Taskgroup A progress report

Transcription

1 NACE CORROSION/2000 Conference OCEAN Thematic Network meeting Taskgroup A progress report Hans C. Arents senior XML consultant I.T. Works Guiding the IT Professional Innovation Center, Technologiepark 3, B-9052 Gent (Belgium), Tel: +32 (0) Fax: +32 (0) hca@itworks.be -Site: - Home: Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 1of 23

2 Taskgroup A progress report Taskgroup A goals Corrosion Web resource discovery OCEAN Service Info Sheet (OSIS) OSIS: a detailed look characteristics embedded vs. stand-alone How it will work OSIS harvesting directory consultation What is planned OSIS embedded Proposed Recommendation prototype of central directory site Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 2of 23

3 Taskgroup A goals Goals: definition of a resource discovery mechanism for connecting corrosion information sources to OCEAN metadata about the corrosion information sources to be harvested and made available through a central directory site definition of standardised data formats for the exchange of corrosion information within OCEAN Why? all sorts of materials data (text, figures, multimedia) to be exchanged using common Internet protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP) finding, retrieving and using corrosion expertise services on the Web (collections of) Web pages, Web sites, Web-enabled databases corrosion experts, corrosion consultancy, corrosion research, exchanging corrosion information (free or for a fee) Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 3of 23

4 Corrosion resource discovery Taskgroup A has decided to focus on goal a lot of corrosion information is available on the Web but is very hard to find out where it is and who owns it before a corrosion information marketplace can be established the possible participants need a way to find out about each other Łneed for an open, standards-based, scalable corrosion Web resource discovery mechanism Corrosion Web resource discovery mechanism using metadata to describe the corrosion Web resources agreed-upon vocabulary for cataloguing corrosion Web resources each corrosion Web resource is described by a set of characteristics e.g. Author, Title, Subject, metadata is harvested and collected into a central directory site central directory site allows consultation of Web resource descriptions Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 4of 23

5 OCEAN Service Information Sheet (OSIS) What? a summary sheet describing the type of corrosion information offered by a corrosion Web resource participating in OCEAN not a human-readable, but computer-exploitable format using a simple syntax, but adhering to a controlled vocabulary easy enough to be created by a corrosion expert powerful enough to be meaningfully exploited by a computer Design goals of the OSIS based on Dublin Core (DC) characteristics, to be extended with specific characteristics for cataloguing corrosion expertise services use of widely available DC tools compliance with emerging metadata standards define an embedded OSIS first, then define a stand-alone OSIS first build proof-of-concept directory for simple corrosion Web pages later build industrial-strength directory for all corrosion Web resources Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 5of 23

6 OSIS: Dublin Core characteristics Content characteristics: Title: the name given to the resource Subject: the subject and topic of the resource that succinctly describes the content of the resource Description: a textual description of the content and/or purpose of the resource Source: information about a resource from which the current resource is derived Language: the language of the content of the resource Relation: information about another resource that is related to the current resource and the relationship type Coverage: the spatial and/or temporal characteristics of the resource (what is covered where and when) Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 6of 23

7 OSIS: Dublin Core characteristics Ownership characteristics: Creator: the name of the person or organisation primarily responsible for the content of the resource Publisher: the name of the person or organisation responsible for making the resource available Contributor: the name of the person or organisation that has played an important but secondary role in the creation of the content of the resource but is not specified in the Creator element Rights: a statement or a pointer to a statement about the intellectual property rights management information for the resource Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 7of 23

8 OSIS: Dublin Core characteristics Resource characteristics: Date: the date the resource was created or became available in its current form Type: the category or genre of the resource (e.g. text, image, video, etc.) Format: the data format of the resource Identifier: a unique identifier for the resource Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 8of 23

9 OSIS: OCEAN specific characteristics Classification characteristics: Classification: one or more resource properties allowing the information resource to be classified with respect to different facets corrosiontype: one or more keywords expressing the type of corrosion covered by the information resource materialtype: one or more keywords expressing the type of material covered by the information resource environmenttype: one or more keywords expressing the type of environment covered by the information resource measurementtype: one or more keywords expressing the type of measurement covered by the information resource informationtype: one or more keywords expressing the type of information covered by the information resource? Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 9of 23

10 OSIS: OCEAN specific characteristics Payment characteristics: Access: whether the information resource is free, or only available on a registration or a subscription basis Payment: details about the payment methods required for accessing the information resource Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 10 of 23

11 OCEAN classification characteristics Classification metatag consists of different facets which can be used to classify the corrosion information resource corrosiontype, materialtype, environmenttype, measurementtype, OSIS Recommendation document will define which facets are allowed in the classification metatag what is the controlled vocabulary of keywords to be used for each facet e.g. ASTM list of materials OSIS Recommendation document will not define the thesaurus structure which may be defined for the keywords in the controlled vocabulary for a particular facet the exclusion relationships which may exist between the keywords belonging to the thesauri of different facets e.g. pitting cannot occur in sulphuric acid Łthere is no general agreement on those domain-specific thesauri and these thesauri might be offered as part of a (paying) consultation interface Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 11 of 23

12 OSIS: embedded vs. stand-alone alone Embedded OSIS: metatags inserted into the HTML code of the Web page for describing: single Web page collections of Web pages advantage: will also be harvested and used by Web conventional search engines Stand-alone OSIS: Resource Description Format (RDF) file posted on the Web site for describing: contents of Web-enabled corrosion databases corrosion consultancy services for sale corrosion research results on offer advantage: will be more detailed than metatags Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 12 of 23

13 Embedded OSIS example <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" " <html xmlns=" <head> <link rel="schema.dc" href=" title="dublin Core Metadata Element Set"> <link rel="schema.osis" href=" title="ocean Service Information Sheet"> <meta name="dc.identifier" scheme="uri" content=" <meta name="dc.title" lang="en" content="selecting the right stainless steel to prevent pitting"> <meta name="dc.subject" lang="en" content="pitting;stainless steel;materials selection"> <meta name="dc.description" lang="en" content="how to select the appropriate stainless steel to prevent pitting corrosion"> <meta name="dc.language" scheme="rfc1766" content="en"> <meta name="dc.creator" lang="en" content="walter F.L. Bogaerts"> <meta name="dc.publisher" lang="en" content="k.u.leuven Dept. MTM"> <meta name="dc.rights" scheme="uri" content=" <meta name="dc.date" scheme="iso8601" content=" "> <meta name="dc.format" scheme="imt" content="text/html"> <meta name="osis.classification" scheme="astm" content="corrosiontype=pitting; materialtype=steel; informationtype=guidelines"> <meta name="osis.classification" scheme="astm" content="corrosiontype=pitting; materialtype=stainless steel; environmenttype=water"> <meta name="osis.access" scheme="osisaccesstypes" content="pay"> <meta name="osis.payment" scheme="uri" content=" </head><body>...</body> </html> Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 13 of 23

14 OSIS harvesting: approach used No brute force spidering, but selective harvesting not collecting any metadata from all the Web pages on a participating OCEAN site but collecting OSIS metadata from the Web pages which have been carefully prepared by the participating OCEAN site Central OCEAN directory: has a list of participating OCEAN sites harvesting robot contacts each of these sites Each participating OCEAN site: has a list of OSIS-enriched pages to be harvested harvesting robot harvests each of these Web pages and brings the OSIS metadata back to the directory site Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 14 of 23

15 OSIS harvesting: approach used participating OCEAN sites central OCEAN site participating OCEAN sites OCEAN directory resource A harvest metatags harvest metatags resource D resource B resource E resource C Web consultation notification corrosion engineer resource F Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 15 of 23

16 OSIS harvesting: language used WebL ( a scripting language developed by Digital Research for automating information retrieval tasks on the World-Wide Web unique features: service combinators: an exception-handling mechanism that makes Web computations more reliable markup algebra: provides a way to extract information from and manipulate HTML/XML Web pages specifically designed to build: hyperlink checkers, Web spiders, metadata harvesters,... requirements: written in Java, requires JVM on web server available for free, extensible using Java Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 16 of 23

17 WebL: : example script // ============================================================================= // Script to generate a HTML file from the metatags harvested from a Web page // Author: Hans C. Arents ( // Copyright (c)2000 I.T. Works. All rights reserved. // ============================================================================= // import necessary modules import Files; // write to HTML file buffer var HTMLfile = ""; var write = fun(string) HTMLfile = HTMLfile + string end; var Webpage = GetURL(" write("<html>\n\t<head></head>\n\t<body>\n\t\t<ul>"); var metatags = Elem(Webpage, "meta"); every metatag in metatags do write("\n\t\t\t<li><b>"); write(metatag.name); write("</b> = "); write(metatag.content); write("</li>"); end; write("\n\t\t</ul>\n\t</body>\n</html>"); Files_SaveToFile("OCEANoutput.html",HTMLfile); Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 17 of 23

18 WebL: : example output which can easily be presented as:

19 Directory consultation: how it could work OSIS metadata: harvested by the harvesting robot, stored in a database at the directory site and made available as a set of directory pages Dublin Core characteristics + OCEAN specific characteristics are to be used as a means of displaying extra information about the corrosion Web resource background about the resource, shown in the directory pages information can be found using full-text search OCEAN classification characteristic is to be used as a means of navigating through the directory pages standard: by walking through the list of keywords in the controlled vocabulary for each of the facets enhanced: by navigating through the tree structure of the thesaurus defined for the keywords in the controlled vocabulary for a particular facet e.g. WebBrain: TheBrain interface defined on top of existing DMOZ directory will not be part of the OCEAN project, but a possible later commercial spin-off Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 19 of 23

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22 What is planned for the next months OSIS (embedded) Proposed Recommendation document: define list of facets for OCEAN classification characteristic corrosiontype, materialtype, environmenttype, measurementtype,? define a controlled vocabulary for each of these facets e.g. ASTM materials list and other relevant efforts define list of OCEAN specific characteristics Access, Payment,? define syntax for OSIS metadata HTML metatags to be added to Web pages Accompanying document OSIS Usage Guidelines describe list of accepted OSIS characteristics give controlled vocabulary for each OSIS characteristic how to easily create/modify/store/announce OSIS metadata both finished by the end of September 2000 Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 22 of 23

23 What is planned for the next year Participating OCEAN sites: read, critize, perfect and finally vote on the OSIS (embedded) Proposed Recommendation adopt the OSIS Recommendation and add OSIS metatags to their Web pages (following the OSIS Usage Guidelines document!) Central OCEAN directory site: proof-of-concept metadata harvester has been developed development of final metadata harvester will be put out to tender harvest the metadata from the participating OCEAN sites and store this metadata in an appropriate database for consultation convert the harvested metadata into a format appropriate for visualization allow third-parties to integrate into the OCEAN central directory site their metadata visualization interface for consultation evaluate this metadata harvesting infrastructure and improve where necessary Copyright 2000 I.T. Works 23 of 23