Talking with Talis

Sporting the title of Head of Making Public Data Public and data.gov.uk, Richard Stirling leads the central team behind those two initiatives, based out of the Cabinet Office of the UK Government.

In our conversation we discuss data.gov.uk which emerged from a conversation between  Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Prime Minister, less than a year ago, and how Richard found himself involved.

The setting up and launch of data.gov.uk, with external advisors Sir Tim Berners-Lee & Nigel Shadbolt, exceedingly short development period, and involvement of the wider community, has been very different to the popular conception of a government IT project.  Richard gives us some insight as to what it has been like on the inside.  He also explains the focus on taking data in to RDF and Linked Data in addition to publishing it in the form provided by the originating departments.

With a look in to what might be next, Richard gives us a great view of what is behind the web site.

Picture published on Flickr by Thayer18

Open Source Library Systems have definitely arrived.  Nevertheless Marshall Breeding’s Perceptions 2009 report seems to indicate that the interest in open source systems, by those libraries with a proprietary system, is still not very high even for those expressing dissatisfaction with their current system.

At ALA Midwinter PTFS announced their intention to purchase the leading open source system support company LibLime.  Just before the recording of this month’s show, they announced that PTFS and LibLime could not agree upon financial terms and have agreed not to proceed with the acquisition.  So who better to join us as a guest on the show, than PTFS CEO, John Yokley.

We open the show with John providing an overview of PTFS, the LibLime situation, and his gerneral view of the market.  Gang members Talin Bingham, Nicole Engard, and Frances Haugen, filled the positions round our virtual table for a view on how these events and survey results indicate a future for the open source sector.

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In this podcast, Sarah Bartlett talks with Niall Sclater, Director of Learning Innovation at the UK’s Open University. Niall reviews over four years at the Open University embedding a Moodle-based VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and the use of e-learning more generally across the institution. He describes the Open University’s transition from its origins in 1969 when it produced its own learning materials and sent out packages of books to its distance learners. In the adoption of learning technologies, the Open University is constrained in its freedom to allow teaching staff to introduce technologies independently, and Niall explains why that is. Niall also explores issues around student diversity – the growing importance of consistency of student experience, and the problems putting a minimum technical specification for home study in place in view of the institution’s traditional mission of inclusivity. The Open University is Moodle’s largest educational site, with around 200,000 students on the system, and 50,000 unique users over a 24 hour period, so it’s useful to hear about the institution’s experiences with Moodle, and Niall’s viewpoint on the future of the VLE. Niall also talks about learning technology futures more generally, focusing on cloud computing (exemplified by the Open University’s recent adoption of Google Apps for Education) and mobile learning.

In this podcast, I talk with James Clay from Gloucestershire College, ALT’s Learning Technologist of the Year, 2009. James is responsible for the VLE, e-learning, mobile learning, the libraries, digital and online resources and the strategic direction of the college in relation to the use of learning technologies. We talk about the achievements of James and his team in introducing innovative technologies at the college, and how encouraging experimentation with technology has gradually changed the organisational culture. With staff using a wider range of media resources with greater confidence, it is easier for his team to embed new technologies as they are alerted to new needs and expectations by diverse consultation methods they have in place with both staff and students. Students are also encouraged to use their own technologies – a neat response to funding constraints whilst simultaneously meeting student expectations. Many of the students at Gloucestershire College will be making their way towards a university course, and so it’s useful to hear James characterise those students and their relationship to technology. Indeed, it is his above all those insights that have brought James to the pragmatic position in the Is the VLE Dead debate for which he is known to many. We conclude by discussing the present and future of the VLE, and his experiences with Moodle.

In this Nodalities Podcast, I talk with blogger and Guardian information architect Martin Belam. I’ve run into Martin at a few Linked Data events where the news and media industries have had a high profile (including the recent News Media Summit, and News Innovation conference last year). Martin has an interest in Linked Data, and an interesting perspective on where it fits in with News, both as a tool for journalism and research and as a resource for the industry.

Also mentioned:
Guardian Open Platform

In this podcast I talk with Billy Brick who is Languages Centre Manager at Coventry University. We take a brief look at the history of technologies in the modern languages field and the inherently social nature of language learning which lends itself very well to Web 2.o approaches. We then turn our attention to a couple of cloud applications that Billy and his colleagues are making use of to augment language teaching tools at Coventry – Livemocha and busuu.com. Both of these contain online lessons and offer the opportunity to pair up with native speakers to practice language skills. Looking more broadly at the humanities, we talk in more detail about Humbox, an open education resources repository to be launched in Sheffield in February. We discuss some of the issues involved in repository development, such as openness and community-buildiing. Finally we look at BASE and BAWE corpora, which contain recorded lectures and seminars as well as a collection of student assignments.

The subject of this Talking with Talis Nodalities Podcast is Conrad Wolfram, founder and Managing Director of Wolfram Research Europe.  He is also Strategic and International Director for Wolfram Research, the organisation founded by his brother Stephen, and responsible for Mathematica software and the WolframAlpha Knowledge Engine.

In our wide ranging conversation we look at Conrad’s career, the evolution of Wolfram Research and its role in introducing wider access to computational functionality.   He takes us through the creation of Mathematica by Stephen Conrad and building a company based upon maths.

We move on to discus the WolframAlpha Knowledge Engine, which is built upon Mathematica technology, and how it fits both in to the online world and the Wolfram strategy.  We close having discussed many issues relevant to the evolution and future of the web.

Photo Copyright © 2009, Conrad Wolfram.

The Gang for this month, Carl Grant, Marshall Breeding and Frances Haugen, convened as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, to review the game changing influences on our world over the last ten years and then attempt to predict what we will see in the next ten.

Ten years ago we were still recovering from the anticlimax of the millennium bug, just ahead of the dotcom bubble bursting and Google’s announcement of their first billionth index entry.  Since then there has been a constant stream of Google prefixed applications and services, ‘i’ prefixed products, and more things suffixed with a 2.0 than you would want to count

Unsurprisingly, when the gang looked back, Google gets a mention or two, along with the rise of digital material.

The predictions for the future for libraries took on an interesting slant. The conversation, that ranged over radically different provision of future library services, raised the possibility of the one-to-one relationship between a library and an academic institution becoming a thing of the past.

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In my latest podcast I talk with Flip Kromer, co-founder of InfoChimps.

We explore the background to InfoChimps, and discuss their aspiration to build a marketplace in which people can contribute and find data – both freely available and commercial.

Social Software in Libraries has been a hot topic for many a month.  Like most of the technologies that we discuss on the Library 2.0 Gang, Social Software covers a broad range of individual components, and can mean differing things to different people.

Our guest for this show is Meredith Farkas, Author of the book “Social Software in Libraries”.  A couple of years after publishing her book, Meredith has become a little jaded about the way libraries are using social software, with some libraries seeing it as a magic wand for community building and engaging with their users.  This chimed well with the thoughts of the Gang, who were drawn to the conclusion that like most software, it is just a tool.  How you use a tool to communicate with your users, is far more important than the tool itself.  Librarians wondering why their blog posts are not receiving comments, should be checking their content for comment-ability.

The Gang this month consists of John Blyberg, Char Booth,  Marshall Breeding, Nicole Engard, and Carl Grant.  After exploring the two main categories of social software, the recommendation/tagging/commenting systems and the Facebook/Twitter/blogging, the gang coalesced  around the notion that it is people that interact socially.  Speaking with a corporate voice, or just relying systems to do it for you, will probably not be enough.

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In my latest podcast I talk with Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Belgian semantic technology company Collibra.

We discuss Collibra, and the problems that many enterprises face in understanding and integrating data held in diverse silos.

I caught up with Vice president of OCLC WorldCat and Metadata Services, Karen Calhoun, in the lobby of a hotel across the road from the iconic British Library building in London.  Karen was preparing for her presentation at the 2009 OCLC Tech Forum to be held in the Library conference centre.

I took the opportunity to talk to her about the last twelve months since the announcement about changes to the OCLC record reuse policy.  We then moved on to discuss how new entrants, Biblios and SkyRiver, in to the record supply sector may alter that landscape.

As well as discussing the themes for her presentation later that morning, we also explored the blurring of the boundaries between OCLC’s traditional record supply focus and the ILS vendor community offering library automation software.

In this podcast, I talk with Aaron Porter, who is Vice-President (Higher Education) for the National Union of Students (NUS) in the UK. The student experience is generally acknowledged to be the most powerful driver within higher education in the UK right now. Aaron and I discuss various dimensions of the student experience in relation to two sectoral reports. The first is the recently published Higher Ambitions report from the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. The second is a forthcoming NUS report, sponsored by HSBC, which presents findings of a survey examining student experiences around coursework, exam feedback and the use of ICT in higher education.

In the podcast, Aaron is forthright in his views that Higher Ambitions leans too heavily on a consumerist position and fails to display the imagination needed at this pivotal moment for policy-making in higher education. We discuss the information that students need to make the right decisions about their studies, the diversity of experiences among the student body, the position of the UK in the global HE marketplace, and how both students and businesses should be acting as active partners and co-producers in the sector.

The NUS report is part of a 3 year study of the experiences of full-time undergraduates in UK higher education institutions, and is funded by HSBC. This latest chapter explores the areas of coursework, exam feedback and the use of ICT. We focus on the shortcomings of student feedback and also the virtual learning environment. Aaron has recently been appointed onto the Task Force on online learning which aims to increase the UK’s market share of the global online learning market, and we discuss exciting developments around Open Education and what is needed to increase awareness and availability of open resources. Aaron draws us back repeatedly to what he perceives to be a central problem – the failure to develop a robust academic community in which students and academics are constantly challenging each other, identifying the atmosphere of consumerism as the main obstacle to reviving that sense of community in universities.

This podcast very much lives up to its promise as a robust and lively discussion of the main issues around the experience of students in universities today.

In November’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang, regular Gang members are joined by Eqentia CEO William Mougayar. The discussion touches on a range of issues, including the potential importance of the DBpedia Live project in increasing third party reliance upon the Linked Data within DBpedia.

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The twelve months that have elapsed since the previous Online Information Conference has seen an explosion in technologies that influence the information world and life in general.  What was being talked about as up coming trends last year, are now core to the agenda of this years conference.

Conference Chair, Adrian Dale, joins me in conversation to discuss these trends an to explore his hopes for the highlights of this years conference.

In this podcast I talk with Melissa Highton who is Head of the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University Computing Services. We talk about the potent combination of top-down strategy and local initiative that has given rise to a number of exciting Web 2.0 projects at Oxford. These projects, which are opening up Oxford University, are surpassing expectations at Oxford, and generating a great deal of interest itself. Melissa explains how they came about, and how they fit into the collegiate culture and complex structure of Oxford University. The projects covered in this podcast are iTunesU, Erewhon and Open Spires. We also talk about how the JISC project Steeple, of which Oxford University is a partner, fits into this. These projects, taken together, enable Oxford University to maintain its academic excellence, whilst opening itself up and enabling people everywhere to benefits from its rich outputs.

Until fairly recently it has been all quiet on the shared cataloguing front.  Cataloguing departments taking records from the Library of Congress, other National libraries, or one of many other libraries that share their Z39.50 connections.  Many libraries also being members of an organisation to share the cataloguing load, such as OCLC, or Talis Base in the UK.

About a year ago dust started to stir on the surface of this stable landscape, when OCLC caused a curfuffle with their move to redefine their record reuse policy.  Then in January, open source library system vendor announced ‡Biblios.net, a free cataloguing service in which you can share with other libraries.  In the last few weeks we have had SkyRiver arrive on the scene.  Not much visible on their site yet, but according to press releases they hope to deliver quality at a lower costs  – so things are a changing.

Unfortunately nobody was available from OCLC, ‡Biblios, or SkyRiver, to help talk through what these moves might mean.  Nevertheless Gang members Marshall Breeding and Frances Haugen were on hand to explore the ramifications of these moves and what a more competitive landscape might mean for the players in this market.

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Stephen Abram is Vice President, Innovation for library system vendor SirsiDynix.  He is track keynote speaker for the The Open Movement in Libraries, Technology & Education track, on the third day of the conference.

In this first podcast in our Online Information 2009 series, Stephen first explores the meaning of the, often over used, openness concept.  Are we talking about openness of systems, software APIs, open source, approach, minds, libraries, or a combination of several. of these.

With such a broad topic, it was inevitable that we addressed many many aspects of the influences of technology and attitudes on the way libraries are evolving.  Touching on the library system industry, and how it has and is changing, postulating on the future of libraries, and external influences from our rapidly changing world, this is a great introduction to his presentation an the track it kicks off.

In October’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang, regular Gang members discuss the relationship between the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Semantic Web.

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The current landscape for open source library systems could be characterised as a hand full of companies, often populated by open source enthusiasts and evangelists, with a handful of staff supporting a couple of handfuls of contracts with libraries to install/enhance/support either a Koha or Evergreen system.  The largest and most well known player in the sector being LibLime who say that they have “helped hundreds of libraries around the globe upgrade to open source.”

The ethos of the open source community is all about sharing innovation, code, resources, and ideas for the benefit of all.  The usual business model for these companies is for them to be contracted to create and locally enhance an instance of the software at a library.  It is usual for any enhancements to the system that are paid for by the contracting library, to be contributed back to the source code for the benefit of the whole community.

In comparison with the rest of the library world, supported by the traditional, closed source, vendors, the open source sector is still fairly small.   The question I put to the Gang this month was “Can the open source sector scale?”.  Will it be able to grow in it’s current form to become a significant alternative to the commercial vendors?

To help Carl Grant, Frances Haugen, and Marshall Breeding kick the topic around, we were joined by Brendan A. Gallagher, CEO of  ByWater Solutions.

Brendan’s introduction describing how a small company operated in this market formed the basis for a wide ranging discussion.  We touched on the motivations of those involved with open source systems, and whether there is a fundamental conflict between being a significant member of a community, and the operational realities of running a successful commercial organisation.   When comparing the successes of the wider open source world such as Mozilla and Linux, with comparative niche of library software there were key differences around size and leadership.

Latterly we moved on to external influences such as the current economic climate, and the evolution of the ILS market place away from what are the ILS systems today.  Another enlightening conversation around the virtual Gang table.

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In this podcast, Sarah Bartlett talks with Gordon Hunt, University Librarian at the University of the West of Scotland.

As Gordon explains in the podcast, the University of the West of Scotland is a very young institution, having come into existence in 2007, as a result of an institutional merger.

We talk about the challenges of running a multi-site library against a backdrop of significant organisational change, ensuring that an equivalence of experience is obtained for all students regardless of location. We take a broad view of how the library works with the rest of the university and helps to meet corporate objectives. In so doing, we discuss a wide range of topics such as the changing role of the library in teaching and learning, the budgetary challenges of the present and future, internal partnerships, external community engagement, and the student experience.

We also consider the distinctiveness of Scottish Higher Education, and how the Scottish context also impacts the library’s operations.

In September’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang we are joined by Brand Niemann of the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a discussion of efforts to apply semantic technologies to Government data in the USA and elsewhere.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• apps.gov, and Vivek Kundra’s post on the White House blog
• Greg Boutin’s blog post about Twine
• Cambridge Semantics, and my podcast with Sean Martin
• DARPA
• Dapper
• data.gov
• DBpedia
• Enterprise Architecture Conference
• EPA
• Gapminder, and my podcast with Hans Rosling
• Government 2.0 Summit
• GreenRiver
• Jim Hendler and Li Ding talk about converting Data.gov data to RDF
• Intellidimension
• Many Eyes
• Mediawiki
• MindTouch
• Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), and my podcast with John Sheridan
• RDB2RDF Working Group
• Salesforce, and my podcast with Adam Gross
• Semantic Technology Conference, and the Semantic Web Gang episode recorded on stage there
• Simile
• Sourceforge
• SPARQL
• Sunlight Foundation, and my podcast with David James
• Swivel
• This We Know
• George Thomas’ conference presentation (PDF), referred to by Brand Niemann
• Timetric
• TopQuadrant, and my podcast with Dean Allemang
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) e-Government Interest Group

This conversation was recorded on Thursday 17 September, 2009.

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In this podcast I talk with David Parkes, Associate Director for Learning Technology and Information Services at Staffordshire University. On the day that the library at Staffordshire University launched its 24 hour service, meaning that the library will now be open continuously until next July, David and I discuss how his team has adopted more agile working practices in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century information landscape and all that entails in terms of technological change, student expectation, budgetary pressures and shifts in the publishing supply chain.

In July’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang we take this week’s release of the 4store RDF triple store as a starting point, and explore the ways in which core technologies such as the triple store are becoming increasingly commoditised.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• 4store (and my podcast with the team)
• Billion Triples Challenge
• Garlik
• Kingsley Idehen
• Jena
• Linked Data
• OpenLink
• RDF
• Sesame
• SPARQL
• Talis Connected Commons
• Talis Platform
• Twitter’s document theft
• Virtuoso

This conversation was recorded on Thursday 16 July, 2009.

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June’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang was recorded on-stage during the closing session of this year’s Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose.

Regular Gang members are joined by conference organiser, Tony Shaw, and an audience in looking back at the issues and trends that emerged during the event.

As well as recording sound the conference team also captured video from the session, which is available for watching on their web site. So if you ever wanted to know what the Gang look like, this is your chance…

This conversation was recorded on Thursday 18 June, 2009.

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In this podcast I talk with Alma Swan from Key Perspectives. Over the past 5 years in which Open Access publishing has undergone considerable growth, Alma has been a reference point, providing useful and authoritative research and analysis into the progress of the Open Access movement, drawing upon her experience in both scholarly communications and the natural sciences. We begin by talking about trends in the core area of Open Access publishing – namely journal articles – and then extend our view to the potential growth of Open Access e-Books. We also look at the emerging area of open research data, examining both the potential benefits to research and to society as a whole, as well as considering the significant challenges to be overcome. This podcast provides a useful snapshot of the Open Access movement as well as insights into its future.
See also Alma’s blog, OptimalScholarship.

In my latest podcast I talk with John Baker, CEO of Desire2Learn. We discuss the company’s attitude to designing software applications, and consider some of the changes in the Higher Education sector since their first products appeared a decade ago.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Commonwealth of Learning
• IEEE
• IMS
• JISC and my podcast with Executive Secretary Malcolm Read
• LORENet
• Moodle
• OAI-PMH and my podcast with Herbert van de Sompel
• Sakai and my podcast with Executive Director Mike Korcuska

This conversation was recorded on Friday 12 June 2009.

For other podcasts in the Xiphos series of Education podcasts see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

In my latest podcast I talk with John Wilbanks, Creative Commons‘ Vice President with responsibility for the Science Commons project. We discuss Science Commons and efforts to make data created from the conduct of science more widely available.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Berkman Center
• Tim Berners-Lee speaks at TED
• Bio2RDF
• CC0 license
• Free Software Foundation
• Linked Data
• Merck’s Human Disease Biology Programme, Sage
• Peter Murray-Rust (and my podcast)
• NCBI
• Neurocommons
• Cameron Neylon
• Open Data Commons
• Open Knowledge Foundation
• OpenStreetMap
• Public Domain Dedication and License (and my podcast with Leigh Dodds)
• PubMed Central
• Science Collaboration Framework
• Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data
• Richard Stallman
• Talis blog coverage as Springer acquires BioMed Central
• World Wide Web Consortium

This conversation was recorded on Friday 29 May 2009.

For other podcasts in the Xiphos series of Education podcasts see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

In my latest podcast I talk with Jan Velterop of Knewco. We discuss the company’s approach to what Jan describes as the ‘Concept Web,’ and look at support from scientists and publishers for the inaugural meeting of a Concept Web Alliance in New York City next week.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Concept Web Alliance blog
• Knewco
• Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)

This conversation was recorded on Tuesday 28 April 2009.

For other podcasts in the Xiphos series of Education podcasts see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

In our latest podcast I talk to Timo Hannay, Publishing Director for nature.com at the Nature Publishing Group. We discuss some of the activities underway across Nature properties to increase audience participation and to raise visibility and use of the data that lie behind so many scholarly papers today.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Amazon Public Data Sets
• arxiv.org
• Creative Commons
• Digging into Data Challenge
• Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
• Dublin Core
• Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP)
• Imperial College
• Molecular Systems Biology
• Nature podcast
• Nature Publishing Group
• Nature Precedings
• OpenID
• Open Text Mining Interface
• Tim O’Reilly
• Oxford University
• Papers for OS X
• Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM)

This conversation was recorded from a London hotel room on Tuesday 3 February 2009. Unanticipated network problems prevented the call being recorded as I usually do, and I owe my thanks to Charlotte Stoddart at Nature who stepped in and recorded the conversation from their podcast studio. My slightly tinny and distant voice is the fault of the hotel telephone system I ended up having to use…

For other podcasts in the Xiphos series of Education podcasts see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.