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Standards Panel: Reflections on 10+ Years of Standards Work

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/meetings/sca-home-nation-tour-2008/. Standards Panel: Reflections on 10+ Years of Standards Work. About This Talk This talk gives a brief summary of Brian Kelly’s involvement in standards work since the mid 1990s and reflections on these experiences.

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Standards Panel: Reflections on 10+ Years of Standards Work

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  1. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/meetings/sca-home-nation-tour-2008/http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/meetings/sca-home-nation-tour-2008/ Standards Panel: Reflections on 10+ Years of Standards Work About This Talk This talk gives a brief summary of Brian Kelly’s involvement in standards work since the mid 1990s and reflections on these experiences. Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY Email B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Resources bookmarked using ‘sca-home-nation-tour-2008' tag UKOLN is supported by: This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat)

  2. About Me and About UKOLN • Brian Kelly: • UK Web Focus: a Web advisory post based at UKOLN • Funded by JISC and MLA to advise HE/FE and cultural heritage sectors • Web developer since Jan 1993 • Involved with JISC Standards work since 1995 • UKOLN: • National centre of expertise in digital information management • Located at the University of Bath

  3. The eLib Years • eLib Programme • Large-scale JISC-funded programme • Ran from 1996-2000? • Standards for eLib projects documented: • V 1.0 published in Feb 1995 / V 2.0 in Oct 1998 • See <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/standards/> • Document refers to: • CGM • SGML • IAFA/whois++ • Z39.50 • URLs and URNs • VRML • … “eLib projects are expected to provide a URL for public services, and a URN when these become stable“

  4. NOF-Digi Experiences • NOF-Digi: • Lottery money to digitise and provide access to cultural resources • Technical Advisory Service provided by UKOLN & AHDS • Standards document: • Based on eLib/DNER Standards document • No longer available on People’s Network Site  • Experiences: • Valuable learning experience for cultural heritage orgs • Standards sometimes too theoretical so ‘escape clause’ (migration strategy) developed – documented reasons for non-conformance & plans for migration to open standards needed in project reports

  5. Developing A QA Framework • QA Focus: • JISC-funded project • Provided by UKOLN and TASI/AHDS • Aim: • Develop QA framework for JISC development projects • Provide recommendations on compliance regime for standards i.e. what does must mean? • Findings: • Uncertainty as to what is meant by an ‘open standard’ • Diversity of deliverables, approaches, expertise, effort, …

  6. Issues • What is an open standard? • RSS (1.0/2.0) • PDF • MS Word • What are the alternatives to open standards? • Do nothing? • Use something that’s not (yet) an open standard but isn’t owned by a company (‘my standard’) • Invent an open standard • Something else? • What about adopting popular patterns of use: • Web Services standards vs REST architectural approach (nb criticisms of WS* complexities & popularity of latter in Amazon)

  7. Characteristics Of Open Standards • EMII-DCF characteristics of open standard: • Open access (to the standard itself and to documents produced during its development) • Open use (implementing the standard incurs no or little cost for IPR, through licensing, for example) • Ongoing support driven by requirements of the user not the interests of the standard provider • EU definition: • The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization • The standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge • The intellectual property of the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis • No constraints on the re-use of the standard

  8. What Do We Really Want? • Do we want: • Open standards? • The benefits promised by open standards: application- and device- independence, freedom from vendor pressures, …? • Do we want: • The cost savings promised by vendor-independent standards? • The costs associated with deploying new standards? • How do we reconcile: • A user-centred approach to IT development? • A developer-led approach to IT development?

  9. Changing Environment • Experiences from mid-1990s: • Identification of relevant standards • Engagement of standards-development • Consensus building; reflecting wide range of stake-holders • … • Recent experiences: • Web 2.0 • Using existing, well-established standards • Commercial provision of (often popular) services

  10. Quality Assurance External factors: institutional, cultural, legal, … Context: Policies Prog. n Funding Research Sector … Annotated Standards Catalogue Purpose Governance … Maturity Risks Responding To Change • Contextual model developed for JISC by UKOLN’s QA Focus project Context: Compliance External Self assessment Learning Penalties

  11. Questions • Issues which need to be addressed: • Does the evidence demonstrate the success of current approaches to use of standards? • Have we learnt from mistakes of the past (cf Coloured Book software)? • Does the contextual model provide the flexibility needed? • Is this an approach which can be used across a range of sectors?

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