[open-bibliography] New group for bibliographic data on CKAN

Wed Mar 3 15:12:36 UTC 2010

Quoting Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.Berkeley.EDU>:

> I would be glad to work with okfn to find maintainers on this data.
> BKN offers a standard,
>  BibJSON  http://www.bibkn.org/bibjson/index.html

Ah! YAS (Yet Another Standard!)

I think that standardization could be considered a part of openness,  
because one of the problems we have once the data is "open" is that  
everyone's data uses different standards. While some of that is  
inevitable, I think in my bibliographic lifetime I have seen dozens of  
different lists of document types (genres in some lingos),  
bibliographic types, etc. All defined in different documents. Is there  
some way we can begin to bring these together so that everyone is at  
least drinking from the same well? (BTW, I am a firm believer in use  
of base standards + application profiles, and I would consider Jim's  
work an application profile.)[1]

One of the ways that this relates to openness is that there is  
commercialization of bibliographic "standards" that makes openness  
hard. If there were open standards for the bibliographic data elements  
then open services could evolve. I am of course thinking about things  
like the VMF project[2], which will probably evolve in the same  
direction that the DOI did and will become a closed system; and the  
Dewey Decimal System, which presumably cannot be used without a  
license. Trying to avoid just that, some of us are attempting to  
"open" the US library data by registering data elements in RDF,[3] but  
it's too early to see if that would be successful. The chief challenge  
is actual "standardization" -- that is, getting the data accepted by a  
wide community. That's a whole 'nuther discussion, however.

kc
[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/profile-guidelines/
[2] http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/VMF/
[3] http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm
-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet