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Ideology Or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites

UKOLN is supported by:. Ideology Or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites . Co-Authors Marieke Guy, UKOLN Alastair Dunning, AHDS Lawrie Phipps, TechDis. Author & Presenter Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath. Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk

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Ideology Or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites

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  1. UKOLN is supported by: Ideology Or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites Co-Authors Marieke Guy, UKOLN Alastair Dunning, AHDS Lawrie Phipps, TechDis Author & Presenter Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath Email:B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/>

  2. Contents • Background • Why Use Standards? • What Are Open Standards? • Surveying Our Communities • The Difficulties With Open Standards • An Open Standards Culture • The QA Focus Project • Conclusions

  3. Background • Cultural heritage digitisation programmes normally insist on use of open standards • But it would appear that there is little policing of compliance with open standards • Many argue for more rigourous policing • But issues are not always clear-cut: • Uncertainty of the meaning of open standards • Immaturity of standards • Lack of support from tools • Flexibility of marketplace solutions • Costs • This paper seeks to address these challenges and provide an achievable approach

  4. Examples • JISC & UK HE Digital Library Programmes • Standards document produced for eLib programme (1994) and updated to support recent digital library programmes • The NOF-digitise Programme • Standards document written to support the NOF-digitise programme for providing access to UK cultural heritage resources • UK e-Government • Standards framework developed to support e-Government work within central and local government

  5. Why Use Standards? • In many digital library programmes there has been a philosophy based on use of open standards to: • Avoid application lock-in and platform dependencies • Minimise migration costs • Provide long-term access to scholarly resources • But in eLib programme (~1994-2000): • Little policing of compliance with open standards • Adoption of "let a thousand flowers bloom" • This approach: • Probably sensible approach in mid-1990s (Gopher?) • Not desirable now: • Web is the killer application; XML is killer format • Need to maximise access; support M2M apps; ... • Need to protect investment from public funding

  6. What Are Open Standards? • But what are Standards and Open Standards? • Do Adobe PDF format and Sun's Java language count? • Can we agree on the following characteristics: • Standard ratified by recognised neutral standards body. • An open standards-making process. • Documentation is freely available on the Web. • Use of the standard is uninhibited by licensing or patenting issues. Note that not all open standards bodies will comply with all of these features. The standards-making process within the W3C, for example, is initially restricted to organisations which are members of the W3C and a small number of invited experts.

  7. A Spectrum For Standards • If we have defined open standards do we treat everything else (proprietary formats) equally bad? (And how should we regard PowerPoint users!) • A Spectrum For Ownership: • Is there a community process for standard development? • Has the standard has been published openly • Has the standard been reverse-engineered Java: Owned by Sun (open standardisation attempts aborted by Sun). However Community Process for development to language. PDF: Owned by Adobe. However specification has been published. Word: Owned by Microsoft. Specification has been reverse engineered.

  8. Surveying Our Communities • Various surveys of Web sites have been carried out in order to monitor compliance with standards: • Survey Of W3C Member Organisations • The majority of W3C member home pages do not pass the W3C's test for compliance with W3C recommendations (Survey in Feb 2003) • See <http://news.com.com/2100-1032-985941.html> • Survey Of Digital Library Programme Project Web Sites • A survey of 50+ home pages for JISC's 5/99 programme was carried out in Oct 2002

  9. Surveying Our Communities • Initial set of findings available from <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/surveys/web-10-2002/>

  10. Difficulties With Open Standards • Why do bodies which seek to use open standards experience such difficulties? • Lack of awareness of importance of standards • Difficulties in implementing standards • Difficulties in checking compliance • Immaturity of the standards • Limitations of the standards • Lack of support from tools • …

  11. Can We Trust The Standards Guys? • RSS • A light-weight syndication standard? • Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication? • XML or RDF? • XHTML 2.0 • Two years ago XHTML 1.0 was promoted by W3C as the killer format: an XML application which was backwards compatible with browsers and similar to HTML • Now W3C have acknowledged the problems will XHTML 1.0 and are promoting XHTML 2.0 as the answer

  12. Standards Or Guidelines • W3C WAI • Are W3C's Web Accessibility guidelinesguidelines (which help to inform us on best practices) or standards which we must implement (with accompanying legal threat) • How relevant are the guidelines to (say) e-learning resources (in which we may wish to make the answer difficult to find?) • Is universal design a realistic goal?

  13. What Do We Do? • What approaches should we be taking? • Surrender To The Proprietary World • Should we allow our cultural heritage resources to be developed in proprietary formats? • Stronger Promotion/Enforcement Of Standards? • Groups such as W3C's QA activity and the Web Standards projects, … feel we should be promoting standards-compliance work more forcefully • But such bodies seem to be very single-minded and ignore complexities of the real world

  14. An Open Standards Culture • There is a third way! • The development of an open standards culture: • Promote the benefits of open standards • Promote exemplars showing best practices in use of open standards • But: • Recognise difficulties of compliance • Recognise challenges of resourcing, technical expertise, …

  15. QA Focus • JISC has funded QA Focus project to: • Support its Information Environment digital library programmes • Develop a QA (quality assurance) methodology which can be applied to future programmes • QA Focus takes a developmental approach: • Explains reasons for standards & best practices • Provides lightweight methodology for supporting use of standards and best practices • Encourages community to share its approaches • Seeks to encourages uptake of its methodology within institutions as well as by projects An important aspect of QA Focus's work is to make recommendations on the approach to standards taken with the programme

  16. Developmental Culture • Possible approaches towards QA and compliance with standards: • Policing approach • Developmental approach • QA Focus takes a developmental approach: • Explains reasons for standards & best practices • Provides lightweight methodology for supporting use of standards and best practices • Encourages community to share its approaches • Seeks to encourages uptake of its methodology within institutions as well as by projects

  17. Policies • How do you know what you should do if you don't have documented polices? Policy example Policy: Web Standards Standard: XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 Architecture: Use of SSIs and text editor Exceptions: Automatically-derived files Ownership: The project manager is responsible for this policy Checking: Use ,validate after update Audit Trail: Use ,rvalidate monthly and document findings You may find it useful to develop similar policies yourself – for example, a policy of the accessibility of your Web site

  18. A Broad Spectrum Of Choice (1) • As part of the broad spectrum we have the following factors: • Ownership and openness of standard (open, neutral body; proprietary but community process; community but spec publish; proprietary and reverse engineered; proprietary and closed) • Availability of viewers (multiple platforms; available for free; available as open source) • Availability of authoring tools (multiple platforms; available for free; available as open source)

  19. A Broad Spectrum Of Choice (2) • Architectural Integrity (developed as part of broader framework – cf W3C specs) • Fitness For Purpose (is the standard designed for the purpose envisaged) • Expertise (does the organisation have the necessary expertise available in-house) • Maturity of Standard (is the standard mature and well-proven) • Local Culture (does the organisation seek to make use of emerging standards or prefer to use proven technologies) • User Needs (does the standard satisfy the requirements of the user) • Preservation Needs (is the standard appropriate for long-term preservation)

  20. Bidding Process • We will recommend that projects bidding for funding should demonstrate their acceptance of the open standards culture by describing : • The standards they expect to use in their work • The technical architecture which will be used • The technical expertise they have to support this • The QA procedures they will use in order to assess their compliance • Their justification for use of proprietary solutions

  21. Reporting Procedures • We will recommend that projects which have been funded should demonstrate their use of open standards by providing the following information in their periodic reports: • The standards they have implemented • Use of proprietary formats • The QA procedures they have implemented • Audit trails showing compliance with standards • Explanations of changes to original proposals

  22. Conclusions • To conclude: • Open standards are important for the cultural heritage community • However use of open standards is not necessarily easy and may be costly • Rather than abandoning open standards there is a need to adopt an open standards culture, which is tolerant towards use of proprietary solutions

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