Linking research & learning technologies through standards

We have posted about the fluidity of researcher identity, and approaches to identity which acknowledge that fluidity—the NicNames project’s in particular. That post discussed the profusion of identities authors now have online, and presumed that those identities need to be deduplicated, and gathered together so that all the author’s work can be aligned to the one identity—even if we do not presume a notion of primary identity.

But the researcher does not always want their disparate identities tethered together. The pseudonym has long been a literary convention, dissected by literary historians (and authority files). Now it is a mainstay of the blogosphere, where a far amount of scholarly writing takes place; and people are well-attuned to the distinction between pseudonymous and anonymous writing. Internet sleuthing can work out the connections between online identities, just as literary scholars have been doing. That doesn’t mean the authors appreciate if you do. There may be an objective reality about an author’s identity, beyond the fluid consensus of authorities. But fluidity may suit the author just fine, because authors want control over their own identity.

We have mentioned NicNames as an approach to dealing with multiple author identities. The other initiative to mention is an outcome of the UKOLN/DRIVER workshop on international repository infrastructure, held in March. One of the infrastructure tasks the workshop faced was how to establish interoperability between repository identifiers internationally, whether they be identifiers for repository objects, or for authors. At a basic level, repository identifiers from the various available schemes—URL, Handle, PURL, XRI—are already interoperable, since all of them are usable under HTTP. But interoperability is a real problem when it comes to what representations the identifiers resolve to, or how to get a service to operate on identifiers from a huge number of different schemes.

Outside their associated services, though, identifiers are just names associated with things, and the workshop came up with a simple solution to identifier interoperability—which ANDS will take the lead in implementing, as presented at the OAI6 workshop in June. The solution is, have authorities assert that two identifiers are pointing to the same thing. This will allow you to translate queries involving one to queries involving the other, without having to build an extra service layer on top of the existing identifier services.

For author identifiers in particular, the identifiers will be the different tokens associated with researchers by sundry identifier authorities—Elsevier and Thomson, national libraries, grants agencies, institutions. And the authorities asserting equivalence between the identifiers will be national hubs (the UN doesn’t yet have the requisite infrastructure). The assertions themselves can be simple RDF statements of equivalence: katherine.mansfield@hogwarths.edu.au owl:sameAs kbeauchamp@unseen.ac.uk .

So the existing identifiers for authors are left alone, there is no unrealistic proposal to substitute them all with a Single Author Identifier. A layer is imposed over these identifiers, to deduplicate them. And that layer is decentralised, to the national level; because that is rather more feasible than a global solution.

A crucial insight is, these national hubs are still accountable to the researchers, unlike the authority file approach. And they will allow researchers to dissociate online identities, if that’s what they want. So if Kath Mansfield does not want the publications of Kate Jackson associated with her, she can get her national hub to assert instead katherine.mansfield@hogwarths.edu.au owl:differentFrom kbeauchamp@unseen.ac.uk. She can do that if the internet sleuthing associating the two identities is wrong. She can also do it, if it turns out to be right: the researcher is still empowered to control the representation of their own online identity.

To some extent. The national hubs are authorities, in the plural, and there may be another national hub insisting they are the same person after all. And that brings us back to consensus-driven wikiality, as we alluded to in the preceding post. There are authorities to assert two identities are the same, and those authorities are necessary to the scholarly process. But the identities of authors are subject to review and revision—just like the research they publish.

Even if *they* know who they are.

The business of a library is to establish authoritative identities for the works they make available. That is why libraries put together authority files, as unambiguous names for authors: those are the names books are indexed under, and searched under in library catalogues. There are several advantages of having an unambiguous identity for an author are obvious. A researcher who wants credit for their work—or the department whose funding depends on it—doesn’t want credit to go to another researcher with the same name. Anyone collecting royalties on their published work will want their identity to be unambiguous as well—though not all fields of research make it as worthwhile to chase after residuals.

Library users also appreciate disambiguation: if I am looking for works by or about the contemporary German novelist Richard Wagner (1952- ), I’d like to avoid the deluge of works by or about the slightly more famous German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). And a library catalogue is being helpful when it includes the dates of birth to differentiate between the two Richard Wagners—just as Wikipedia is, when it refers to Richard_Wagner_(novelist).

Making those kinds of distinctions depends on having good enough metadata on the authors. If you’ve publishing a dead-tree book in the past few decades, your national library has been in cahoots with your publisher to make sure they have that metadata. *I* don’t remember giving the Library of Congress my year of birth, but it avoids a car dealer in Florida getting credit for any books I’ve written. (See Libraries Australia.)
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We have already mentioned that the recent quarterly IMS meeting concentrated on developments in Common Cartridge, and how Common Cartridge is being aligned with other initiatives underway in IMS. One of those initiatives is Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), and was the subject of a developer workshop there.

The other major initiative involving Common Cartridge are Curriculum Standards, which are being added to Common Cartridge as metadata. We have also discussed here the importance of machine-readable curricula, and how they can be exploited as metadata for learning objects—to enable more focused discovery of learning objects, and better alignment of resources to a school’s curriculum. Including Curriculum Standards in Common Cartridge addresses these concerns expressly.
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In 2008, the Link Affiliates team carried out a project for DEEWR, the Department of Education Employment and Work Place Relations, to investigate the use of learner identities especially in the school sector. All states and territories, were consulted at the school level including government and non government school jurisdictions, as well as vocational education and higher education representatives.
The report from this work can be found at the Australian Information and Communications Technology in Education Committee, AICTEC website at http://www.aictec.edu.au/aictec/go/home/about/pid/289     It is a hefty report and not one for the faint hearted. It uses an e- framework http://www.e-framework.org/ approach to analyse the possibilities for using a learner identity management framework, LIMF for assisting in the smooth transition of students between jurisdictions and systems. More than 180,000 students transfer between systems/jurisdictions each year and the current manual system of transferring information to assist in a smooth learning transition is not well utlised. 

The report made a number of recommendations on how to progress the use of learner identities in Australia especialy with regard to student transfer. These recommendations are now under consideration by a sub committee of AICTEC.
At the same time the vocational education sector is revisting the report to assist in the establishment of e-portfolio approaches.

This was a tight contained project carried out within a short time frame. While it was concerned to report on the specific issue of school student transfer, it is suggested that it is a useful document for consideration of learner identity issues in general. Other perspectives would be most welcome.

Hyperlinks break, and there has long been a realisation that there is information online whose hyperlinks should not break. Repositories have been set up to ensure the ongoing availability of online information; but like any online data source, repositories too change servers and structures and platforms, and their hyperlinks too break. This is a problem that affects e-research as much as it does e-libraries and e-learning. With the increasing move to publish and cite research data online, the issue is becoming even more keenly felt.

The repository community has come to accept that persistent identifiers help deal with this issue; they do this through some mechanism of redirection to the current network location of a resource. In itself, this does not solve the issue: it’s no good having a persistent identifier redirect to the current network location, if the redirection is not updated, or the identifier server is down, or the data is tampered with. But removing the dependency on current location does at least allow procedures to be put in place, which can prevent foreseeable disruptions to the persistent access to a resource.

The PILIN project was tasked with exploring the policy and technological issues behind persisting identifiers; as a result, it produced quite a bit of text, and some code. Institutions that already host persistent identifiers can use these outputs to firm up their infrastructure. But PILIN was not an operational project, and it could not build a sustainable, backbone identifier infrastructure. That is the job for a national service supporting access to data: individuals and institutions should be able to rely on such a service to keep their identifiers around in the long run, even if they cannot host the identifiers themselves.

The Australian National Data Service fits that description, and has acknowledged from the beginning that providing persistent identifiers are a core part of its business. It has already piloted a persistent identifier service based on the Handle System, and is going live with it. The service is intended for B2B use through XML over HTTP, rather than manually administering each identifier: this encourages users to automate solutions to maintaining identifiers, which is sounder practice for ensuring that identifiers really are kept up to date.

The Link Affiliates team has also been writing training materials on persistent identifiers, building on the PILIN project work, and concentrating in particular on the range of policies needed to ensure persistence. Although ANDS is providing the infrastructure for hosting the identifiers, much of the policy implementation still has to happen on the side of the researchers and data managers, who have requested the identifiers and are responsible for keeping them up to date.

A brief note, by the by, that I have posted elsewhere on the UKOLN International Repository Workshop, and its work on persistent identifiers. The workshop came up with a model for identifier interoperability, as discoverable assertions of equivalence or difference of different identifier names. This is humble and unexciting enough to be feasible (particularly for author identity, a fraught issue which has already engaged much discussion).