[open-bibliography] Open Bibliography in Climate

Thu Jun 24 15:59:35 UTC 2010

I am now summarising the outcome of the discussions on the creation of an
Open Climate Bibliography. This project is run under the auspices of the
Open Knowledge Foundation and will be supplemented by web pages and other
resources on the OKF site. Like other OKF projects it invites collaborators
- you do not need to be an expert. Feel free to join and mail the list,  or
mail Jonathan or info [at] okfn.org .

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The Open Knowledge Foundation has created a critical mass of bibliographic
expertise both through its membership, its open Bibliography mailing list,
and the recent funding of a multidisciplinary project (#JISCOBIB). In
exploratory discussions with a number of those active in climate research
and policy it has become clear that an Open, semantic bibliography will be
of considerable value to those interested in climate science for many
reasons.

The project, Open Climate Bibliography (OCB), will be run through the
mechanisms of the Open Knowledge Foundation which provides modern Open
semantic resources for discussion, creating resources, and dissemination.
The scope of the project will be informed by discussion on the OKF's Open
Bibliography list and may or may not change from the initial scope.

Initial Scope:
OCB is strictly limited to creating an Open semantic bibliography using
accepted bibliographic standards (yet to be determined, but such as Dublin
Core, PRISM, FRBR). The bibliography will use existing bibliographic
collections or collections of bibliographic entries relevant to climate
science. As the definition of climate science and its metadata is subjective
the project aims to start with a single resource, the  bibliographic
references in material from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). [One of the first acts of the project will be to approach the IPCC
to persuade them of the value of such a bibliography and to see if they are
in a position to help the effort, e.g. with material and expertise].

Bibliographic Technology and Metadata
The OKFN-OCB group will strictly confine itself to the technical aspects of
metadata (e.g. formats, language, licence, etc.) and will not in itself
carry out any cataloguing, annotation or selection of resources. In essence
this is a best-endeavour to capture a "semantic snapshot" of the
bibliography at given points in time. It will also not, initially, address
the content of the resource pointed to by the bibliographic entry or
reference and will not attempt to create a domain-specific index. If any of
the resources are not textual, (e.g. graphics, movies, data files, computer
programs, computer models) OCB will not attempt to interpret or index them.

Open Knowledge
The most critical and novel aspect of OCB will be determining which
resources are Open according to the Open Knowledge Definition. This will
extend to establishing the bibliography itself as completely Open and
finding which OK-compliant licences are most appropriate (data, document,
database, etc.). We will hope to persuade current bibliography owners to
allow their material to be converted to an Open form. We will also
investigate how much openness can be created automatically (e.g. from
publication lists, repositories, etc.)
Where material referenced by the entries is not fully Open we will record
the state in the bibliography and will need to develop an appropriate
taxonomy.

Community involvement
All OKF projects are open to anyone to contribute to and we are actively
inviting collaborators. We welcome domain experts in both climate research
and bibliography but these are not required skills. We expect many of the
processes can be carried by anyone following a carefully agreed protocol,
and may, like other "citizen" projects, allow multiple creation of
bibliographic records, thus providing a "voting system" and also an
objective metric of the consistency of the markup. [We re-emphasize that the
bibliographic metadata does not require specialist knowledge.]

Re-use of the OCB
As the Biblography will be Open and semantic it can be re-used for a very
large number of purposes. These do not need the permission of the OKF or any
of the contributors. OCB could, for example, be used to find communities of
practice, list fully Open resources, create mashups with geographical or
temporal resources, provide material for educators and learners, produce
metrics, etc. Its design will mean that it can be included in "Web 2.0"
Linked Open Data applications.
The bibliography is extensible and downstream users can add their own
annotations and filters. The OCB does not by default intend to include these
extended bibliographies or resources, but may provide a listing of
significant derivative works.

Liability
The OCB cannot be a definitive snapshot of the source bibliographies and the
OKF takes no responsibility for how it is used.

Timescale
Give us a week or so to collect our thoughts and resources as we start up
#JISCOBIB but by all means mail this list with comments. Please stick
closely to the subject line as there are other bibliographic projects
mediated through this list

Peter Murray-Rust

The following have been involved in the discussions and wish to support the
OKFN-OCB activity as described above.

Cameron Neylon
Jordan Hatcher
Rufus Pollock
Glyn Moody
Jonathan Gray
Ben O'Steen
Richard Drake
Ivo Grigorov
Andrew Montford
Conrad Taylor
Nick Barnes

[there will be opportunity on the web page to update the list of
discussants]

Please feel free to forward this mail:

open-bibliography
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at okfn.org, sara.gray at okfn.org <open-bibliography-owner at lists.okfn.org>
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Open Knowledge Foundation: http://www.okfn.org/

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-
1223-763069

#

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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