Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR)

1. www.apsr.edu.au Register this—Register thata comparison of registry technologies and registry metadata standards for the e-research domain Australian Partnership forSustainable Repositories (APSR) Chris Blackall and Adrian Burton 1

2. Registers/Registries • Registry Services • Registry Standards • Compared… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analyze_This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analyze_That Metadata Open Forum 2008

3. Presentation Outline • Why I’m interested in registries • What is a register/registry? • Why do we need them? • The role and benefits of registries in the context of federated networks of ‘repositories’ in e-Research • Registry solutions compared…

4. Why I’m interested in registries (I) • Because I managed a project to build one • Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) Registry • A registry of research data collections and [web] services related to them • Aligned with the draft ISO 2146 (Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organizations) • ORCA Registry is part of an emerging national information architecture (now referred to as the Australian Data Commons) for e-research in Australia

5. Why I’m interested in registries (II) • Because I’m involved in the planning and implementation of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS): • ANDS will develop, operate and integrate various registries for e-research in Australia • ANDS is funded through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme (NCRIS) • Registries are essential to ‘informatics’ intensive disciplines: also referred to as e-research (Australia) or e-science (UK, EU)

6. What is a register/registry? • As defined by ISO 19135:2006 Geographic Information—Procedures for item registration • Registration: the assignment of a permanent, unique, and unambiguous identifier to an item • Identifier: linguistically independent sequence of characters capable of uniquely and permanently identifying that which it is associated • Register: a set of files containing identifiers assigned to items with descriptions of the associated items • Registry: information system on which a register is maintained Metadata Open Forum 2008

7. Why we need registries (I) • For people-to-people transactions • to establish and maintain trust • to register items/entities in order to establish ownership, relationships, accountability, jurisdiction etc. • For software-to-software transactions • to identify parties in service transactions • to facilitate automated business transactions between parties Metadata Open Forum 2008

8. Why we need registries (II) • For researcher-to-researcher transactions: • To permanently, uniquely, and unambiguously identify entities involved in the research and scholarly communications lifecycle • To automate computer-mediated experimental workflows • To verify the truth claims made by researchers in their research • To establish and maintain the trustworthiness of research knowledge • and much more… Metadata Open Forum 2008

9. Why we need registries (III) • There are lots of domain-oriented registers, but little or no interoperability between them, or Web Service interfaces for business process automation • Why? Wendy Pyper. 2007. Getting a Fast Lock on Dugong Location. Australian Antarctic Magazine, Issue 13, p.26. Metadata Open Forum 2008

10. Field of Research ID Equipment ID Species ID Research Subject ID Calibration File ID Organization ID Repository ID Collection ID Location ID Item/Object ID Dataset ID Research Program ID Researcher ID Why we need registries (IV) Publication ID Metadata Open Forum 2008

11. Registers Metadata Open Forum 2008

12. Encyclopedia of Life Metadata Open Forum 2008

13. ISO 11179/ebXML Registry Business/Enterprise WS-I (Web Services-Interoperability) UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) ISO 2146 (Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organizations) Research/HPC-Grid Computing Libraries& Archives EAC (Encoded Archival Context) OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture) Registry ecology Web of Entities Metadata Open Forum 2008

14. Warning!!! • Complex, over-detailed slides ahead • Why so complex? • Context: This talk is about registries in the context federated architectures for managing research data for long term access and (re)use— i.e. its not about enterprise architectures nor content management systems • The first loyalty of researcher’s is to their discipline/research community and a long way second to their host ‘enterprise’ • Science is a global activity: researcher’s work locally, interact globally, collaborate intensely and are highly mobile; hence, federated systems are required for their needs Metadata Open Forum 2008

15. Metadata Open Forum 2008

16. Australian Data Commons Architecture Metadata Open Forum 2008

17. ISO 2146 summary • ISO 2146 (Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organizations) is a (draft) standard for federated information management • http://www.nla.gov.au/wgroups/ISO2146/ • It is essentially a generic registry information model: does not deal with functional implementation • It supports use cases for document-centric repository ‘services’ • …ideal for ‘loosely coupled’ services • Its extensibility features enable many domain-specific profiles • ORCA-Registry: first application to use ISO 2146 info model • http://www.apsr.edu.au/orca/index.htm Metadata Open Forum 2008

18. ISO2146 Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organizations http://www.nla.gov.au/wgroups/ISO2146/ Metadata Open Forum 2008 18

19. ORCA Registry Screen (III) Metadata Open Forum 2008

20. Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) Registry RIF-CS Schema Metadata Open Forum 2008

21. Metadata Open Forum 2008

22. ebXML registry summary • ebXML Registry/Repository is a standard (OASIS and ISO) for secure, federated information management • It is an integrated registry and repository model • It supports many diverse use cases • SOA use cases • eBusiness use cases • Its extensibility features enable many domain-specific profiles • It is being deployed in diverse applications by organizations worldwide: many e-government Metadata Open Forum 2008

23. ebXMLRegistry Registration, Discovery, Queries Registry Repository Taxonomies, Classifications, Associations Federated queries, Inter-registry links Federated Information Manage-ment Standard Metadata Content management Secure Architecture Cataloging,Content validation,Version control,Lifecycle support,Extensible Info. Model Digital signatures,Audit trail,Access control,SAML SSO Events Content-based Event notification

24. ebXML Registry 3.0 specification • Very (…very) detailed specifications • Version 4.0 specification in preparation • Key person: Farrukh Najmi • Active development community • http://sourceforge.net/projects/ebxmlrr • Reference software implementation • FreebXML: http://www.freebxml.org • But needs strong community consensus to devlop metadata profiles e.g. • Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC) approved the ebRIM (electronic business Registry Information Model) application profile of the OpenGIS Catalogue Service 2.1.2 standard (April 2007) Metadata Open Forum 2008

25. The Web of Entities (I) • LinkingOpenData is a W3C community project to extend the Web with a data commons by publishing various open datasets as RDF on the Web and by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources • http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData • DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web (via RDF/SPARQL) • http://dbpedia.org Metadata Open Forum 2008

26. The Web of Entities (II) Metadata Open Forum 2008

27. The Web of Entities (III) • “The OKKAM project aims at enabling the Web of Entities, a global virtual space for publishing and managing information and knowledge about entities. The Web of Entities will be the result of enabling the smooth integration of decentralized information sources, made possible by supporting the use (and reuse!) of global unique identifiers for entities” • EU Seventh Framework Program • http://fp7.okkam.org/ Metadata Open Forum 2008

28. “A Registryof Entities” “The Web ofEntities” ebXML Registry DBpedia ISO 2146 Registry LinkingOpenData ISO 11179 Registry Okkam service-oriented web-oriented WS-I: Web Services-Interoperability REST (Representational State Transfer) RDF/OWL XML/ XML Schema URN/Persistent Identifiers URI Continuum of Trusted Information about Entities more… less… Metadata Open Forum 2008

29. http://treach.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au:8000/vitrodev/index.jsp?primary=1http://treach.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au:8000/vitrodev/index.jsp?primary=1 Metadata Open Forum 2008

30. END Metadata Open Forum 2008

31. ORCA Registry • It’s a pilot, not a production service • It’s not a discovery service (it’s for machine-to-machine transactions) • It’s for repository/collections managers • It harvests collection-level metadata records, not item-level records • It provides no capacity for record owners to edit records (a feature not a bug) • It’s a pointless service unless part of a federated architecture of repository services • It works on the principle of ‘register locally, discover globally’

32. ORCA Registry Screen (I) https://pilot.apsr.edu.au/cosi/about.php

33. ORCA Registry Screen (II)

34. For more ORCA info… Metadata Open Forum 2008

35. ORCA Registry technical details (I) • PHP/PostgreSQL Web application (Apache lic.) • Part of our own Web application framework (COSI-Collections and Services Interface) • Supports REST-type service calls and messaging (i.e. not WS-I standards and protocols) • An ORCA Registry instance can configured for local and/or a national/global network topology • ORCA Registry instances have REST service interfaces for for metadata harvesting and providing Metadata Open Forum 2008

36. ORCA Registry technical details (II) • First implementation of the draft ISO2146 (Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organizations) • ORCA Registry used the draft ISO2146 XML binding for the basis of the DBMS data model and the metadata interchange profile (expressed as a .xsd schema) • Working on a ORCA Schema profile for OAI-PMH (June 2008) • ISO2146 is compatible with the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile (DCCAP) • Credits: James Blanden, Scott Yeadon, Judith Pearce, Adrian Burton and Chris Blackall Metadata Open Forum 2008

37. “The simpler the user-experience, the greater the complexity and layers of abstraction and indirection needed in the underlying infrastructure” ATM Machine (3D Model) Metadata Open Forum 2008