NPR API + Solr = ?

Adapted from an email to the pubforge list.

Solr is a great application, and its out-of-the-box features still amaze me. With the newer versions, it’s incredibly easy to hook Solr up to any data source (using the Solr Data Import Handler) and just let it do its thing.

I don’t have any thoughts about communication, but one of the tennents of the code4lib community is “less talk, more code”. Public media spends a lot of time planning collaborations or trying to find funding (or worse, talking about doing those things) instead of actually doing it. I’d love to see more prototyping, iterative development, and open sharing and discussion about what new and interesting services we can provide.

On an earlier post to the list, John Tynan suggested the potential of providing a “More Like This” service for NPR News data, and in the interest of just getting something out there, I spent a little bit of time hooking everything together. To give it a pretty front-end, I also hacked in a Solr AJAX interface.

The NPR/Solr demonstrator uses this solr endpoint. I’ve locked down the indexes, but left everything else open so you can see how the pieces fit together. If there is enough interest in this application, I would be willing to develop it out further if you provide ideas, use-cases, etc in the comments.

The source code is available from the github project npr-solr.

None of this took very long to develop, the most time consuming part was importing from the paginated NPR API (with its absurdly low 20 records-per-request maximum..).

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By chris – March 19, 2010

Public media links for the week of 3/6

Some thoughts on curation – adding context and telling stories

Just over two years ago I wrote a post about the importance of the resource and the URL — and I still stand by what I said there: the core of a website should be the resource and its URL. And if those resources describe real world things and they are linked together in the way people think about the world then you can navigate the site by hopping from resource to resource in an intuitive fashion. But I think I missed something important in that post — the role of curation, the role of storytelling.

Tom Scott’s article is particularly interesting as public broadcasting begins to transform from distribution into conversation. It’s great to see some thinking about the interaction of user generated content and programming.

Consolidation: CPB renews its economy push for shared master control
facilities

CPB has come up with another incentive and a new demonstration project in its long and sporadic
campaign for the cost savings of shared technical facilities and staff. ¶Under a new rule adopted by the
CPB Board, public TV stations won’t be eligible for master control equipment funding unless they share the facility with one or more other stations, according to Mark Erstling, senior v.p. for system development and media strategy.

I’m probably biased because I started in public media as a master control op, but consolidation worries me. One of the great things about public media has been its incredible local efforts. While it seems like public media drifted away from that, local master control should encourage better programming for local communities.

This is a little older, but the announced cuts to BBC Online (and the
responses to it) are interesting, and I’d love to see a discussion
in US public media about digital vision going forward:

The BBC: still no digital vision

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about a growing sense of frustration with the BBC (and, for that matter Channel 4) for their continuing failure to establish a strategy repositioning them in a way that makes sense for a public service media organisation in the emerging digital ecology. I drafted this before Mark Thompson’s recent announcement of cuts in BBC Online; the decisions he has announced recently only confirm a view that the BBC has yet to find a direction in the new media landscape.

What is the BBC?

Well, so what? What’s so special about the BBC that we should have a right to public money? Well, we have no intrinsic right to this money in the same way that, say, the police and fire departments don’t have an intrinsic right to public money. However, like any public good, society cooperates to share certain resources for public gain.

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By chris – March 14, 2010

Fedora and Microservices

In this post, I want to discuss repository architecture philosophies, although I will focus primarily on Fedora and California Digital Library microservices, there are some generalizations one can pull out of this. It would also be interesting to pull in some very different repository models, like iRODS or a triple-store-backed system, but that’s outside of my expertise.

The basics

This is not a section I really want to write, but I don’t know of a high-level answer to “when we say repository, this is what we mean”. I spent a little time looking around for a summary, but more often than not I found more questions (or, perhaps more useful yet inappropriate for my purposes, technology-based answers rather than use-driven), so I’ve taken a stab at addressing what I believe are some key issues:

Repositories are a collection of services, with well-defined interfaces, for storing and managing data (both content and metadata) in a format-neutral, display-independent manner way. Repositories can be used as preservation repositories, as access repositories, as centralized aggregations of far-flung data, etc and operate on any scale for any audience. Furthermore, there are existing standards and agreements about what it means to be a certain type of repository (TDR, OAIS, etc). All of these repositories, however, share some common services — whether implemented as software, external processes, or manual processes.

Some essential repository services are:

  • Identifier services, which may include assignment + registration
  • Storage services (although the content stored may be only pointers to the “actual” content)
  • Content identification, matching identifiers to content items
  • Ingest workflows
  • Access mechanisms

Without these services in place, a repository system would face some difficult obstacles in creating and providing value-added services. Repositories may provide multiple flavors of these services, some of which may be defined in generally accepted standards, models, and specifications.

Other basic services which operate on top of the above services are fairly common in most well-developed repository frameworks include:

  • Dissemination services, to transform repository data into other forms + formats
  • Authorization services

More advanced services may include:

  • preservation services, including checksum (generation + verification), file format migration, support for models like LOCKSS
  • relationship services, using an RDF triplestore or similar, offering SPARQL endpoints, interferencing, etc
  • discovery services, using Lucene/Solr/etc, to provide relevancy, optimized user experience, drill-down faceting

These more advanced services are likely separate applications in the repository ecosystem and are generally useful utilities independent of any repository system. Repositories generally integrate with these external applications in a modular, mix-and-match manner using well-defined interfaces.

Fedora

One approach to repository services is the “repository-in-a-box” model, where you can install and configure a base set of services provided by a single application. Within this group of services, Fedora provides a very basic implementation of the core repository services (vs a full-stack application like DSpace, which provides production-ready user interfaces). Fedora bills itself as a Flexible, Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture.

  • Identifier services, through PIDGen which provides sequential identifiers per-namespace
  • maps http uris to deferenceable uris to files
  • REST + SOAP APIs for Ingest + Delivery
  • Dissemination services using WSDL
  • Authorization using XACML (and authentication using a number of plugins)
  • Integrates with the Mulgara triplestore and a Lucene index (by default)

Fedora provides a many opportunities for customization and enhancements through custom development:

As services go beyond the basic, common applications present in institutional repositories, enhanced repository services require custom development or supplemental services outside of the repository services. For most, this includes integration with a more advanced search provider (like Solr). At some point, additional services can blur the lines between the repository services and front-end user interfaces (which have to respond to local customization to meet user needs).

Repository-independent services, or third-party services, require some wrapper to make them interoperable with the Fedora APIs, which makes integration with existing technology more difficult. Even Duraspace’s Duracloud offering is (currently) built as separate services with some possibility of storage-level integration. Preservation support services will bypass the repository APIs and provide those services against the file system instead.

Considering the services Fedora doesn’t provide or the obstacles Fedora creates in integration, many ask why they should start using Fedora anyway. The strongest response to this, I believe, is that it provides a common structure to basic repository services, while at the same time not creating major obstacles to future expansion or migration outside Fedora. Out of the box, Fedora provides a set of “training wheels” (ht Mike Giarlo <http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/>) for repository services development that can be removed when unnecessary, but in the meantime offers structure for the creation of new repositories and support for repository services as needed.

CDL Microservices

Another approach to repository services are “microservices” like those designed by the California Digital Library (CDL), provide standards and specifications for individual repository services, which form a structure for standardized, mix-and-match repository services that can integrate, interoperate and take advantage of existing technology independent of a repository application like Fedora. This, conceivably, allows all domain developers to take advantage of these common projects without using a specific technology. CDL provides microservices specifications for:

  • identifier assignment + registration, using NOID, which can act as a CLI tool or a CGI service
  • file-system structures, using the Pairtree convention
  • data exchange and verification, using BagIt
  • access standards, using the ARK URL format

The standards are developed inline the “UNIX philosophy”:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. — Doug McIlroy

These basic services can be organized and crafted using the existing capabilities in web servers, file systems, etc. More advanced services can act within this structure, using individual standards when needed. While significant development and customization may be required to get a microservices architecture to a useable state, the end result is more flexible and targeted to an institutions needs.

Flexing Fedora

These two approaches are certainly not incompatible, and Fedora is quite capable of using some of these micro-services standards under the hood (replacing custom developed approaches to these basic services). By taking this approach, Fedora could act as a management application on top of generic repository data, allow both Fedora-based and microservices-based services to operate on the data, and make it easier to reach around Fedora when necessary (or, go so far as to remove it entirely).

What follows is a short summary of on-going work in this area, which mostly focus on removing the Fedora-centric definitions of /how/ or /where/ services act. The majority of these ideas build on new developments and best practices (since Fedora was initially created) in the repository community as a result increased adoption or awareness of issues. Where available, I’ve included links to projects in-the-works.

Some of this work is quite easy to do:

Other projects that are more involved, and require more work than just creating new modules for Fedora:

More advanced microservices integration is highly involved and would require a major re-work of the application:

  • Two-way messaging queues (or file alteration monitors, or database update hooks) to allow Fedora to receive updates
  • decreased reliance on self-generated registries, I think the situation is getting better, but I’m not sure its fully there..
  • pluggable storage modules with intelligent filtering, routing, multiplexing, and rules mechanisms — the Akubra project may be doing (part of?) this <http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/AKUBRA/Akubra+Project>
  • workflow support hooks, to allow integration and automation of workflow tools (possibly a result of Hydra?)
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By chris – March 4, 2010

PBCore 2.0: What I’d like to see

This is a short writeup of things I would like to see present in PBCore 2.0, which is currently in progress. It reflects my own personal opinions, etc.

One of the biggest challenges that PBCore 2.0 will face is determining how all-encompassing a standard it should be. Media organizations create a large variety of assets through diverse mechanisms for a wide range of purposes with any and all possible skill sets and technologies. Billed as the metadata standard for public broadcasting, it probably needs to respond to everyone’s needs and avoid requiring the impossible or limiting the foreseeable. It is for this reason I believe the most important thing PBCore 2.0 can do is provide a structure and framework for metadata without proscribing “the one true way”. To do this, PBCore 2.0 must be flexible, and more importantly, extendable if it is going to succeed.

These ideas probably fall outside “core” PBCore-compliance, but would enhance the descriptive power of the schema. All it would take are two considerations during the development of PBCore 2.0: a permissive data model and (more importantly) a system and place to document and describe standard extensions, best practices, and implementations.

One of the biggest strengths of PBCore 1.x, as I’ve written earlier, is the vast data dictionary that is the combination of a number of siloed applications full of current data. In PBCore 2.0, I truly hope due consideration is given to linked data and semantic ontologies to provide an easy way for an organization or individual to supplement a core vocabulary with a purpose-driven vocabulary for describing assets (the EBU’s P-META classification schemes have taken the first tentative step into this realm and are well worth a look) . This could be done as simply as providing URL-based references to data dictionary values, e.g.:

...

RDF Schema
wikipedia.org

...

This system could be easily extended (in a standardized way) to provide data dictionary descriptions, relational information (sameAs, parentOf, etc) and more, while allowing some level of basic compliance that can ignore the extension.

Other extensions to the schema are probably more complex and would require the PBCore 2.0 schema to be permissive, rather than restrictive. One important (and I’d argue, essential) example of this is temporal + spatial media fragments, which could allow a system to describe, in some level of detail, fragments of an asset. This could be represented like:

...

RDF Schema


...

...

...

(obviously the semantics, describing multiple instantiations, and other issues would need to be worked out..)

I’d like to take this a step further and develop a systematic way of embedding other schemas (presumably designed for describing objects and ideas outside of the core focus of PBCore, such as people and entities, rights metadata, and provenance). By developing some best practices, this could be done in a discoverable and standard way, maybe something like:

...

    Chris Beer

   Chris Beer
   Male
   Mr
   
 
    Rabble-rouser

...

Tools that don’t understand FOAF should be encouraged to ignore these additions, but they provide a rich method of extending the schema in a decentralized and flexible manner.

Again, I’m not calling for the inclusion of advanced (and likely, complicated) features into core PBCore compliance, just hoping that in developing a standard for the future, it remains flexible and extendable to meet the needs of all users while being accessible to all.

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By chris – February 7, 2010

Open source happenings

Just some quick notes:

  1. I got a patch into FITS to add some basic video metadata extraction. I’d like to take it further to ensure support for the formats that exiftool supports, but it’s a good start.
  2. Today I pushed out a first release of ave-sync, a media/xml synchronization tool. Also a good start, and should be a starting place to play with the w3c FileAPI in Firefox 3.6.
  3. XForms applications are painful to write, but probably a good choice for XML-based workflows.. more on that later..
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By chris – February 2, 2010

A Fedora in a Pairtree

The California Digital Library (CDL) has released a number of exciting micro-services specifications for digital libraries. The Fedora repository from DuraSpace takes an opposite approach and has a monolithic applications comprised of a number of modules. With the modular approach, it should be possible to slip micro-services under the hood of Fedora easily.

Here is a first attempt at implementing the Pairtree filesystem hierarchy for Fedora:

package fedora.server.storage.lowlevel;

import java.io.File;
import java.util.Map;

import fedora.server.errors.LowlevelStorageException;

/**
 * @author Chris Beer
 */
class PairtreePathAlgorithm
        extends PathAlgorithm {

    private final String storeBase;

    private static final String SEP = File.separator;

    public PairtreePathAlgorithm(Map configuration) {
        super(configuration);
        storeBase = (String) configuration.get("storeBase");
    }

    @Override
    public final String get(String pid) throws LowlevelStorageException {
        return format(pid);
    }

    public String format(String pid) throws LowlevelStorageException {
        String pt = to_pairtree(pid);
		return storeBase + pt + "obj" + SEP + pid;
    }

    private String to_pairtree(String s) {
		String pt = SEP;
		String src = escape(s);

		int i = 0;
		while(i < src.length()) {
			pt += src.substring(i, i+2) + SEP;
            i+= 2;
		}

		if(i < src.length()) {
			pt += src.substring(i);
		}

		return pt;
    }
    private String escape(String s) {
		/*
		 Fedora PIDs do not support non-visible ASCII or the characters below,
		 so we skip hex encoding:
		 "   hex 22           <   hex 3c           ?   hex 3f
		 *   hex 2a           =   hex 3d           ^   hex 5e
		 +   hex 2b           >   hex 3e           |   hex 7c
		 ,   hex 2c
		 */
		return s.replace("/", "+").replace(":", "+").replace(".", ",");
    }
}

See also: http://gist.github.com/280020

This basic services replaces the Timestamp Path algorithm for FOXML storage and creates a minimally compliant Pairtree. A better implementation could add:

  • Splitting Fedora datastreams into individual files on the filesystem. A first step would be to implement an appropriate managed content mapper
  • Add the appropriate identifier cleaning specified in §3. Much of this was omitted in this implementation, with the assumption that the repository core would handle identifier validation
  • The implementation should support pairtree initialization (§4). The current assumption is the repository maintainer would pre-establish a pairtree hierarchy for Fedora to populate. To do this properly, I think one would need to override the DefaultLowlevelStorageModule to add an initialization step.
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By chris – January 18, 2010

jQuery and SVG (and inline SVG)

If you’re using Keith Wood’s great jQuery SVG plugin, you may find that the .css() function doesn’t work on SVG elements, as in:

var elem = $('#test');
if (elem.css('display') == 'none') {
    elem.css('display', '');
}
will generate an error when CSS properties are written, but not when they are read. To address this, add this code to jquery.svgdom.js: 
/* Support CSS on SVG nodes. */
var origCSS = $.fn.css;
$.fn.css = function(name, value, type) {
	if (typeof name === 'string' && value === undefined) {
		var val = origCSS.apply(this, [name, value, type]);
		return (val && val.baseVal ? val.baseVal.valueAsString : val);
	}
	var options = name;
	if (typeof name === 'string') {
		options = {};
		options[name] = value;
	}
	return this.each(function() {
		if (isSVGElem(this)) {
			for (var n in options) {
				this.style[n] = (typeof options[n] == 'function' ? options[n]() : options[n]);
			}
		}
		else {
			origCSS.apply($(this), [name, value, type]);
		}
	});
}

I make no guarantees that it works on all platforms or browsers, but I mimicked the way Keith implemented .attr() for SVG elements, using the style attribute instead, so it hopefully has similar levels of portability. So far it works for me in Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 3.0. I'm going to guess that it works in Safari, because old code that used the style attribute worked there as well. No idea about IE, because my SVG doesn't load in that to begin with...

In addition to this, I needed to use the plugin to modify existing inline SVG, which seemed daunting given that the plugin normally created its own SVG canvas to render on. However, by hacking together a few calls to some of the internal functions I was able to get a jQuery SVG Wrapper with which I could call methods such as circle(), etc.:

var theDiv = $("#svg-container-div")[0];
$.svg._afterLoad(theDiv, $("#svg-root-element"), {});
var svgRoot = $.svg._getSVG($("#svg-container-div"));
var svgDoc = $("#svg-root-element");
svgRoot._svg = svgDoc[0];
svgRoot.circle(svgDoc[0], 270, 150, 25, {'id' : 'testcircle', 'fill' : "#ffffff", 'stroke' : '#ff0000'});

I'm not sure that this method of doing things is entirely acceptable as far as using the plugin correctly, but for me it successfully modified the DOM and I was able to reference the created elements without incident afterwards. At this point there was one last thing that I wanted to change about the plugin: when creating an SVG element I needed to specify a DOM element, not a jQuery wrapper. Usually this just means that the jQuery wrapper must be de-referenced to get the node, i.e. svgDoc[0] above, but I would get annoyed having to remember to add the array de-reference, so I modified jquery.svg.js again, this time changing the definition of _args, which handles argument decoding for all of the svg functions:

_args: function(values, names, optSettings) {
		names.splice(0, 0, 'parent');
		names.splice(names.length, 0, 'settings');
		var args = {};
		var offset = 0;
		var vOffset = 0;
		if (values[0] != null && (typeof values[0] != 'object' || !values[0].nodeName)) {
			if (!(values[0].jquery && values[0][0].nodeName)) {
				args['parent'] = null;
				offset = 1;
				vOffset = 0;
			}
			else {
				args['parent'] = values[0][0];
				offset = 1;
				vOffset = 1;
			}
		}
		for (var i = 0; i < values.length; i++) {
			args[names[i + offset]] = values[i+vOffset];
		}
		if (optSettings) {
			$.each(optSettings, function(i, value) {
				if (typeof args[value] == 'object') {
					args.settings = args[value];
					args[value] = null;
				}
			});
		}
		return args;
	},

This should provide the same behavior but allow the results of $(selector) to be supplied directly as the first argument to any SVG drawing methods (circle, rect, etc.), but only the first of these will be painted to, which is most useful when selecting an id, not a class. In addition the previous method of directly supplying an SVG DOM element will still work, as will falling back to using the default internal reference that is established when the SVG canvas is created.

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By greg – January 13, 2010

Compiling mod_h264_streaming for lighttpd

In compiling the mod_h264_streaming module for lighttpd on Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), I hit a few snags following these directions.

From the directions, the first half went smoothly:

wget http://download.lighttpd.net/lighttpd/releases-1.4.x/lighttpd-1.4.25.tar.gz
tar -xvzf lighhttpd-1.4.25.tar.gz
cd lighttpd-1.4.25
wget http://h264.code-shop.com/download/lighttpd-1.4.18_mod_h264_streaming-2.2.0.tar.gz
tar -zxvf lighttpd-1.4.18_mod_h264_streaming-2.2.0.tar.gz
cp lighttpd-1.4.18/src/moov.* src
cp lighttpd-1.4.18/src/mod_h264* src

add these lines to src/Makefile.am around line 266:
lib_LTLIBRARIES += mod_h264_streaming.la
mod_h264_streaming_la_SOURCES = mod_h264_streaming.c moov.c
mod_h264_streaming_la_LDFLAGS = -module -export-dynamic -avoid-version -no-undefined
mod_h264_streaming_la_LIBADD = $(common_libadd)

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/opt/local

make

At this point, I ran into an error with the plugin:

[...]
moov.c:77:22: error: byteswap.h: No such file or directory
moov.c: In function 'byteswap16':
moov.c:96: warning: implicit declaration of function 'bswap_16'
moov.c: In function 'byteswap32':
moov.c:105: warning: implicit declaration of function 'bswap_32'
moov.c: In function 'esds_read':
moov.c:1941: warning: unused parameter 'size'
[...]

Looking around, it seems to be an incompatibility between mac os x and *nix. I found a patch for a similar problem in navit, which loads the right library and function aliases.

Here’s my diff:

--- lighttpd-1.4.18/src/moov.c  2009-06-27 03:58:50.000000000 -0400
+++ src/moov.c  2009-12-07 16:49:50.000000000 -0500
@@ -73,11 +73,12 @@
 #define DIR_SEPARATOR '\\'
 #endif

-#ifndef WIN32
-#include 
+#include

+#define bswap_16 OSSwapInt16
+#define bswap_32 OSSwapInt32
+#define bswap_64 OSSwapInt64
 #include 
 #define DIR_SEPARATOR '/'
-#endif

 uint64_t atoi64(const char* val)
 {

After that, you can just continue merrily on..

make
make install

The directions for testing the plugin are a little buried on the maintainer’s site, but once I found them, everything seemed in order.

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By chris – December 8, 2009

Metadata standards (continued): technical metadata

In my last post, I compared the structure of a number of metadata standards, but focused mostly on descriptive elements. Here, I want to look at the technical metadata, describing the format, carrier and encoding. As before, I’ll highlight some interesting differences, but mostly let the structure stand alone.

Continued…

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By chris – November 28, 2009

A comparison of metadata standards for media

In this post, I will introduce five different XML schemas for media metadata with brief introductions for each. These five, while certainly not comprehensive, are sometimes used to provide metadata for access. In place of actual catalog records, randomly generated instances will be used to focus on the form of the schema, rather than the content (which gets into discussions of data dictionaries, which, while important, are certainly better left to subject-matter experts). Future posts may perform comparative studies of metadata classes (entities, technical, events, etc), but in this post the comparison is left as an exercise for the reader.

Note: Some of the examples have been truncated or reformatted in an effort to cut down on redundant information, but may render the examples invalid.

Continued…

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By chris – November 11, 2009