INLS 620: Web Information Organization (Fall 2019)

Location: 208 Manning, Tuesday & Thursday 11a-12:30p

Instructor: Patrick Golden

E-Mail: ptgolden@email.unc.edu

Office hours: By appointment

Last updated Oct. 31

Description

This advanced information organization course focuses on understanding and using the Web as a platform for publishing data. The focus is not on programming Web sites, but on understanding and applying the organizational principles of the Web. Students will develop a deeper understanding of information architecture, not at the level of individual Web sites, but of the Web as a whole.

Evaluation & grading

Eight assignments (10% each)
Final deliverable (15%)
Participation (5%)

Final grades will be assigned according to the following schedule:

H: 95 or above
P: 75 to 95
L: 60 to 75
F: below 60

For undergraduate students, points will be converted to letter grades as follows:

A: 95 or above
A-: 90-93
B+: 87-90
B: 83-87
B-: 80-83
C+: 77-80
C: 73-77
C-: 70-73
D+: 67-70
D: 63-67
D-: 60-63
F: below 60

Honor Code

You are expected to know and respect UNC Honor Code. Collaboration, discussion, and seeking assistance from other students is encouraged in this class and is not inconsistent with the Honor Code. In the case of written work, all words drawn from others must be attributed appropriately.

Assignments

Uploading a submission to iNaturalist

Throughout the semester, we will work with the citizen science Web site iNaturalist to track some data being published on the Web. You will begin by submitting three pictures of wildlife by September 5. We will work on submitting our data in class later in the month.
Questions about the Web

You will receive a document with about a dozen questions about the Web and HTTP. Due September 26.
Writing RDF

You will write a small linked data file by hand, which will be aggregated into a class-wide graph. We will begin creating our files in class on October 1. Your submission will be due on October 29.
Final project

As a class, we will create a linked data graph that connects our iNaturalist submissions, which will eventually be ingested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, to the RDF we wrote in class. You will work in groups to create a graph with at least 10 links connecting our observations to the class graph we created in October. You will present your connecting graphs in class on December 3, and produce a written description of your graph individually to me via email by December 12.

Schedule

August 20 – Introduction

August 22 – History of the Web

History of the Web. Oxford Brookes University, 2002.

A concise yet thorough history of the origins and development of the Web. Pay particular attention to Appendices C and D, in which Tim Berners-Lee outlines his proposal for the project that would become the Web.

Berners-Lee, Tim. “Enquire Within upon Everything; Tangles, Links, and Webs; info.cern.ch.” In Weaving the Web. San Francisco: Harper, 1999.

This optional but short excerpt from Tim Berners-Lee’s book explains in his own words how the Web got started.

August 27 – Internet Architecture

Galloway, Alexander R. “Introduction.” In Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, 4–12. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.
Yanowitz, Jason. “Under the hood of the Internet: an overview of the TCP/IP protocol suite.” Crossroads 1, no. 1 (September 1994): 8–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/197177.197182.

August 29 – Internet Architecture (Continued)

September 3 – What Happens When You Click on a Link

Patrick in New Orleans. No class.

September 5

Patrick in New Orleans. No class.

September 10 – What Happens When You Click on a Link

Richardson, Leonard, and Mike Amundsen. “Surfing the Web.” In RESTful Web APIs, 1–16. Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly, 2013.

September 12 – HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Richardson, Leonard, and Mike Amundsen. “A Simple API.” In RESTful Web APIs, 17–28. Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly, 2013.

September 17 – Web architecture

Richardson, Leonard, and Mike Amundsen. “Resources and Representations.” In RESTful Web APIs, 29–43. Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly, 2013.

September 19 – Hypermedia

Richardson, Leonard, and Mike Amundsen. “Hypermedia.” In RESTful Web APIs, 45–57. Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly, 2013.

September 24 - Another hypermedia format: RSS

September 26 – Semantic Web & RDF

Berners-Lee, Tim, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. “The Semantic Web.” Scientific American, April 2002. https://www-sop.inria.fr/acacia/cours/essi2006/Scientific%20American_%20Feature%20Article_%20The%20Semantic%20Web_%20May%202001.pdf

October 1 - RDF & Turtle

Eisenberg, J. David. “How to Read W3C Specs.” A List Apart, September 28, 2001. http://alistapart.com/article/readspec.
W3C. “RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax,” February 25, 2014. https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/.
W3C. “RDF 1.1 Turtle,” February 25, 2014. https://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/

October 3 – Data modeling: relational model

Read pages 11–28 of chapter 2, “Modelling” in LDFLAM.

Verborgh, Ruben, and Seth van Hooland. “Modelling.” In Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums: How to Clean, Link and Publish Your Metadata, 11–70. Facet Publishing, 2014. http://book.freeyourmetadata.org/chapters/1/modelling.pdf.

October 8 – Data modeling: meta-markup

No class. Patrick sick

October 10 – Data modeling: graphs / RDF

Read pages 43–52 of chapter 2, “Modelling” in LDFLAM.

To read before this class:

Verborgh, Ruben, and Seth van Hooland. “Modelling.” In Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums: How to Clean, Link and Publish Your Metadata, 11–70. Facet Publishing, 2014. http://book.freeyourmetadata.org/chapters/1/modelling.pdf.

October 15 – Constructing a class graph

October 17

Fall break. No class.

October 22 – Guest speaker: Ryan Shaw

October 24 – XML, JSON, JSON-LD

October 29 – JSON-LD (cont.), Identifiers

October 31