posted Sep 29, 2008 7:29 AM by Jay Collier
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updated Sep 29, 2008 9:53 AM
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Dirk Swart and his colleagues at Cornell have released a paper outlining the objectives for an easy-to-use Web publishing tool to support Cornell data repositories. Cornell has given permission to share, so take a look and feel free, as always, to comment below. - Practicing Web 2.0, by Dirk Swart, Al Gonzalez, Barbara Friedman, Tonya Miles, David DeMello, Tony Lombardo, Lisa Cameron-Norfleet, Nathan Reimer, Robert Miller, Corey Merrell
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Excellent paper. I have 3 off-the-cuff thoughts.
1) Web pages are only a portion of an institution's digital assets. At the same time, Web pages contain unique information and pull information from other sources, which they blend together, making them difficult to archive. Even worse, AJAX can be used to make "pages" into dynamic interfaces that can't be archived in any meaningful way.
2) Web 3.0, as Tim Berners-Lee expresses it, is a label for his ongoing push toward separating data from presentation. Small devices, such as cell phones, are bringing renewed focus to non-Web delivery.
3) Integrating information from diverse sources is a known pattern for which there are known technological solutions. The problem spaces are: a) Is it possible to build an elegant user experience, one that isn't divided into discrete "blocks" with idiosyncratic behaviors? People, in general, are using many different Web tools, yes. But, how many does one "regular user" use? b) How to know where all the information is and how it's related?
These problem spaces require human analysis and discovery. Technology-based attempts, such as "auto-discovery" of data repositories, have failed.