[ckan-discuss] PDF to replace RDF as primary format for data.southampton

Fri Apr 1 10:50:29 BST 2011

*grin*

As  a bit of back story I recently, with my friend John Goodwin, spoke 
to The Register about LOD.

The resulting article was pretty good (they have been entirely negative 
in the past) but their editor clearly picked up on one quite from me, 
and as a result the following image was on their homepage for 48 hours:
http://lemur.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~cjg/Archive/Photos/2011/cjg-boffin.png

And I got lots of flak in the forum about how dumb my comment was.

(As someone who's had ten years experience in Open Access Research I 
stick by my words 100%. It's a joke to simulate paper  in 2011.)

My motivations in the field can be summed up by the following quote from 
26 years before I was born:

--snip---
"The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom Bomb, not 
corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, nor the morals of the 
young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human 
knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia" - which isn't even arranged 
alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they 
ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap, 
but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place 
them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.

Call it the crisis of the Librarian.

We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We 
need a new science to be a perfect secretary to all other sciences."

- Robert A. Heinlein, 1950.
--snip---

Tim McNamara wrote:
> On 1 April 2011 22:33, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org 
> <mailto:rufus.pollock at okfn.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 1 April 2011 10:26, Tim McNamara <paperless at timmcnamara.co.nz
>     <mailto:paperless at timmcnamara.co.nz>> wrote:
>     > On 1 April 2011 19:51, Christopher Gutteridge
>     <cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk <mailto:cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk>> wrote:
>     >>
>     >> Due to the flak we got over my comments about PDF last week,
>     we've been
>     >> forced to re-evaluate it.
>     >>
>     >> We've made the difficult decision that RDF will no longer be
>     the preferred
>     >> format for information interchange on our data site. Full
>     details about the
>     >> decision here:
>     >>
>     http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/data/2011/04/01/pdf-selected-as-interchange-format/
>     >
>     > This is a real shame. PDF is a presentation format for
>     documents, not a
>     > format for the interchange of data. I don't understand how PDF
>     can be said
>     > to facilitate "exchanging data"[1].
>
>     Just to clarify Tim: this is an April fool!
>
>     Rufus
>
>     [...]
>
>
> Urgh ... time zones totally got me. I hate being in New Zealand 
> sometimes. Sorry for rant.
>

-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/

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