knowledge about itself with respect to the Enterprise Architecture. The Zachman ... the information architecture; other times the term denotes the process of doing this work. More ..... dpi.gc.ca/btep-phto/pres/2003/b-transform/b-transform_e.ppt.
COLLABORATIVE DIGITAL LIBRARY FOR HISTORICAL RESOURCES: DEFINING THE SYSTEM’S ARTIFACTS USING ZACHMAN’S APPROACH Abrizah Abdullah and A.N. Zainab Department of Information Science, Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Malaya Kuala Lumpur [abrizah, zainab]@um.edu.my Abstract This paper presents a preliminary work in the development and implementation of a collaborative digital library of historical resources for school projects by collaborating partners. The digital library aims to provide an electronic system to help educators as well as students obtain information on local history; collect, store and organize information in digital format; publish and share electronic resources; learn how to use IT to obtain historical information. It proposes a method to provide a structured way for the digital library enterprise to acquire the necessary knowledge about itself with respect to the Enterprise Architecture. The Zachman Framework, together with the Public Sector Reference Model, is used to help define the system’s artifacts, and which will help to investigate further the existing stake holder’s conditions and environment that would ensure the reception of a collaborative digital library for schools use. Surveys and interviews were conducted to investigate stakeholders’ readiness and reception to participate in the building of the digital library as content providers, developers and managers, as well to ascertain the basic features needed for the digital library. Preliminary findings indicated students’ need for a digital library and teachers’ willingness to participate in the development of the prototype. Keywords: Collaborative digital libraries; Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture; Business Architecture; Public Service Reference Model
1. Introduction The Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya (FSKTM UM) has been awarded a grant from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) Malaysia to develop a collaborative digital library for digital resources that can be used by secondary school students, in particular those conducting their school-based projects. We named the project CoreDev (Collaborative Resource Development), and it is one of a number of repository architectures that have been proposed over recent years for use in various digital libraries initiatives. Related architectures have included those described in literature on digital library framework such as Kahn and Wilensky [4] and Arms, et.al. [2]. We reinterpret the architecture, establish a development team and built a prototype that demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture with a test-bed of diverse digital collections on historical personalities and buildings for students’ local 335
history project. At the same time, surveys and interviews are conducted to investigate students’ and teachers’ readiness and reception to participate in the building of the digital library as content providers, developers and managers, as well as to ascertain the basic features needed for the digital library. Our preliminary findings indicate students’ need for a digital library and teachers’ willingness to participate in the development of the prototype. However, our initial approach emphasizes on addressing the technological aspects of the digital library and lacks of a sound methodology to establish an understanding of the entire structure of the digital library. For example, we need to find other potential stakeholders, their involvement and roles in the digital library, their attitude towards the initiative, their perception of its potential use and how it fits within the curricular goals in general and history education in particular. We need an approach to understand the digital library system, which is derived and based on empirical data and stand up to conceptual reasoning. This paper does not address all of the goals and planned characteristics of the digital library, such as its distributed nature, architecture, standards, governance, and interoperability of components. Rather, this paper intends to propose a method to provide a structured way for our digital library enterprise to acquire the necessary knowledge about itself with respect to the Enterprise Architecture, based on a sound theoretical foundation and pragmatic objectives of the Zachman Framework. It sets the scene with a brief overview of CoreDev. This paper examines the approach underlying Zachman Framework and positions it relative to the Public Reference Service Model (PSRM) to come up with a set of constructs for our digital library. In the context of this paper, we are going to consider, as components of Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture, the contextual (scope) or planner’s perspectives, and the conceptual (business model) or the owner’s perspectives.
2. Enterprise Architecture And The Zachman Framework In general, enterprise architecture is a framework that describes how an organization develops, manages and uses information technology to optimally support its business functions [4]. Sometimes, the term refers to the group of people responsible for modeling and then documenting the information architecture; other times the term denotes the process of doing this work. More commonly, Enterprise Architecture refers to the models, documents and reusable items (such as components, framework and objects) that reflect the actual architecture [5]. In the EACommunity (www.eacommunity.com) Enterprise Architecture is a framework or blueprint for how the organization achieves the current and future business objectives. It examines the key business, information, application and technology strategies and their impact on business functions. Each of these strategies has a separate architectural discipline and Enterprise Architecture is the “glue” that integrates each of these disciplines into a cohesive framework [3], as depicted in Figure 1. From these definitions, we understand that enterprise architecture consists of the various structures and processes of an organization. Following this understanding, we know that an enterprise architecture model is a representation of those structures and processes. A good enterprise architecture model will depict the organization both as it is today and as it is envisioned in the future, and will map the various views representing the architecture to one another. These views include both business-oriented perspectives as well as technical perspectives.
336
Figure 1:Architecture Relationship[3]
The collaborative digital library project proposes to use the Zachman Framework as support to develop its Enterprise Architecture, although other methods can be applied. The Zachman Framework aims to provide an architecture that represents the information systems’ artifacts, providing a means of ensuring the standards for creating the information environment exist and they are appropriately integrated. It proposes a logical structure for classifying and organizing the descriptive representation of an enterprise, in different dimensions, and each dimension can be perceived in different perspectives (Figure 2). In this framework, the architecture is described across two independent aspects, the rows represent the views of five different types of stakeholders (planner, owner, designer, builder and sub-contractor) and the columns represent different aspects of the architecture (data, function, network, people, time and motivation). The points of intersection between the rows and the columns, between the views and the aspects, form cells. Each of these cells holds important information of the enterprise that needs to be understood and explicitly declared. The Zachman Framework is generic in nature and, therefore, can be applied to any subject area and to any type of organization. Zachman’s is the most widely known framework in the Enterprise Architecture context. The reason for its extensive use is due to its flexible framework. It does not impose a method and it does not restrict any user to a set of pre-defined artifacts [6]. We see the primary strength of the Zachman Framework that it explicitly shows that there are many views that need to be addressed by enterprise architecture. A related strength is that the Zachman Framework explicitly communicates that there are several stakeholders in enterprise architecture, not just the enterprise architects and developers. The implication is that we need to involve the stakeholders of the system in the development of the architecture to ensure that it meets their needs, and ideally we want to follow the practice. Throughout this paper, we propose to use the Zachman Approach to investigate further the existing stake holder’s conditions and environment that would ensure the reception of a collaborative digital library for schools use
337
Figure 2: The Zachman Framework [9]
In the context of this paper, we are going to consider, as components of Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture, the contextual (scope) or planner’s perspectives, and the conceptual (business model) or the owner’s perspectives. These two components are referred to as the Business Architecture for it describes the functions a business performs and the information it uses. The planner is concerned with positioning the digital library in the context of its environment, and the owner is interested in the digital library’s deliverable and how it will be used. We will propose our possible sets of constructs or artifacts to represent the cell content for each cell in the Zachman Framework’s Scope and Business Model.
3. Artifacts We understand artifact to mean, any kind of representation, model or diagram, which support the intention of each cell in Zachman Framework. The following table (Table 1) presents the artifacts for each cell. In order to understand and describe the Business Architecture at these two levels, namely the scope and business view, a business reference model is required to describe explicitly the relationship between business components across rows and columns and specify additional business components that are relevant for the digital library. A business reference model contains all the business components and relationships for a given business domain [7]. In this context, we have chosen the Public Sector Reference Model (PSRM) to develop our digital library business model further. We use PSRM because PSRM defines rules that are of particular importance to the public sector, who is the stakeholder of the digital library, as compared with the private sector. We foresee that using public business models to strengthen business design capabilities is one of the key strategies to ensure the reception of a collaborative digital library for schools use, because the
338
public-sector oriented concepts in the PSRM make the models more accessible and easier to use than more general models based on private sector concepts and vocabulary [7]. PSRM (figure 3) is a model that can be used to depict how a particular business serves a public and how it could. It features libraries of services and processes patterns tailored to public sector setting and vocabulary. It also features strong architectural specifications for public service business design such as programmes, services, accountabilities and performance measures A service in the PSRM is primarily defined by identifying its "final, valued output" to the client [8]. Based on our understanding of this description, we adopt formal definitions of programmess and services from the PSRM, and present this in the context of our digital library as shown in Figure 4. Table 1: Artifacts and the Zachman Framework at the Business Architecture level
SCOPE (Planner)
BUSINESS (Owner)
What List of things important to the business
How List of processes the business perform
Semantic Model
Business Process Model Function
Data
Where List of location in which the business operate Business Logistic Model Network
Who List of people involved in the business
Work flow model People
Figure 3: The Public Sector Reference Model [7]
339
When List of events significant to the business Master Schedule Time
Why List of business goals and objectives Business Plan Motivation
INDIVIDUAL CLIENTS: STUDENTS AS USERS & CONTENT DEVELOPERS
Historical Portal COREDEV
COREDEV: PROVIDER ORGANIZATION – involves processes, services &
Ministry of Education
Academic Institutions Repositories
ROLES Governance Accountability Responsibility Authority
CLIENT ORGANIZATIONS
Public Teachers Schools
Schools
Students
INDIVIDUAL CLIENTS: TEACHERS AS CONTENT MANAGERS
Figure 4: CoreDev’s PSRM
We then incorporate CoreDev’s PSRM to the Business Architecture (Contextual and Concept Model) of the Zachman Framework and identify the required attributes for our system’s artifacts. These artifacts should be easily understood by the planner and the owner of the collaborative digital library, and the artifacts represent only and exclusively the content of each cell. Row 1 presents the planner’s view of the digital library, and row 2 presents the owner’s view. This proposed artifacts is presented in Table 3 below. Initial fact-finding process through surveys and interviews help us to define the artifacts in column 1 to 6 of our framework (Table 4). Each artifact will be presented in a form of rich pictures as the modeling technique from the owners’ view. Table 3: The proposed system’s artifacts incorporating Zachman Approach and CoreDev’s PSRM
What
How
Where Who
Services
Location of access
Processes
Place
Resources
ROW 1
Stakeholders Target groups Content managers Content producers
When Why Event
Programs
Time cycle
Objectives Curricular goals
Roles
ROW 2
Semantic model
Service Process Model
Data
Function
Service Network Model Network
340
Workflow
Schedule
Business plan
People
Time
Motivation
Table 4: Definition of artifacts in the proposed framework from planner’s view Column 1. Data (What) 2. Function (How) 3. Network (Where) .4. People (Who)
5. Time (When) 6. Motivation (Why)
Description This is a list of resources that are significant to the Collaborative Digital Library enterprise. This include library resources, text files, image files, audio files, video files, web pages of local history, digitized students’ history projects and people as information sources. This is a list of processes and services that the enterprise performs. These processes transform the enterprise “inputs” into “outputs”. It defines the scope or boundaries of models of processes that the enterprise performs. This is a list of locations in which the enterprise operates. This include the location of access and place where stakeholders use the digital library, such as the school library, history room or from home. It defines the scope or boundaries that are connected by the Enterprise. This is a list of organizations to which the enterprise assigns responsibility for work. At present, this include the lower secondary school students, History teachers, teacher librarians, technical support staff, other collaborators (schools, MOE, ETD, CDC, TAC) and the researchers. It defines the roles each organization that are responsible to the enterprise play. This is a list of events to which the enterprise responds relative to time. This include the events involved in conducting the history project, such as choosing topic, searching for information, writing, publishing, submitting and grading project work. This is a list of major goals (or objectives or strategies), curricular and programs that are significant to the enterprise, relative to motivation. This includes the readiness to use the digital library, willingness to participate in content development and management, and the success factors.
4. Using The Approach To Investigate The Digital Library Environment FSKTM UM is providing the context for effective and broad collaboration among faculty, educators, students and librarians through the digital library project. This initiative is a focal point for the creation, use, and investigation of electronic information services, resources, and systems -developed from a user's perspective. Based on the proposed framework, we have started investigating the environment in which the collaborative digital library for historical resources site operates and the role that the members can play in supporting the site. These would involve: (a) Ascertaining students’ readiness to participate in the building of the digital library as content providers and developers. This would include finding out their ICT skills, their knowledge and use of the Internet. (Who and Why) (b) Carrying out a needs analysis for digital resources among students undertaking their history projects. This would include finding out their perceived and actual needs for digital resources.(What, Where and Why) (c) Ascertaining the types of information that students require and would use when undertaking their history projects. This would include studying their current behaviour of information use and their perceived level of satisfaction with the available information. (What, How and Where) (d) Finding out students motivation and willingness to collaborate and share digital resources. This would include students understanding of their role in the collaborative digital library environment. (How, When and Why) (e) Ascertaining teachers’ readiness to participate in the building the digital library as content managers. This would include the present status of collaboration in schools and knowing their current process of handling the history projects in school. (Who, How, When and Why) (f) Finding out the Ministry of Education’s attitude towards the initiative to develop the digital library for educational use. This would include their perception of its potential use and how
341
it fits within the general curricular goals in general and history education in particular. (Who and Why)
5. Embarking On The Collaborative Digital Library CoreDev aims to provide an electronic system to help educators as well as students obtain information on local history; collect, store and organize information in digital format; publish and share electronic resources; learn how to use IT to obtain historical information. We expect CoreDev to serve the needs of anyone with interests in Malaysian history. We have chosen history as the domain of our test-bed based on our fact-finding processes that indicate that the students sampled (n=60) mainly use Internet resources to get information for History subject (90%, 54), followed by Science (67%, 40), and Geography (57%, 34). A total of 90% (54) use the Internet to find resources for their History project. Since these three subjects require students to submit a project report to be evaluated at the national level, this clearly indicates that students use Internet resources for projectbased school subjects only. Hence, CoreDev has been conceived, and is being constructed to meet the needs in support of the development of local historical resources for secondary school students. As a starting point, our design efforts focus on the needs of history teachers and students who are conducting their schoolbased history projects (Secondary 1, 2 and 3). This user community is selected for particular emphasis because today they have to typically travel to state and public libraries to obtain materials, or other institutions holding primary sources about the topic they are working on. CoreDev may help to make collections more accessible to this user community. Two early offerings serve as the beginning of the test bed archive: a biographical portal of selected Malaysian personalities and historical buildings. The basis for choosing resources on personalities, buildings and places at this initial stage is to support information needs of these in conducting their school-based history projects which usually centre around writing a report on local personalities, historical buildings or places. It is in this context that students use various means of obtaining information. We conducted series of surveys and interviews aimed to understand the existing students’ conditions and environment that would ensure the reception of a collaborative digital library for history projects for schools use. The survey has provided invaluable information about information gathering behaviour and the community’s reception of digital libraries. Our general impression is that the Internet and digital libraries have been accepted in a very favourable way by the students. Our samples are Internet users and a high majority has access to the Internet from home. Students use digital resources for their academic work. In the survey, it became apparent that users' concerns and priorities were centered around searching for information and participating in a the digital library community as content providers. Primary findings of the user study revealed the need for search and publishing tools in the digital library, as well as the need for a community around the digital library. The survey revealed that students not only desire a digital library where they can find historical resources but also willing to be design partner and part of the community which they can communicate with others about history projects. Unlike research digital library collections, educational digital libraries depend heavily on the direct contributions of materials from their communities of users. In order to facilitate this, the main difference in the system when compared to other digital libraries in Malaysia will be in the system architecture that allows collaborators such as students and teachers from partner schools, organizations, associations and individuals to cooperatively develop electronic resources and upload the resources to a hosting system. CoreDev uses the three-tier client-server architecture to provide
342
the platform for building resources collaboratively by member partners in three ways: creation of original digital works, digitization of paper-based resources and providing linkages to other relevant web sites The system incorporates many types of digital resources (Figure 5) in different media (text, images, audio and video clips), from different servers, with different levels of quality and metadata. The schools, teachers, students, the public, universities, and depositories are the expected stakeholders, with the helm of the system being hosted by the Ministry of Education (as shown in Figure 4). Students and teachers will be partners in digital resource development as content developers (in creating and submitting history projects) and content managers (grading, reviewing, indexing ad validating information) respectively, and it is these partners who will form the nucleus of the collaboration (Figure 6). CoreDev caters for the needs of secondary school students and teachers who want to access quality, grade-level appropriate historical resources that would help them move beyond the traditional text-and-test approach to education. The ultimate value of the CoreDev project will be measured in the number of students and educators who use and contribute to the collection, and the richness in content of the digital library is dependent upon their active participation as partners. The outcome of this involvement is imparting information literacy and ICT skills, and reinforce the power of ICT as a research tool to the educational community.
Government websites Digitized reports
LINKS TO OTHER ONLINE HISTORICAL RESOURCES
DIGITIZED RESOURCES
Relevant websites on historical resources (suggested & reviewed) Digitized images
CoreDev DIGITAL RESOURCES
Educational websites
Libraries & Archives websites
Images
Online
Audio
Video
Figure 5: The digital resources in CoreDev
343
students
teachers
Other educational community •Browse •Search •Retrieve
Index and validate students’ uploaded file or project report
Create & Submit history projects via student module
• Upload various format of digital objects • Create online html file using step by step report generator
•Semi auto grading and review students’ uploaded file or project report •Inform students of project status
First tier- client PCs running web browser to access system
Middle tier- web server running processes (Apache Tomcat)
Third tier- database servers to maintain records & transactions (MySQL)
Figure 6: Content developers and managers and their respective roles
6. In Summary In this paper, we presented an approach that can provide guidance in the development of a collaborative digital library enterprise, contributing significantly to our understanding of the architectural components from the contextual (planner) and the business (owner) view. We use Zachman Framework and incorporate PSRM into the framework to describe explicitly the relationship between business components across rows and columns and specify additional business components that are relevant for the digital library. Based on these two models, we define the artifacts of each cell and propose a new set of artifacts for our digital library enterprise. Based on initial fact-finding surveys and interviews with stakeholders throughout the duration of this work, the utilization of the approach confirms the existence of the concepts that we designate as an artifact in a cell. We are still at the early stages of realizing the potential of digital libraries in educational contexts, however, CoreDev is building upon a rich source of historical information resources created by secondary school students in a form of project work, advanced technical infrastructures at the faculty, and the participation of students as content developers and teachers as content managers. What have been described in this paper are avenues for participation, anchored in real-life experiences. We need more forums for exploring the issues on the digital library enterprise, more demonstration projects, and more legislative efforts. That is the work ahead.
344
7. References [1] Ambler, Scott, W. 2002. Agile Enterprise Architecture: Beyond Enterprise Data Modelling Available at http://www.agiledata.org/essays/enterpriseArchitecture.html [2] Arms, William Y., Christophe Blanchi, and Edward A. Overly, 1997, An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries, D-Lib Magazine, February Available at 10.1045/february97arms>. [3] Bolton, Gary. 2004. What is enterprise architecture. Available at http://www.eacommunity.com/resources/ whitepapers.asp [4] Kahn, Robert and Robert Wilensky, 1995, A Framework for Distributed Digital Object Services: Corporation for National Research Initiatives, Available at http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/k-w.html. [5] McGovern, James, Scott W. Ambler, Mike Stevens, James Linn, Vikas Sharan, and Elias Jo. 2003. The Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture. Prentice-Hall [6] Pereira, Carla Marques and Pedro Sousa. 2004. A method to define an Enterprise Architecture using the Zachman Framework. ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2004, March 14-17, Nicosia, Cyprus. [7] Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. 2003. Government of Canada Strategic Reference Model. Available at : http://www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/btep-phto/documents/2003/gsrm-mrsg/gsrmmrsg06_e.asp [8] Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. 2003. Business Transformation Enablement Program (BTEP): A new way of thinking about the business of government, http://www.ciodpi.gc.ca/btep-phto/pres/2003/b-transform/b-transform_e.ppt [9] Zachman, J.A. (n.d.). The Framework for Enterprise Architecture. Available at www.zifa.com
345
