I was in Boston last week. It was lovely – the sun streaming through the red fall leaves and it was warm enough to walk around in just a shirt.
The event was the 10th anniversary of a publisher service that I had conceived and proposed. Others have taken it on to create one of the most significant developments in academic publishing. The idea is simple, but its execution hard. That is to link the references at the end of an academic article to the article in another publishers’ database. The problem is knowing where that other article is and coping with the fact that publishers buy and sell journals, thus shifting them around the place. The journal reader shouldn’t have to know where the cited article is, only to click and (with suitable permissions) get access to it.
We have similar issues in government. We have data and information that the end-user wants to find that is distributed across many different places, and usually the user doesn’t care about which bit of government provides it. Moreover, there are changes that occur when Departments get closed and created, thus moving their online content around the place.
The two problems are similar – how do you get separate bodies to collaborate and how do you find and link to relevant information and data that will outlast major changes.
The publishers use a handle technology on which is built a Digital Object Identifier system. Attached to each is a searchable metadata store that includes the current location. By each publisher uploading all their bibliographic data to a central store, you can form automatic processes that link citations to the location of the cited article. As articles move, their unique handle stays the same and only the location in the central datastore needs updating.
For government, we considered this but took a different approach to ensure all links work. This is because government is essentially a closed system. So that is why we have adopted use of URLs as Unique Resource Identifiers, rather than a handle approach. All websites are archived by The National Archives in such a way that the original URLs can be identified. Then each Department needs to introduce a piece of software that automatically redirects the link to the Department website if still there or to The National Archives if not. That way, links always work.
Both academic publishers and government share another important value for end-users. They need to be able to know that the information they reach is authoritative. For publishers this means that it is peer-reviewed and the title of the journal broadly indicates the degree of reliance they can place on the results. For government, the fact that it is a .gov.uk site means that it is the authoritative source of information. Trust lies at the heart of both systems.
Likewise, end-users need to know if information is the most recent. In academic publishing the date is the indicator with other information such as whether or not an article has been retracted (for example the original MMR vaccine paper was retracted). In government, it is important to replace old information with new, while making sure that the old is still available through the archive, to avoid losing part of the history of the country.
This approach also underlies the Semantic Web applications we’ve been introducing. Different types of information are distributed across the public sector, for example jobs and consultations. The question is how to find them and create useful aggregated services from them, both by government itself and for others. The solution we’re implementing is the use of semantic web and specifically RDFa. This is because RDFa is being searched and used by Google and Yahoo! and so is findable. Single point of access services can then be created that point the user back to source.
There are many analogies between academic journals and website publishing in creating a good service for its customers and users. It is useful to consider these and see how citizens can be given a better experience. It is also useful to look at a lot of other channels – for example, news and information services. Websites bring together many different aspects of information and communication and there is value to be had in looking at precedents and taking the best from them, while exploring how to use the Web most effectively to deliver services that online users want.
I felt proud to be back in Boston among old friends from around the world, celebrating something so significant. I’m looking forward to what we can achieve by working collaboratively across the public sector to make an equivalently important step change in user experience.
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