SWORD2 and Infrastructure

This week I read JISC's SWORD2 Project Final Report [pdf] in conjunction with SWORD: Cutting Through the Red Tape to Populate Learning Materials Repositories, a February 2009 article introducing and explaining the protocol.

SWORD stands for Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit and is designed to "lower the barriers to deposit." It's on the default install of DSpace and is an optional interface for Fedora, EPrints, and IntraLibrary. Various repositories use the protocol and there are client-side applications that utilize it as well: Feedforward is a desktop application for personal information management, OfficeSWORD plugs into Microsoft Office so one could upload data to a repository directly from the program, and there's a widget and Facebook app for the protocol too.

The "Cutting Through the Red Tape" article briefly explains the underlying technology (it operates off of the Atom Publishing Protocol) and applications for use. It does this through four hypothetical use scenarios. The first details a university lecturer who can deposit notes, syllabi, transcripts and such simply by dragging them to an icon, and then a refinement he only needs to press a button in the application where he's creating the document (MS Office, say) and it's deposited. There's an optional form that could pop up for extra metadata he could attached (comments, etc.) but all the metadata the repository needs is already discernible (it's his work machine so they know who he is, time of deposit, format, size, title, and so on).

The second case examines two public sector educational resource providers (a social services one and a health one) that need to share data from their repositories. They're able to do this by using deposit services that use SWORD, so that every ingest with SWORD creates a set of metadata for discovery, search and display.

The third case elaborates upon direct deposit from the content creation tool, and the fourth demonstrates how one could receive various feeds from Feedforward, select a certain group, and deposit that into a repository.

The SWORD2 report essentially describes a successful interoperability update of the protocol and notes that advocacy efforts for SWORD should continue since it may be reaching "critical mass" and viability as a standard.

SWORD and the cases presented are interesting because I feel like it represents some of the infrastructure we've discussed. Particularly in the case OfficeSWORD, one could see how "invisible" it could become: just another button on the panel along with 'Print' and 'Save' that deposits the work for circulation in a repository. The cases where the user is able to deposit directly from the content creation tool are therefore really encouraging. It's obvious that a significant barrier to digital repositories is the click-count or other simple work that needs to be done for the deposit; if software or plugin developers only need to design a function for SWORD deposit, this could significantly change.

In terms of cyberinfrastructure, TCP/IP and HTTP are protocol and protocol sets that are so embedded in how "things just work" it's frequently difficult to imagine them actually being developed and adopted. No user ever has to deal with them. But it's clear we need similarly massively successful protocols fueling the cyberinfrastructure NSF calls for.