Access to all regular articles. This page is intended for printing purposes. Note that the internal links to references will not work correctly.
Christine Dugdale reports on the 7th International BOBCATSSS Symposium on Library and Information Science in Bratislava, Slovakia, 25-27 January 1999.
The conference was held in the modern Istropolis Congress Centre in a somewhat damp and foggy Bratislava in Slovakia from the 25th-27th of January.
Although the gloom outside was lifted by the enthusiasm of the many young delegates, this year’s conference was a disappointment. In particular, the somewhat muddled 3-pronged themes of ‘Learning Society’, ‘Learning Organisation’ and ‘Lifelong Learning’ were not often addressed directly. The opening remarks stressed the importance of learning throughout life. Great emphasis was placed upon the role of information professionals in providing information, and teaching learning, awareness, selection, navigational and retrieval skills in addition to encouraging active learning. These strands of thought, however, tended to be absent from the following papers.
The conference is unique in both being organised by library school students as part of their studies and in its emphasis upon encouraging and supporting papers from students as well as lecturers and practitioners. But, whereas some of the clearer and more refreshing overviews were given by LIS students last year, this year they seemed to follow a more pedestrian approach of simply detailing literature reviews, describing courses and existing teaching initiatives rather than a more adventurous ‘star-gazing’ from the stance of a future practitioner. This pattern was followed by other speakers and there was little discussion about on-going research or announcements of new findings. Indeed, papers tended, overall, to be descriptive of existing practices or situations with well rehearsed accounts of the information needs of the organisations/citizens of tomorrow. There was no attempt to suggest ways of meeting those needs.
As might be expected from a conference organised by library and information students with ‘learning’ as a theme, there was a heavy emphasis on the training of future information professionals and on Continuing Professional Development for existing practitioners in papers presented by LIS students and lecturers. More papers discussing different ways of helping or educating users to navigate today’s information maze, presented by practitioners from public and specialist libraries, would have offered a more balanced approach. Indeed, whereas it is true that lifelong learning, the acquisition of new skills and a flexible and inquisitive mind is essential for those working in the field of library and information science, there was a disturbing near-silence about users. Very few speakers even mentioned, in passing, the place/needs/demands of users with regard to lifelong learning in the learning organisation.
According to the programme, conference themes should have centred around the issues of new media for schools, lifelong learning via libraries, learning and knowledge management, library education, self-directed learning, strategies for a learning society, learning organisations, and qualifications for the learning society. There was, therefore, ample opportunity to discuss the impact both of future sources of information and of information systems. Despite this, very few papers ever even mentioned system users or recipients of the help/advice which the well-educated librarian of the future would be qualified to offer. One would have expected the needs of users to be high on the curricula of library schools and, therefore, to be reflected in a conference organised by students which included several papers presented by existing students. Any discussions about library school curricula, the training of future information professionals and the design of digital infrastructures must, surely, be meaningless without any consideration of the user’s needs or the impact of these programmes/systems upon users? It is possible that system development has been so fast and concentration upon technology so great that librarians have lost sight of this most important fact - that all developments exist in order that they might be harnessed to provide information for the end-user and that their primary task is to help end users to satisfy their needs. One would have expected all this to underlie all system development and LIS student training. One would also have expected that emphasis would always be on the content and access to that content rather than on the media itself. If this conference is typical of current student thinking, then we will not be an IT-using society, but an IT-driven society. In a customer-care ethos, everything else is a means to the end of serving the information needs of the end-user.
There were descriptions of existing services in a number of very different countries scattered among papers, but little about the impact that these services were having upon individual users, organisations or, indeed, how widespread their use was. One often wondered how extensive a coverage some of the more advanced systems being described actually were. One speaker from an Eastern European country did stress her frustration on returning home bubbling over with enthusiasm about all she had learnt about web services whilst in America as well as all the knowledge she had gained and the information that she could pass on - only to meet with indifference and a lack of support.
The opening addresses emphasised that there is now a greater exchange of information than ever before. They also made fascinating references to the idea of a new-found greater equality of access to information and more equality in the information exchange process - between the ‘transmitters’ of information and the ‘receivers’ of information. Unfortunately, these thoughts were not taken up by later speakers.
One of the aims of the symposium is to provide a platform for a dialogue between librarians, teachers, information managers, and students from Western and Eastern Europe. The symposium did achieve this objective with more than 50 papers and workshops and over 200 participants from over 20 countries in Europe and beyond. Speakers came both from those countries with well-developed electronic networks and those which are still devising policies on digitisation to support educational and cultural initiatives.
Whereas, last year, a large number of the papers presented by speakers from East European countries frequently mentioned the new millennium and quoted their government’s or their organisation’s use of the year 2000 as a spur to new developments, this was strangely missing from this year’s papers. One was left wondering whether initiatives were so well advanced that speakers’ thoughts were turning towards new directions or whether the momentum had been lost and these projects would struggle to meet their year 2000 deadlines - or had even been abandoned.
The theme of fast changing technology and the phenomenal proliferation of information of varying degrees of quality, however, was carried forward into this year’s symposium. It was stressed that information had been revolutionised many times in the present millennium, albeit, generally, at a slow pace. The greatest development, Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, had served to organise and standardise the exchange and spread of information. Advances in the next millennium were more likely to increase the spread of information at ever faster rates, but in a far more disorganised non-standard way through electronic sources and, especially, the internet.
It was, however, perhaps an appreciation of this, that led to one very interesting thought being voiced. It was suggested that, in the next millennium, the information professional will have a more stable career path than others. In the face of rapid advances in technology and communications and a volatile global working environment, information will become ever more important. While information specialists will need to change their methods of working and their information sets frequently, they will not need to change careers like others. The need for information managers and information intermediaries will grow and become more and more important in the learning organisations of the future.
The theme which emerged most strongly from many of the papers throughout the symposium was the importance of information management and the role of the information manager now and, especially, in the future within every sphere of life throughout the world. Information will become more and more important in the future and information will need managing in every area of society. Without management, information cannot be accessed, retrieved or used. Without carefully selected and organised information, individuals, companies, and countries will not be able to turn information into knowledge to equip them to live and work effectively in tomorrow’s global society. It was stressed that management skills were essential for the information professional and that these skills figured large in many library schools’ curricula today. One speaker even suggested that more emphasis is placed on the assimilation of management skills in library schools than on many syllabi for business students. Information management was important in every discipline and this was highlighted by the large number of students at the symposium who all saw themselves as future information managers, but who came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were studying in departments with an impressive range of titles. It was stressed over and over again that the future picture of information systems was one of merging, converging and cohesion. There was an important need for local information systems, but these should all be components of an interdependent whole. Different information systems must be inter-joined for efficiency and effectiveness. This calls for ever greater management skills. Yet, when questioned, most librarians do not cite management as one of their most important skills.
This year’s conference was organised by the students of the Fachhochschule Darmstadt and the Hochschule fuer Bibliotheks- und Informationswesen Stuttgart. Next year’s conference will be held in Krakow, Poland on 24-26 January and will be organised by the students of the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark on the them of "Intellectual Property v The Right of Knowledge?".
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Christine
Dugdale manages the ResIDe Electronic Library at the University
of the West of England, Bristol. Funded as an eLib short loan project, the
ResIDe Electronic Library sought to explore such issues surrounding the
implementation of an electronic reserve as copyright and collection
management systems. ResIDe has expanded to include a current awareness
database and a past examination paper database and is now a permanent part
of the University's Library Services.
For citation purposes:
Christine Dugdale, "7th International BOBCATSSS Symposium," Exploit Interactive, issue 1, 10 April 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue1/bobcat/>
Marc Garnerwill walk you through the development of euroguide; a subject gateway to EU websites, which was developed by Essex Libraries (UK) with input from members of the EARL European Task Group, and design work by Sixtyeight Creative Solutions.
Euroguide [1] is a subject gateway to websites which contain information about the European Union. It has been developed by Essex Libraries [2] with input from members of the EARL European Task Group. EARL (Electronic Access to Resources in Libraries) [3] is a consortium of 146 public library authorities who are working together to develop and deliver networked information services in public libraries.
1. To assist individual members of the public (European citizens) to find their way through the maze of European information on the Internet, and to guide them to authoritative sources of European Union information on the web.
2. To provide a more efficient and cost effective way for public
libraries offering public Internet access to help their users make best
use of the web. In the past each authority would have had to construct its
own guide to websites containing EU information, now it is hoped that they
will simply ‘point’ to Euroguide.
Essex Libraries approached Sixtyeight Creative Solutions [4], who specialise in internet solutions, with whom they have previously collaborated on a number of other web projects including:
The design of the site had to take account of a number of goals. Firstly, the site is aimed at naive users, i.e. users who might have little experience of using the Internet and/or who might have little understanding of the European Union and European information. Therefore the site had to be very easy to use and to avoid specialist terminology. Euroguide points users to specific pages within sites, as well as homepages wherever possible. Secondly, the site is intended to be adopted by individual public library authorities and therefore it was important that it should look visually attractive and interesting, and that it should establish its own identity and domain name (rather than Essex Libraries). Thirdly, the site is intended to be very participative, and to encourage users to suggest useful sites for inclusion, send comments and ideas, and also ask for help if they couldn't find the information they were looking for.
An alphabetical list of subject categories. Initially, the guide offers access by 60 subject categories, which have been chosen to represent the terms that people use when searching for information, rather than ‘Eurojargon.’ Clicking on a category takes the user to a list of sites which contain information relevant to the topic.
Sixtyeight used the professional web authoring package 'Golive
CyberStudio' to create the site.
Adobe Photoshop 5 was used as the main graphics tool for the user
interface. Titles, graphics and buttons were created in Photoshop and then
exported as GIF or JPEG files. 'Sixtyeight' sketch out the page layout and
ideas for the user interface on paper. Once happy with the structure and
concept, this is then worked up within Adobe Illustrator and/or Photoshop
as a complete page. The client is then presented with either printouts of
these designs or a working web demo. Once approved a test site is produced
and after final ammendments 'goes live'. 'Sixtyeight' tailor their service
to the specific needs of each client and approach projects as more of a
partner than a supplier. "We enjoy what we do and see no reason why
the client should miss out on that either." says Marc Garner "...euroguide
is meant to feel uncomplicated to use and Phase Two will make it even
simpler for the euroguide team to maintain. We aimed to 'create a presence
on the Net' for the euroguide team and not a daunting presence in their
office."
The site, as it is now is very much in its infancy. There are ambitious plans for further development, both in terms of the content and the technology supporting it. With regard to the content the guiding principle is ‘quality not quantity.’ The aim is to guide users to the key, authoritative European information sites, not to try to list as many as possible. Developments in this area will focus on keeping up with changes and adding new sites as appropriate – hopefully guided by input from users. We are also beginning to work on short descriptions of the sites so as to make it easier for users to select suitable sites from the listings.
Developments are now beginning on the core part of Phase Two. This is to provide the euroguide team with direct access to a database of categories and their entries. 'Sixtyeight' proposed various functions to the euroguide team. Below is a summary of the updating procedures planned, all the administration takes place through a standard web browser.
1. They can add a new category, edit the name of existing categories or edit the contents of any category.
2. Either the whole database or just one category can be viewed and its entries edited.
3. Entries contain the 'Title', a description to appear below the title and the URL to display if the title is clicked.
4. Entries can be edited at any time and the web site is therefore updated immediately.
5. If a new entry is added it appears at the top of the list of entries for that category and flagged 'NEW'. A preset controls how long entries remain 'NEW', this preset can be changed at any time through the admin area. When the preset period expires the 'NEW ' flag is removed and the entry reverts to its alphabetical position within the list. 'NEW' entries are also automatically added to the 'What's New' page until the preset period expires.
6. Some entries may fall under more than one category. Therefore to avoid having to enter data twice, entries can easily be duplicated to another category or moved to another category.
'Sixtyeight' were keen to provide a solution which could be easily managed by the euroguide team. But which was also flexible enough to cope with future developments or requirements.
The site was launched around October 1998, and seems to have addressed a real need. Usage rates are impressive. Enquiries and questions such as the following arrive regularly:
Sara Ann Kelly of the euroguide team comments "Overall the comments have been very positive, but it's also useful to receive constructive criticism. I am very excited about the future of euroguide."
Marc Garner, Sixtyeight Creative Solutions, email:
solutions@sixtyeight.co.uk
Sara Ann Kelly, European Information Officer, Essex
Libraries, email: Sara.Ann.Kelly@essexcc.gov.uk
Mary Rowlatt, Information Services Manager, Essex
Libraries, email: maryr@essexcc.gov.uk
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Marc Garner
Sixtyeight Creative Solutions
Email: solutions@sixtyeight.co.uk
URL: http://www.sixtyeight.co.uk
Sixtyeight
Creative Solutions, known as '68' to its friends and clients, has been
developing internet solutions for 3 years. Marc Garner, who formed the
company, has strong roots in creative design and advertising. '68' are
able to provide complete campaign packages including not only a structured
internet presence but also supporting printed literature and promotion.
'68' have seen steady growth with clients such as Essex County Council,
Kotschy & Kotschy Advertising, Oyez Press, Marketing International and
H.E. Stringer Ltd.
For citation purposes:
Marc Garner, "The Development of euroguide," Exploit Interactive, issue 1, 10 April 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue1/euroguide/>
Sue Welsh, PubliCA Webmaster, introduces the Concerted Action for Public Libraries. The Citizen's Gateway will be a regular column in Exploit Interactive.
PubliCA, the Concerted Action for public libraries, was two years old at the beginning of the year. Those not familiar with its work may be asking: what is a concerted action? and why do public libraries need one? This article will seek to answer those questions by describing PubliCA's aims, achievements and forthcoming a ctivities. This is the first in a regular series of articles focusing on European public libraries and PubliCA activities.
A concerted action is a Libraries Programme mechanism designed to create a human network united by shared concerns, for the stimulation of action in pursuit of common goals. Concerted actions provide cohesion across projects and countries for issues with wide ranging significance such a copyright and standards.
Public libraries became an issue because of their past lack of engagement, compared to other library sectors, in European telematics activities. The Public Libraries in the Information Society study, set up to examine the challenges that are experienced by public libraries predicatably found that they encounter a lack of funding, technical and IT skills amongst staff and training opportunities, but equally that there is uncertainty about policy and a lack of overall strategy for development in this area [1].
A key element in all these aims is dissemination and exchange of information, about telematics research activities to the libraries, about the libraries needs and activities to each other and about the activities of public libraries to the world in general and key decision makers in particular.
PubliCA has established a mailing list and a web site as important dissemination tools (see below). In addition, as the definition of concerted action above implies, these aims are realised through PubliCA's human network. Since January 1997 PubliCA has organised three face to face workshops, each attracting 35 or more librarians from European Union members states and Central and Eastern Europe.
After the most recent of these, held in Leuven, Belgium in August 1998, the Leuven Communique was produced and agreed by all participants. Addressing the issue of the role of public libraries in the information society the Communique stressed their importance to democracy and citizenship, income and social development, lifelong learning and cultural and linguistic diversity. The participants called for national and federal public library policy to improve citizen’s access to information, help citizens to benefit from the information society, work to remove the disparities between access in different regions and meet the cost of extending library services to the information society. The Communique has since been translated into 14 languages and distributed widely in paper and electronic format [3].
Looking forward, in 1999 PubliCA will organise a major conference on public libraries, focusing on national policies and their practical application. This year will also see the realisation of PubliCA's training placements scheme, matching expressed training needs of senior library staff in the Central and Eastern European states with libraries in the West willing to offer training.
The PubliCA web site [4] is an excellent source of information about the project and is also used to disseminate information from the projects extensive network of country contacts. It can be used as a source of contacts for public libraries thinking of embarking on new projects, and as a source of information about public libraries in European countries. Recently, a new section describing previous and ongoing EU funded projects involving public libraries has been added. This column will feature regular reports culled from the PubliCA web site and other PubliCA sources covering all aspects of public libraries activity in Europe - stay tuned!
PubliCA is lead by a consortium of European public libraries and related organisations, and supported by the European Union under Framework Programme 4. Enquiries and suggestions regarding this column should be sent to Sue Welsh (swelsh@library.croydon.gov.uk).If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
For citation purposes:
Sue Welsh, "
Public Libraries in Europe: Meet PubliCA," Exploit Interactive, issue 1,
10 April 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue1/citizens/>
Many project developers will be making use of the Web, either as a integral part of the project or to provide information about the project. In a regular column on Web Technologies Brian Kelly reviews developments of Web protocols and formats. The article is intended to provide background information for projects which are about to make decisions on appropriate Web technologies to use.
As all Web developers will know, the Web originally consisted of three architectural components:
How have these developed since Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, began development of the web in the early 1990s?
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) originally provided a simple mechanism for defining some simple structural elements common to many documents, such as paragraphs (the <P> element), headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc.), and simple character formatting (bold, italics, etc.)
As the Web grew in popularity during the mid 1990s we began to see a battle for market share in the browser market, with Netscape and Microsoft releasing numerous HTML extensions (<FONT> and <CENTER> and, more controversially, <BLINK> and <MARQUEE>, etc.).
Although the frequent release of new browsers with new functionality (including not only support for extended HTML tag sets but also improved bookmark managers, email and news interfaces, etc.) initially appealed to many Web users, as the set of HTML extensions began to grow concerns were expressed over (a) the loss of browser independence, (b) the difficulties of developing authoring tools which could support new elements, (c) the dangers of using proprietary rather than open standards and (d) the architectural flaws in many of the extensions, with their role in defining the appearance of Web resources, rather than the underlying document structure.
Fortunately pressures from commercial companies which were making large-scale use of the Web together with, no doubt, an awareness from the browser vendors of the architectural flaws in their approachs to extending HTML, seems to have had some success. Both the major browser vendors have now stated their commitment to two important developments in the area of data formats: Cascading Style Sheets and XML.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have been developed to complement HTML. HTML, as an SGML application, was originally intended to define the structure of a document. CSS provides a mechanism for describing how a HTML document should appear. Although CSS level 1 was not widely deployed (due to the failure of Netscape, the browser vendor with the largest market share, to support it) CSS level 2 [1] is now supported (although admittedly not fully) by version 4 of Netscape and Internet Explorer.
The main advantages of using CSS rather than using HTML elements to describe the appearance of a page are:
Although HTML 4.0 and CSS 2.0 are the currently recommended data format standards for the Web, they have their limitations. Adding new elements to HTML can be very time-consuming, unless you are Netscape or Microsoft - but as we have seen, introduction of new elements by browser vendors is unpopular. In addition there are many elements which we would not expect to become part of a future HTML standard. Mathematical elements, for example, (<INTEGRAL>) are too subject-specific. There are innumerable application-specific examples which could also be given (such as <STAFF-NUMBER> or <PART-NUMBER>).
XML, the Extensible Markup Language, addresses HTML lack of extensibility. With XML arbitrary new elements can be defined, as illustrated in Figure 1.
| <MEMO> <FROM>Jo Smith</FROM> <TO>Hans Schmidt</TO> <SUBJECT>XML</SUBJECT> <CONTENT>Have you read the latest news about XML? It seems <STRONG>very</STRONG> interesting! </CONTENT> </MEMO> |
| Figure 1: Example of an XML Document. |
XML appears to have a great deal of momentum behind it, as can be seen by looking at web sites such as XML.COM [2], The SGML/XML Web Page [3], the XMLINFO.COM [4] and XMLSOFTWARE.COM [5] pages, W3C's Extensible Markup Language (XML) pages [6] and Peter Flynn's Frequently Asked Questions about the Extensible Markup Language [7].
HTML 4.0 and CSS 2.0 would appear to provide the recommended data formats for today, with a watching brief needed for XML - which could have a role to play for storing structured resources, which are delivered in HTML/CSS format. What other data formats developments may be relevant?
XLink [8] and XPointer [9] are proposals which will provide richer hypertext functionality for XML resources. As described in the What Are .. XLink and XPointer article published in the Web version of Ariadne [10], XLink is intended to provide richer forms of hyperlinking (e.g. to allow hyperlinked resources to be embedded in the document or displayed in a new window as well as replace the existing document, which the <A> element can do in HTML). XPointer will enable arbitrary portions of an XML resource to be processed, such as link to the fourth paragraph in the second sentence.
In the area of graphics, we are seeing many developments including WebCGM [11], HGML [12] and PNG [13]. The W3C's User Interface domain is active in coordinating such developments and has released an activity statement [14]. A Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group has been set up which has produced a document on Scalable Vector Graphics Requirements [15]. In the related area of multimedia the main development has probably been the release of the SMIL specification [16].
Although not a data format DOM, the Document Object Model [17], defines a object model for HTML, CSS and XML which will enable elements, attributes and content to be manipulated by client-side languages such as JavaScript. Note that the term DHTML (Dynamic HTML) is sometimes used to refer to use of the DOM.
Resources on the web are referred to by use of a URL - Uniform Resource Locator [18]. For example the URL <http://www2.echo.lu/oii/en/oii-home.html> (normally) refers to a document held on a computer with the domain name www2.echo.lu with the file name oii-home.html which is stored in a directory /oii/en/ beneath the web root directory and which is accessed using the http protocol.
A major problem with URLs is that they confuse the name of a resource with its location. We are familiar with the distinction in the library world between an ISBN, which identifies a document, and an accession number, which defines the location of a document within a library. In the Web, however, there is no way of, for example, easily referring to multiple locations of a resource.
Uniform Resources Names (URNs) [19] are a proposed mechanism for identifying a resource. The resource identified by a URN may reside in one or more locations, may move, or may not actually be available at a given time. The URN, has two interpretations, the first is as a globally unique and persistent identifier for a resource (achieved though an institutional commitment) that is accessible over a network; the second is as the specific "URN" scheme which will embody the requirements for a standardised URN namespace.
The Document Object Identifier (DOI) is an example of a proposed URN application. The goals of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system [20] are to provide a framework for managing intellectual content, link customers with publishers, facilitate electronic commerce, and enable automated copyright management. The components of the DOI system are: (A) An Identifier which consists of a prefix that is assigned to a publisher by a registration authority and a suffix that is assigned by the publisher (note that publishers may choose to use existing international standard identifiers, for example, ISBN numbers for books); (B) A directory which forms the basis for a resolution system (the directory is centralised and provides the mapping of DOIs to URLs) and (C) A database by which detailed information on an object may be maintained by the publisher.
HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, governs the transfer of resources between a web browser and a web server. Typically clicking on a hypertext link in a web browser will sent a HTTP GET request to the server. The server will respond by send requested resource (if it exists) together with a series of headers.
Although HTTP/1.0 was used during the exponential growth of the web in the mid 1990s, there are a number of problems with it:
HTTP/1.1 [21] has been designed to address the deficiencies and to fix a number of bugs in HTTP/1.0. The HTTP/1.1 specification provides support for multiple TCP connections and improved support for caching.
Although HTTP/1.1 provides performance benefits, it is still not scalable and it has not been designed to be extensible. HTTP/NG, the Next Generation of HTTP, [22] is a complete redesign of HTTP, which addresses these deficiencies.
The original version of the Web, which was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990s was based on the three architectural components described above: Data Format (HTML 1.0, which has developed to HTML 4.0 and is now complemented by CSS and XML), Transport (originally HTTP/0.9, and now HTTP/1.1 with development work on HTTP/NG) and Addressing (originally URLs).
During the mid 1990s much development work began to take place in areas such as content filtering, digital signatures, enhanced navigation of web sites, resource discovery and web collections. This work included:
As it became apparent that these developments were all related to metadata the World Wide Web Consortium set up a group to coordinate these developments [27].
Influenced by work such as Dublin Core, PICS and MCF, the Metadata Coordination Group developed a framework for metadata developments known as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [28]. The importance of RDF to the Web infrastructure is illustrated in Figure 2.
 Figure 2: Metadata, the missing architectural component from the web |
Although the RDF specifications are relatively new, we are already seeing a number of other specifications and applications being developed using RDF. As illustrated in Figure 3 (taken from "W3C Data Formats" [29]) W3C regard RDF as the key metadata format.
 Figure 3: The Role of RDF in the Data Format Architecture for the Web |
A number of example of uses of RDF are given below.
 Figure 5: Mozilla Support For RDF |
In addition to these examples, we can expect to see a number of other specifications based on RDF being developed. For example, W3C are likely to be producing specifications in the areas of digital signatures and privacy.
This article has given a brief introduction to recent developments to the web architecture, including developments to data formats, transport, addressing and metadata. A complete description of new web procotols and formats has not been given and areas such as electronic commerce, internationalisation, privacy and other social aspects (including accessibility issues) have not been addressed.
The article also does not address deployment issues. How can new protocols and formats, which are needed in order to develop richly functional and efficient services, when the user community is largely using older browsers? And without the widespread deployment of the latest generation of browsers, there seems to be little motivation for service providers to make use of the technologies described in this article. These issues will be addressed in the next edition of Exploit Interactive.
No doubt many projects funded by the European Union carry out surveys of standards relevant to their work, as well as European and national funding bodies. A quick survey revealed the following:
In addition to these reports, a excellent book on web standards is "Wilde's WWW: Technical Foundations of the World Wide Web" [34]. Further details about the book can be obtained from Springer's [35] or Amazon.com's [36] web sites.
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Tel: +44 1225 323943
Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Address: UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK, BA2 7AY
 Brian Kelly is employed as UK Web Focus, at UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking) at the University of Bath, England. Brian's responsibilities include keeping the UK Higher Education community informed of web developments. |
For citation purposes:
Brian Kelly, "The Development Of Web Protocols And Formats," Exploit Interactive, issue 1, 10 April 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue1/web/>
In what will be a regular Web Technologies column, Brian Kelly and Ian Peacock discuss the results of a recent analysis of the Telematics for Libraries Projects' URLs.
The WebWatch project [1] based at UKOLN, University of Bath, has developed robot software to analyse web technologies in use within a range of communities, and to advise communities on the implications of the findings. The WebWatch project has recently analysed the URLs for Telematics for Libraries projects. This article summaries the findings.
As well as providing a hyperlink to a resource, the URL of a Web page also provides useful information. The fully qualified hostname is normally of the form www.project-site.domain (e.g. www.desire.org or www.pride.ac.uk. This can often provide information on the country the server physically resides in (the UK in the first example, although the country is not known in the second example). The hostname can also indicate the nature of the organisation hosting the page (e.g. com or .co refers to a commercial company).
The construction of the directory hierarchy can indicate the relation of the page to the site. It may be possible to develop heuristic techniques to ascertain the ease with which the URL may be used, cited or remembered.
A list of Telematics for Libraries projects is maintained at the ECHO web site [2]. An HTML document exists for each project which provides summary information for each project. If the project has a project web site, the address is provided. Using this information we extracted 50 URLs corresponding to project web pages from the list of 107 projects.
A Perl script was used to obtain information from the project URLs. The script provided the following information for each URL:
URL, Scheme, Hostname, Path, Port, Fragment, Length of hostname, Length of path, Top domain, Secondary domain
Not suprisingly, all URLs used the http scheme. All but one URL (which used port 1999) refered to the (standard) TCP port 80 for data transfer over HTTP.
Five URLs contained the tilde character (~). This is a Web server mechanism that allows users to have Web space under the hierarchy /~user/.
All URLs ended with the suffix .htm (HTML document) or .html ( HTML document) or with a slash (/).
Figure 1 shows the length of the URL without the scheme, i.e of the hostname and path (which includes the first /). The two components are shown in different colours.
 Figure 1 - Number of characters in each URL |
Note that for the longer URLs, the length of the path dominates the length of the overall URL.
Table 1 lists the six project sites which contained only the domain name and no path.
| Project | URL |
| BALTICSEAWEB | http://www.baltic.vtt.fi/ |
| CASA | http://www.casa.issn.org:1999/ |
| DER@L | http://deral.infc.ulst.ac.uk/ |
| EUROPAGATE | http://europagate.dtv.dk/ |
| MALVINE | http://www.malvine.org/ |
| TOLIMAC | http://tolimac.ulb.ac.be/ |
It should be noted that only the MALVINE project has its own domain - the other projects included the project name before the organisational name.
In contrast, Table 2 lists the projects with the longest paths.
| Project | URL |
| SPRINTELB | http://www.iol.ie/resource/dublincitylibrary/sprintel/index.html |
| BIBDEL | http://www.uclan.ac.uk/research/centre/cerlim/projects/bibdelhp.htm |
| TRANSLIB | &lr;http://peterpan.uc3m.es/proyectos/translib/HomePage.htm>
|
| HARMONICA | http://www.svb.nl/project/harmonica/harmonica.htm |
| COBRA | http://portico.bl.uk/gabriel/en/projects/cobra.html |
| DECIMAL | http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/dic/research/decimal.htm |
In Table 2 it can be noticed that:
The top level and second level domain was extracted from the hostname of each URL. Table 3 shows the findings. Figure 2 gives a pie-chart representation of the data.
|
 Figure 2 - Top level domains found in URLs |
Figure 3 shows the second level domains that comprise the data for Table 3.
 Figure 3 - Second level domains found in URLs |
Figure 3 shows that ac.uk is the densest in terms of project sites. This in turn means that the top-level uk domain has the highest number of project sites.
It is desirable for projects to provide a short URL for the main entry point for the project, as this is more memorable and less likely to cause mistakes when citing the address (either in print or when speaking).
One way of shortening a long path name is to avoid including the filename, by making use of the web server's default naming convention. For example the URL for the fictuous project Microscape: <http://www.foo.bar.com/projects/microscape/microscape.htm> could be replaced by <http://www.foo.bar.com/projects/microscape/>. This is not only shorter, but also avoids potential mistakes in typing the suffix (e.g. "did she say .htm or .html?").
Organisatiations may have policies governing the directory structure which may result in long URLs. Use of the ~name convention may provide a shortened URL - e.g. <http://www.foo.bar.com/~microscape/>. A problem with this approach is that the ~name convention is often used for personal home pages (many universities use this approach to provide web space for students). End users who have experienced use of this approach may place low value on URLs containing the tilde character, as described in SOSIG's Internet Detective [3]. This tutorial guide to finding quality resources on the Internet states "If the URL contains a tilde then be aware that you are probably (although not definitely) looking at a personal page with personal opinions rather than an official site giving the official line." [4].
If the host organisation permits it, it may be desirable to include the project name within the domain name. For example the Europagate project which is hosted by the DTV (Danmarks Tekniske Videncenter & Bibliotek) has the URL <http://europagate.dtv.dk/>.
Rather than relying on the host organisation's policies for hosting web sites, projects may chose to obtain their own domain name. For example Exploit Interactive obtained the domain name exploit-lib.org. The Exploit Interactive website is hosted at the URL <http://www.exploit-lib.org/>. The domain name was obtained from InterNIC [5]. The first choice of <http://www.exploit.org/> had already been taken.
Another alternative could be to make use of the EU.org [6] organisation. EU.org's organisational home page states that "The goal of EU.org is to provide free subdomain registration to users or non-profit organizations who cannot afford the outrageous fees demanded by some NICs, especially in Europe". Using EU.org it would be possible to use the domain name exploit.eu.org. The Exploit Interactive decided not to pursue this option, since little was known about the EU.org organisation.
A final alternative which could be considered is the use of PURLs [7]. Instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL (Persistent URLs) points to an intermediate resolution service. Since EU project deliverables may well be sought after once the project has finished, it may not be desirable to provide a URL which may be deleted once the project has completed (as could happen if the website is hosted by a large organisation, and files are automatically deleted when project staff leave).
In the longer term the use of DOIs (Document Object Identifiers) [8] should be considered for use by projects.
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN: UK Office for Library and Information Networking
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
UK
BA1 7AY
Tel: +44 1225 323943
Fax: +44 1225 826838
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Ian Peacock
Netcraft
Bath
UK
Email: ip@netcraft.com
URL: http://www.netcraft.com/
Brian Kelly is employed as UK Web Focus, at UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking) at the University of Bath, England. Brian's responsibilities include keeping the UK Higher Education community informed of web developments. |
 Ian Peacock recently left UKOLN to join Netcraft; a networking consultancy based in Bath,
England. It is well known worldwide for its Web Server Survey, which is widely
considered a primary empirical metric for the number of web sites and the
relative popularity of web server software on the internet. Clients include IBM, Hewlett
Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft. |
For citation purposes:
Brian Kelly and Ian Peacock, "URLs for Telematics for Libraries Project Pages," Exploit Interactive, issue 1, 10 April 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue1/urls/>
|
Issue Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News and Events | Et cetera | ||
|
| ||
| Go to Top |
A UKOLN Service. Contact Us. Copyright © 1999  |
Last Updated: 9th May 1999 |