Research: Deliverables: D3.2 Prototype RDF rating services

This deliverable demonstrates several prototype applications of the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) in the context of the DESIRE work on web indexing and quality-assured information gateways. This work builds upon, and implements in part, the analyis undertaken earlier as D3.1 - Quality Ratings in RDF.

The documentation and demonstrators for D3.2 consist of two parts, undertaken by ILRT and UKOLN respectively. UKOLN's work focuses on the integration of quality-oriented attributes into the ROADS search and retrieval environment, and presents a prototypical client-side interface to one such rating bureau. The ILRT demonstrators contrast the facilities offered by a generic RDF datastore with a more traditional relational database approach, showing how either approach can be integrated into more general RDF-based information services.

Demonstators and documentation

The demonstrators are maintained on separate sites and can be accessed from the URLs below.

• ILRT demonstrator: rating and recommendations toolkit and prototype
• UKOLN demonstrator: Quality-based ranking and client application

Motivating Scenarios

The following 'motivating scenarios' are taken from the earlier D3.1 report. While the current demonstrators do not address all these applications (for example digital signatures) we present frameworks and software toolkit components that are intended to be usable for such purposes.

• I'm looking for peer-reviewed journals (and not merely 'vanity publishing').
• I'm looking for resources recommended by a subject-librarian.
• I'm looking for 3rd party descriptions of this resource from metadata servers run according to [some specified] collections policy.
• I'm looking for Web resources matching [some search] which will be useable (by blind users / on a Nokia Communicator browser / without Java enabled).
• I've created a set of Web pages from my PhD thesis; I'd like to include metadata in those pages, which makes it clear that this is well-researched content, so that other people working in this area can discover my document.
• Our pages are listed in catalogue of the (OMNI/EELS/DutchESS/SOSIG) subject gateway; we'd like to include a 'kitemark' logo and a (digitally signed) machine-readable equivalent on those pages so that search engines know that the site has been rated as 'high quality' by a trusted source.
• I want to be able to 'recommend' resources as rating highly on some quality scale to a trusted metadata service, so that those resources might be found more easily by others in my subject community.
• I want to be able to find resources that other subject specialists in my community have rated highly.
• I want to be able to find resources that other PhD researchers in my community have rated highly.
• I want to be able to do an Internet search from a single point of access, and have my query automatically forwarded to appropriate searchable catalogues/databases/gateways/indexes on the Web, prioritising gateways that follow (something like) the DESIRE quality selection criteria.
• I've created a page that uses Macromedia Shockwave; how can this technology dependency be made explicit so that people who can't use Shockwave don't find it when searching?
• I want to be able to have my search results filtered or ranked according to some 'rule' based on a quality-related property of the resources listed
• I want to find resources matching [some search term], listing those that are freely accessible first.
• I'm an Internet cataloguer and would like to have some automated support tools to help with resource selection and description (e.g. forms pre-populated with mechanically detectable information, or an easy way of finding out whether a site has lots of broken links or makes well known usability errors)
• I run a large scale Internet search service, and want to be able to cross-reference from our 'search results' page to 3rd party descriptions, ratings, classifications and reviews available elsewhere; we need to know which of these services are run by information specialists, librarians and subject specialists, and which aren't.

Scenarios such as these present a considerable challenge - they raise questions about trust, about machine vocabularies for describing both Web resources and for characterising the agencies which create those descriptions.

In addition these scenarios suggest problems which are more architectural in nature: how, for example, can one service discover which other metadata servers offer useful descriptions for some given URL. The 'RDF quality vocabulary' strand of activity in DESIRE attempts to make some contribution towards addressing these issues, and does so in the broader context of the DESIRE Subject Gateway activity and the work on distributed indexing and searching.

The scope of the discussion and recommendations which follow are consequently more constrained than the list of 'motivating scenarios' given above might suggest. When combined with the technologies, services and recommendations developed elsewhere within DESIRE, the framework outlined here should go some way towards addressing many of the issues raised in the motivating examples above.