SkoHub –

KOS-based content syndication

Adrian Pohl / @acka47

Linked Open Data, Hochschulbibliothekszentrum NRW (hbz)

Köln, 2019-05-29

Diese Präsentation:
http://slides.lobid.org/skohub-hbz/

Open is the new normal

The goal of openness

To establish a practice where scientific, educational or other cultural resources are by default published under an open license on the web to be read, used, remixed and shared by everybody.

There are lots of openness initiatives

Open Access & Open Science

Free Culture

Open Data

Open Educational Resources

...

So we've got a lot of open stuff on the web

...but how do we discover what is relevant to us?

The challenge

With a growing supply of resources on the web, the challenge grows to learn about or find resources relevant for your teaching, studies, or research.

The repository approach

Maintenance burden

Create and maintain a list of sources (repos) to add

Watch out for new resources to be added

Adjusting the crawlers when interfaces change

Normalize data from different sources

Shortcomings of the repo approach

Only cover resources in repos, not elsewhere on the web

Users have to know where to find your service to start searching

The approach is "off the web"

Off the web

Conceptually, we have come to see [OAI-PMH] as repository-centric instead of resource-centric or web-centric. It has its starting point in the repository, which is considered to be the center of the universe. Interoperability is framed in terms of the repository, rather than in terms of the web and its primitives. This kind of repository, although it resides on the web, hinders seamless access to its content because it does not fully embrace the ways of the web.

– Van de Sompel/Nelson 2015

How could a web-centric or resource-centric approach to discovery by subject look like?

URIs, URIs, URIs

URIs for open resources and controlled vocabularies

Web-based subscription and notification

(with ActivityPub)

An inbox for ervery subject

Applications can send notifications to the inbox

Applications subscribe to an inbox and will receive push notifications

The described infrastructure allows applications:

to send a notification to a subject’s inbox containing information about and a link to new content about this subject

to subscribe to the inbox of a subject from a knowledge organization system in order to receive push updates about new content in real time.

Example

Advantages

Push instead of pull

Supporting web-wide publications

Knowledge organization systems are used to their full potential

Encouraging creation and use of shared Knowledge Organization Systems across applications

Incentive for content producers to add machine-readable descriptions

SkoHub project (2019)

Basic inbox and subscription infrastructure (skohub-pubsub)

Static site generator for Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (skohub-ssg)

Describe, link resources & send notifications from the browser (skohub-editor)

Browser-based subscription to subjects (skohub-deck)