Ubiquity
There’s quite a lot of buzz around Ubiquity at the moment, which is probably most simply described as an attempt by Mozilla to take the mashup out of the domain of the web developer and into the hands of the user. The product allows a user to create their own mashups without having to be fluent in web scripting and coding; all they need to do is install the appropriate client on their browser (currently Firefox only) and then type in what they want to do.
The applications demonstrated in the demo are fairly simple at this stage but it’s easy to see how they could have quite a lot of use in education to help take the drudge out of some common tasks and to open up what we’re doing about combining services. So, as an ex social scientist I seemed to spend quite a lot of time combining stats together and then displaying them on a map; it would be great if a I had a ‘widget’ that would do that for me and take some of the spadework out. That then frees me up to do a bit more of the interesting research that I really want to do.
Add a little more and it’s a tool that could become extremely useful. It’s all built on an open source license so there is potential for Grease Monkey type extensions that allow further extensions. We are slowly and painfully seeing the freeing up of data under Open Access and a revival in the citizen scientist as a result (see here) . Then we have tools and standards such as OAuth and OpenSocial that are allowing us to selectively release data about us and permissions to help these services do something for us.
Ultimately, I think it’s worth watching what Ubiquity is doing over at Mozilla Labs because it could start opening up some mainstream avenues for really useful mashup tools that save the researcher and educationalist a lot of time and let them get on with what they’d like to do.
Verisign PIP
Saw this on TechCrunch today and was intrigued. OK, you are effectively maintaining an identity vault but it further proves yesterday’s post that the bigger vendors are starting to get into identity metasystems, often in a variety of ways. Given they want to see these succeed commercially then maybe this will be the year when identity starts to get a little easier rather than more complex.
The down sides for Verisign’s PIP(Personal Identity Portal) is that it still seems quite US focused, you have to have an active browser session with PIP for it to work and there is a limit to which sites it will manage details for.
The up sides are that it works for most of the main commercial sites (such as Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn), you can have two factor authentication if you so wish and it’s Verisign so they’ve got a good background in dealing with security and trust.
In sum, another useful tool in the armoury of identity for the educationalist and researcher, even if it’s not going to be somewhere to store your federation credentials or that digital certificate to get at Grid resources.
Call for Participation: OASIS OASIS Identity Metasystem Interoperability (IMI) TC
One of the latest calls for participation that came my way was this one for Identity Metasystem Interoperability. I’ll fess up now and say this has been sitting in my inbox for a while waiting for me to have a look through it hence this entry not being quite as current as it could be.
Firstly, what is an identity metasystem? A good definition can be found (as always) at Wikipedia. In brief, an identity metasystem provides for a user to be able to manage their identity credentials all in one place. So, if I’m a researcher and I have a digital certificate, a federation login and access to a wiki or blog through a user name and password, I can manage them off one interface instead of having to remember each set of details.
So what does this mean? Well, we at JISC put out an ITT for some work looking at exactly the same area and its applicability to higher and further education last year. We felt at the time that there was a great deal that could be got out of finding appropriate identity metasystems to manage identity for those in education and research as we’re all conscious of the ever-increasing number of identity credentials we get given. We didn’t get any responses we could fund so it was put on hold until there was more capacity in the sector to respond.
OASIS’s move to form the group is worth a look because it’s showing a wider interest in getting this working after quite a lot of effort from Microsoft to promote CardSpace and infocards. There is also the work of the Higgins project and Bandit’s DigitalMe and previous efforts such as at a Burton identity event to show interoperability between all these systems. Is now the time when identity metasystems will start being used rather than just being shipped with one of the most-used operating systems? I think time will tell and that users are taking quite a while to get used to this new thing called identity. In the mean time, I hope that the TC on identity metasystems is a diverse one that reflects the needs not only of Microsoft but also of a wide range of users, including those in education and research.
Yahoo Fire Eagle Launched
Given the amount of buzz over ‘the next big thing’ in Web 2.0 (or are we now moving to Web 3.0?), which appears to be geo-location, it was inevitable that soon one of the bigger established players would launch a platform. Hence Yahoo’s Fire Eagle didn’t come as much of a surprise when it launched. As with all apps that take personal identifiable information, it lets you control how you manage your data and what you share. In this case you can update the service with where you are and that can then go to other services such as BrightKite that actually use the information. BrightKite’s probably a good example as it allows users to interact based on where they are and what they are doing and it also pushes location data back to Fire Eagle. Sites like Dopplr are also on board so you can share information about where you will be that can propogate across sites rather than being trapped in one site.
All this is great for the average busy researcher. I can see where my colleagues are (providing they’re subscribing; big ‘if’) and arrange to meet up or they can contact me. The mobile phone service is especially interesting as it simply pushes where I am to my services and there is no need for me to do anything. Suddenly my social network becomes a hell of a lot more interesting and I’m meeting new colleagues who have similar interests and are in the same location.
The downsides are the usual ones for personally identifiable information (PII). I’m now not just giving up information on what I am interested in but where I am and if that’s being pushed out to a variety of services they have that information too. OK, they can promise that they will delete that information when I ask them to and Yahoo are very good at giving the option of switching the service off when the user asks for it but that information is still out there in the public domain. As we’ve seen recently with the Google/YouTube and Viacom legal case, once a user gives out their attention data into the public domain, it can have unexpected consequences. In that case, attention data had the potential to become PII just by the sheer volume of it and the open-ness to data mining to create a unique profile. Imagine what could happen with geo-location data that has far more potential to uniquely identify an individual.
All in all, though, I think that geo-location services have a great deal of potential in higher and further education. JISC now have quite an extensive geo portfolio and some of those services, such as Digimap, are already helping researchers whereas some others that are embryonic such as GeoXWalk are very close to providing a service. Match up, say, GeoXWalk with a geo-tagging app such as FireEagle and location aware instruments and you can then start creating intelligent meta-tags for where data is created as well as when and with what. That could create some pretty exciting new research with derived data, license agreements permitting ;-).
First Look at Facebook Connect App
Facebook have published their first site that uses Facebook Connect. Called RunAround, it allows runners to track their runs and involve their friends without having to add them manually to the site or fill out registration details. It’s great to see a practical application for Connect and to also see some good privacy principals operating there as well. A user has the option to register for the site and go down the site’s registration process or use their Facebook details. A user then actively consents to release information (in this case one line stories) and brings the friends that they have on Facebook who have already registered with Run Around with them. It’s early days yet so I’m watching for other applications of Connect to see how it all pans out and see how sites such as RunAround fair but this all looks promising for limited disclosure of information to third parties to help the user but not then breach their privacy.
Another related development is Twitter definitely adopting OAuth and Firefox likely to do so too (but straight into the browser). With Twitter it will mean a much better way of allowing third party apps based on Twitter to carry out action on the user’s behalf without them having to hand over their username and password. With Firefox it will allow browser apps to carry out actions on a user’s behalf, which opens up what we’ve wanted to look at in JISC for a while, which is n-tier authentication and authorisation (even if at this stage it looks like being at one level).
A more interesting question is around how people deal with these new capabilities. We’ve already seen through the Identity Project and FLAME how identity is dealt with in FE and HE and how users’ attitudes to releasing personal information differs as well as their awareness of what they’re doing. DPIE 2 revealed that most users would like to have useful tasks done on their behalf with their personal information, such as registration details being filled in for them. In a world with technologies such as Facebook Connect and OAuth, whilst we have the technology to alllow users to retain their own personal information, do they necessarily know how to control this? I think we need apps such as RunAround so users can get to grips with the technology on a fairly simple level and then do more as they feel more comfortable. Hopefully we’ll then be in a world where the user doesn’t have to give up the crown jewels of identity and cede their username and password details to be able to do simple tasks such as registration.
LHC Computing Grid
Computing reported today that, after much work, the Grid behind the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is due to start work in earnest tomorrow. I think this is pretty significant because whilst we have been warning of the data deluge for a while now and looking at ways to address it, the LHC and the grid being used to provide compute and data storage resources give good examples of exactly what we are talking about. It’s estimated that the LHC will produce around 40,000 GB of data every day or around 12 to 14 petabytes in the average year. What isn’t mentioned in the Computing article (understandably) are the other demands being placed on grid resources by instruments similar to the LHC, which require equallly formidable grid resources. All of that data ultimately has to make its way around the academic grids to the researchers who use it and collaborate with others to make new discoveries and carry out increasingly innovative research; some idea of the challenge faced can be seen in this article on the UK portion of GridPP at RAL. That’s a lot of traffic and a lot of storage, as whilst facilities such as CERN have quite stunning data storage facilities (around 5m GB of disk and 16m GB of tape storage), the data can’t stay there forever given the rate at which it is produced.
JISC has been working hard in all areas to help provide appropriate resources to facilitate this data both getting from the instruments to the scientists involved and allowing them to then have the tools to share it. JANET provides the core physical network for academic institutions, having completed SuperJANET5. On top of that we have been working with the National Grid Service (NGS) to ensure there are appropriate grid facilities for researchers in the UK. Through programmes such as e-Infrastructure and VREs we have been working to make the tools needed for researchers to collaborate and share experimental results. Finally, the repositories and information environment work has been reviewing how the data produced can be curated and archived so researchers can find it and re-use it. Future work is going to be on continuing to develop these tools but also looking at new ideas and new software to help researchers take data from the LHC and other instruments and sources and carry out their research more efficiently.