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see wikipedia

CV and career that sounds like a world-trip with many achievements, amongst them related to this field:

now retired, but still active in:

Where do the parts of this diagram live? Specially this human landing page for a software snapshot. Is that a github page thing?

While the sum of many individual knowledge graphs is a bigger knowledge graph, the sum of many individual APIs is not a bigger API, but rather a mess of interactions in which neither the server nor the client can improve the situation much within the traditional framework of thinking about APIs. – Ruben Verborgh in Reflections on Knowledge, 2021

When looking from the web at a repository, one actually does not see a repository. Rather, one sees web resources that happen to be exposed by the repository. The notion of a repository does not exist in the Architecture of the World Wide Web; it does not even entail the notion of a web server. The Web is all about resources identified by URIs. In this web-centric perspective, a compound object consists of any number of URI-identified resources that exist somewhere on the web. Constituent resources may be hosted by one or more repositories but that is not considered an essential characteristic. This 180 degree shift in perspective became a veritable aha moment for us, a Kool-Aid we drank, something we saw that can never be unseen. – quoted from page4 explaining the “Resource Oriented View” of the web

Herbert: Do check out this presentation explaining Signposting from a FAIR-Digital-Object perspective

the general idea is to have the links between the core concepts available

we do it to solve a huge problem, being: the need for heuristics to find your way around different portals - by exposing in a standard way the navigational guides (signposts) that are only made available to humans (and are effectively changing over time, so any hueristics in the scraping logic needs to be addapted regularly)

how: simple conventions: (1) use the HTTP-Link header in combination with IANA assigned link-relations

It is a simple thing, takes no time to do.

The uptake has been really slow, only the recent year (mainly through EU projects) there is something clearly happening.

The new version of dataverse and dspace will have it on board.

It is so simple it is hard to oppose, and the value is likely to outweigh the effort.

But it is waiting for a network effect – the real value grows exponentially with the adoption rate.

Herbert warns us about this not going to be enabled or helped from any commercial player - offering us a story from the PIDapalooza conference about the clearly stated unwillingness from a present executive of a main commercial player in the repository space. It clearly shows a fundamental bottom line struggle for openness is behind this –> yes, suporting it would allow openness and e.g an easier, more consistent citation, but it would largely also enable bots like scihub to be able to harvest and share…

In more general terms: What is driving adoption of standards? Herbert mentions a paper / talk (todo Joanna to follow up) that addresses this.

Marc also thinks abouth a paper from Kate Darling: “Creativity without law.” that touches upon “what elements drive human behaviour: law+enforcement, architecture+nudging, common accepted morality, economics+benefits

Britt questions about whether bottom-up vs top-down is a better strategy in these cases; but Herbert doubts if one could even make that destinction for fair-signposting: it doesn´t seem to follow that kind of categorisation?

Herbert mentions the need for a standards-community: discussion and adaptation is what makes it better, and supports active adoption.

Herbert also applauds the positive effect of public figures advocating and promoting.

Marc also suggests two other essential properties many “good standards” have in common and should be recognised here:

Good standards: (1) have a big space within (enable more then restrict, create a space for so called permissionless innovation) and (2) are simple and clear

Both properties apply to signposting IMHO - so it should be destined for succes :smile:

Still, while these observations make a distinction between these realms, there still is a clear link between them too: as soon as RDF works with derefencable follow-your-nose links the distinction really blurs. At that time it makes sense to have these worlds nicely overflow from the one into the other – an idea we revisited near the end of the meeting…