Many use cases:
•  Mirroring repository content
•  Aggregating content
•  Replicating datasets
2012 •  Exposing content to archives
•  Keeping linked data applications that
leverage remote data up-to-date

•  Differing needs regarding:
•  Coverage
•  Accuracy
•  Latency


ResourceSync Approach

•  Resource centric; it’s all about the URI (again)

•  Introduces a set of modular capabilities that a server can
implement to allow 3rd parties to remain in sync with its
resources. Recurrently publish:
o  Resource Lists

o  Change Lists

o  Resource Dumps

o  Change Dumps

•  All capabilities based on the Sitemap document formats and
extensions thereof
o  Existing Sitemaps are off-the-shelf compliant


ResourceSync Capabilities


•  Beta spec end 01/2013
•  http://www.openarchives.org/rs/

•  Feedback
•  mailto:resourcesync@googlegroups.com

•  Papers in D-Lib Magazine
2012 •  http://dx.doi.org/10.145/september2012-
vandesompel
•  http://dx.doi.org/10.145/january2013-klein

•  Paper in Ariadne
•  http://www.ariande.ac.uk/issue70/lewis-et-
al


1998 - 2013


1998 - 2013

a stack of journals or a network of interconnected
a bunch of PDF files assets and actors


Conclusion

•  OAI-ORE, Memento, ResourceSync illustrate the potential of
leveraging the Web infrastructure for scholarly communication

•  This suggests that other special requirements of scholarly
communication (certification, archiving, persistence, trust, annotation,
metrics, …) may be addressable in an interoperable manner by
leveraging the Web infrastructure

•  Wins:
•  Long Term Sustainability: Reuse of infrastructure (network,
software, platforms, standards, etc.) that the entire world depends
on
•  Integration of scholarly discourse with other Web-based discourse


@hvdsomp #idcc13

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog – Caspar David Friedrich (1818)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog

The Web as infrastructure for scholarly research and communication

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The Web as infrastructure for scholarly research and communication