I’m not having a go at Wikipedia at all – I’m a big fan, but I had a thought about the recent McMaster University and Wikimedia Canada initiative to for health care content creation in the creative commons (holding workshops Oct 4th, 2011 at McMaster  introducing both professors and students to health care content creation in the  creative commons) .

This has come up before when I was working on Open Educational Resources: what is to stop nutters/malcontents – subtly or otherwise – altering medical information that leads to somebody putting their health in jeopardy or pushing one procedure over another, promoting one drug over another, etc.? I dont quite know how to defend this argument yet.

If you Google search for “shark cartilage”, “laetrile therapy” or “copper bracelet” you can see the nutters and profiteers already have their own web sites, which of course you and I are unable to edit.

For that reason I’m very glad that there’s a site which is prominent in search results which has policies on neutrality and reliable sourcing, and on which there are people watching the articles, undoing damage and blocking persistent vandals or spammers. If I see misleading info on cancercures4u.org, I can’t correct it then and there, but if I see it on Wikipedia, I can.

That said, there aren’t as many people watching and contributing to Wikipedia articles as there ideally should be. This is why I’m  enthusiastic about Cancer Research UK getting involved in editing cancer articles, this McMaster initiative, or the meeting yesterday at the Wellcome Institute which talked about using Wikipedia for public engagement. There are also projects to automatically sync information in Wikipedia (about RNA fragments, for example) with external databases.

Clearly we all only have a limited amount of time, but academics and support staff put a lot of time and effort into publications or sites that are supposedly aimed at informing the general public, but are only read by a small number of people. Maybe some of that effort could go into a put-it-where-people-will-look-for-it approach, for much greater impact? The interest in Wikipedia training from funding bodies and scholarly societies indicates many of them are starting to think this way.

It’s a general point about open, remixable content that anyone could potentially create their own versions with false information. That’s a consequence of open content being “free” as in “free speech”- free speech allows people to say stupid things, or give others stupid advice. As with any speech, readers need to consider the source.

Let’s get some terminology out of the way. Dbpedia is a service that extracts machine-readable data from Wikipedia articles. You can look at, for example, everything Dbpedia knows about the University of Bristol. SPARQL is an SQL-like language for querying triples: effectively, all the data is in a single table with three columns. SNORQL is a front-end to Dbpedia that allows you to enter SPARQL queries directly. It’s possible to ask SNORQL for “All soccer players, who played as goalkeeper for a club that has a stadium with more than 40.000 seats and who are born in a country with more than 10 million inhabitants” and get results in a variety of machine-readable formats.

Sadly, when you look for ways to use Dbpedia data, some of the links are broken, which was initially off-putting. SNORQL is great fun though. SPARQL is a something I’m only just learning, but to anyone familiar with SQL and the basics of RDF it’s straightforward.

List the members of the 1994 Group of universities

SELECT ?uni
WHERE {
?uni rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/University&gt; .
?uni skos:subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:1994_Group&gt;
}
ORDER by ?uni
Results

Get the Longitude and Latitude of the University of York

SELECT ?lat, ?long
WHERE {
:University_of_York geo:lat ?lat .
:University_of_York geo:long ?long
}
Results

List universities in the United Kingdom, with their cities, types, web sites, and numbers of Undergraduate and Postgraduate students

SELECT DISTINCT ?uni, ?city, ?type, ?ug, ?pg, ?web
WHERE {
?uni rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/University&gt; .
?uni dbpedia2:country ?uk .
?uni dbpedia2:city ?city .
?uni dbpedia-owl:numberOfPostgraduateStudents ?pg .
?uni dbpedia-owl:numberOfUndergraduateStudents ?ug .
OPTIONAL { ?uni dbpedia2:type ?type } .
OPTIONAL { ?uni dbpedia2:website ?web }
Filter (?uk = :United_Kingdom || ?uk = :England ||?uk = :Wales ||?uk = :Scotland || ?uk= :Northern_Ireland)
}
ORDER by ?uni

Note that in this implementation, “:” is an abbreviation for “http://dbpedia.org/resource/”, so “:United_Kingdom” is just a shorter way of saying “http://dbpedia.org/resource/United_Kingdom”
Results

The data in these examples is sometimes patchy, as you would expect. Glasgow presently appears twice in the list because it is listed as both a “public university” and an “ancient university”. The latter query could do with some tidy up. The HESA data on which the student and staff numbers is based is often a few years old rather than up to date. Web sites URLs are formatted in different ways in different infoboxes, leading to a slight inconsistency (which could be fixed by an extra line of code). Then again, given that it’s drawn from Wikipedia, I’m impressed at the completeness (and of course it’s easy to correct or update the figures).

Chains of doctoral advisors featuring four scientists

SELECT ?a, ?a_birth, ?b, ?b_birth, ?c, ?c_birth, ?d, ?d_birth {
?a rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Scientist&gt; .
?b rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Scientist&gt; .
?c rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Scientist&gt; .
?d rdf:type <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Scientist&gt; .
?a dbpedia-owl:birthDate ?a_birth .
?b dbpedia-owl:birthDate ?b_birth .
?c dbpedia-owl:birthDate ?c_birth .
?d dbpedia-owl:birthDate ?d_birth .
?d dbpedia-owl:doctoralAdvisor ?c .
?c dbpedia-owl:doctoralAdvisor ?b .
?b dbpedia-owl:doctoralAdvisor ?a
}
ORDER BY ?a_birth

Results
Lots of potential here for tracking the impact of individual academics and institutions.

1. They didn’t filter content: anyone could use Twitter and the hashtag to write whatever text they wanted on the Conservative site.
2. They didn’t filter out markup: users could style the content of messages how they wanted, e.g. 48 point high and they could embed images of their choice (including spoofs of the Conservative poster campaign).
3. They didn’t filter out Javascript commands: users could insert a command redirecting the whole site to Labour, Rickroll or porn, which they promptly did.

Code-injection is something any developer should consider when building one of these services, and surely most do, but it’s nice to have a period reminder of what can go wrong when you miss out the necessary one or two lines of code.

One of the signals which is increasing in importance is page speed: the time it takes the page to load and render. Hence it’s worth reading up on Google’s performance optimisation tips.

That vision just got a step closer with Yahoo’s YQL, a kind of super-API which allows you to perform SQL-like queries across data from multiple sites. The tutorial on Net-tuts uses the example of taking the latest tweets from a group of Twitter accounts. You could substitute RSS for Twitter to make a news aggregator (not a hugely imaginative application, but one on my mind recently).

More links:

• YQL home
• Language guide
• Combining SPARQL and YQL

A few weeks ago I noticed something odd about the representation of creative commons licences in the ATOM feeds coming from Flickr. In my photostream on Flickr I have a picture of dry stone wall, licensed as CC-by-nc (Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons) and a schematic diagram of a FRBRized complex resource licensed as CC-by (Attribution Creative Commons). Looking at the ATOM feed that is available for my photo stream, we see

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"  xmlns:flickr="urn:flickr:" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">
<!--snip-->
	<entry>
		<title>Dry stone wall</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/philbarker/4015001528/"/>
		<id>tag:flickr.com,2005:/photo/4015001528</id>
<!--snip-->
		<author>
			<name>phil barker</name>
			<uri>http://www.flickr.com/people/philbarker/</uri>
		</author>
		<link rel="license" type="text/html" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/deed.en_GB" />
<!--snip-->
        </entry>
<!--snip-->
	<entry>
		<title>FRBRized complex resource</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/philbarker/3877477899/"/>
		<id>tag:flickr.com,2005:/photo/3877477899</id>
		<author>
			<name>phil barker</name>
			<uri>http://www.flickr.com/people/philbarker/</uri>
		</author>
		<link rel="license" type="text/html" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en_GB" />

<!--...-->

I’ve snipped out some of the irrelevant information, but the important bits are lines 14 and 26, which identify the creative commons licences under which the Dry stone wall and FRBRized complex resource images are released. According to this Dry stone wall is released as CC-by-nd (Attribution-NoDerivs; it should be CC-by-nc, i.e. Attribution-NonCommercial) and FRBRized complex resource is released as CC-by-nc (Attribution-NonCommercial; it should be CC-by, i.e. Attribution).

I’ve checked with colleagues and other photostreams and the miss-identification of CC licences in the ATOM feeds is quite general.

Is this just nit-picking? Well, no, it’s not. Any commercial service that gets content from Flickr and uses the Flickr ATOM feeds to work out which images they’re allowed to use is going to be using the wrong images as a result of this, possibly even using images illegally. They could be misled into believing that it was OK to use my picture of a Dry stone wall for commercial use so long as they don’t modify it.

I reported this to the Flickr support back in mid-October. Their front-line tech support didn’t seem to get what the problem was at first (not surprising, really, it’s not your usual how-can-I-copyright-my-photo type of query) but on explanation they recognized that it needed escalating. Since then I’ve heard nothing; and evidently the problem hasn’t been fixed. Until it is fixed, beware: the licensing info in Flickr ATOM feeds ain’t worth the XML it’s written in.

For me the most interesting contribution was Prof. Derek Law’s opening keynote. He warned that the HE library sector may be too focused on responding to changing economic conditions, when the cultural changes happening now are arguably more significant. More and more of our culture is visual rather than verbal, and reading is becoming an optional lifestyle choice rather than a requirement of university life. University-level assessments are increasingly practical or multimedia rather than essays. It is nearly possible to get a PhD in some subjects without being  literate in a conventional sense: by learning to operate software and getting Google Scholar to do most of your literature review. Moving into the digital age is not merely about digitising old formats. It requires engaging with the difficult questions of how to access and preserve the new kinds of cultural objects that new technologies make possible. Law proposed a “Library 2.0″ approach that compromises between “Web 2.0″ and the traditional bricks-and-mortar library.

I went to Mike Ellis and Tony Hirst’s session on mashups, which was similar to last year’s, but it’s a pleasure to hear about new tools and mashups, and their enthusiasm for opening up the web’s data is inspiring. I hope their exhortations are heard across the sector.

Paul Boag contrasted the experience of finding a course on a university web site with the experience of using a typical ecommerce site. The experiences are poles apart, with course finders being almost universally hard work for the user. Isn’t promoting courses to potential students a core function of university sites?

The keynote session on How the BBC make Web Sites illustrated a polar opposite to a standard procedure of Design-in-Photoshop-then-convert-to-HTML. They started with the question “what is this site about?”, analysed the data structure of the domain and thought very deeply about URL design. Page layout, design and branding were added as a penultimate layer, with interactivity being the final addition.

A number of sessions that I attended were case studies in things going wrong. From Jeremy Speller’s and Russell Allen’s session on implementing university portals, I learned the term “Zombie project” (see ZDnet blog post). A lesson learned was that a tech project will only succeed if you get buy-in from the suits, the techies and the users.

One delight of the conference was this “Hug a Developer today” video. Someone out there cares!

Thanks to the IWMW community, and hopefully see you next year.