inkdroid

So RepoCamp was a lot of fun. The goal was to discuss repository interoperability–and at the very least repository practitioners got to interoperate, and have a few beers afterwards. Hats off to David Flanders who clearly has got running these events down to a fine art.

I finally got to meet Ben O’Steen after bantering with him on #code4lib and #talis … and also got to chat with Jim Downing (Cambridge Univ) about SWORD stuff, and Stephan Drescher (Los Alamos National Lab) about validating OAI-ORE.

Stephan and I had a varied and wide ranging discussion about the web in general, which was a lot of fun. I really dug his metaphor of the web as an aquatic ecosystem, with interdependent organisms and shared environments. It reminded me a bit of how shocked I was to discover how rich and varied the ecosystem is around a “simple” service like twitter. If I ever return to school it will be to study something along the lines of web science.

It was also interesting to hear that other people saw a parallel between OAI-ORE Resource Maps and BagIt’s fetch.txt. The parallel being that both resource maps and bags are aggregations of web resources. Of course bags can also just be files on disk, it’s when the fetch.txt is present in the bag that the package is made up of web resources. It would be interesting to see what vocabularies are available for expressing fixity information (md5 checksums and the like), and if they could be layered into the resource map atom serialization. Perhaps PREMIS v2.0? It might be fun to code up what a simple OAI-ORE resource map harvester would look like, that checked fixity values — using LC’s existing BagIt parallelretriever.py as a starting point. God I wish I could just hyperlink to that :-(

At any rate, I now need to investigate OAuth because Jim thinks it fits really nicely with AtomPub and SWORD in particular. And if it’s good enough for Google it’s probably worth checking out. Jim also said that there is a possibility that the SWORD 2.0 might take shape as an IETF RFC, which would be good to see.

Thanks to all that made it happen, and for all of you that traveled long distances to join us at the Library of Congress.

If you’ve already caught the micro-blogging bug identi.ca is an interesting twitter clone for a variety of reasons…not the least of which is that it’s an open source project, and has been designed to run in a decentralized way. The thing I was pleasantly surprised to see was FOAF exports like this for user networks, and HTTP URIs for foaf:Person resources:

ed@hammer:~$ curl -I http://identi.ca/user/6104
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:58:56 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1
Status: 303 See Other
Location: http://identi.ca/edsu
Content-Type: text/html

It looks like there’s a slight bug in the way the HTTP status is being returned, but clearly the intent was to do the right thing by httpRange-14. If I have time I’ll get laconi.ca running locally so I can confirm the bug, and attempt a fix.

It’s also cool to see that Evan Prodromou (the lead developer, and creator of identi.ca and laconi.ca) has opened a couple tickets for adding RDFa to various pages. If I have the time this would be a fun hack as well. I’d also like to take a stab at doing conneg at foaf:Person URIs to enable this sorta thing:

ed@hammer:~$ curl -I --header "Content-type: application/rdf+xml" http://identi.ca/user/6104
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:08:42 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1
Location: http://identi.ca/edsu/foaf

instead of what happens currently:

ed@hammer:~$ curl -I --header "Content-type: application/rdf+xml" http://identi.ca/user/6104
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:08:42 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1
Status: 303 See Other
Location: http://identi.ca/edsu
Content-Type: text/html

I guess this is also just a complicated way of saying I’m edsu on identi.ca–and that the opportunity to learn more about OAuth and XMPP is a compelling enough reason alone for me to make the switch.