[open-bibliography] Open Bibliography in Climate

Wed Jun 23 18:32:30 UTC 2010

Intensive discussions have taken place over the last few days between about
12-16 people (including deveral from OKF) under the general heading of "Open
Climate Initiative" (OCI) and OCI-index. We now feel that this is starting
to gel into 2-3 separate but related activities and this mail specifically
relates to bibliography and the role of the OKF and Open-Bibliography
project.

There is considerable support for an open scholarly project in the
Bibliography of Climate, with a range of opinions about the scope - should
it be limited solely to bibliography or should it extend to data and code.
And within documents should it apply recursively to the discovery of
references and links within the documents. This is labelled provisionally
"OCI-index" and is linked organizationally to an emerging OCI.

As one of our (PMR+RP) current funded projects is in strict bibliography I
have restricted our vision to applying standard and modern bibliographic
techniques to the creation of formal Open bibliographies within Climate
research, most notably the IPCC "bibliography" (which is primarily
references distributed throughout their publications). This vision extends
to identifying the formal Openness of the bibliographically referenced
material.

The JISCOBIB (Open Bibliography) project is sponsored by JISC at the
Chemistry Department Cambridge and the OKF. I shall post more about this
later. I am its PI and the primary tasks are converting specific
bibliographies and collections of papers to semantic Open bibliographies.
This involves developing new tools for extracting and semantifying
bibliographies, assigning identifiers, deduplication / disambiguation,
creating schemata, etc. These tools will be made Open as soon as they are
developed and can be used in any bibliographic endeavours.

The JISCOBIB projects starts next week and I suggest we apply our technology
to a few leading bibliographies in Climate research such as IPCC, Am. Inst.
Physics and 1-2 others. I shall refer to this subproject as Open Climate
Bibliography.

I am delighted with the contact I have made with climatologists and see
great scope for collaborative endeavour in Open Bibliography - this is an
Open world and we are fortunate to be able to provide part of the support

Peter

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-bibliography/attachments/20100623/26fa5f42/attachment.html>