[open-bibliography] OKFN blog: Bibliographica, an Introduction

[William Waites]

On 10-05-21 08:17, E. Hoorn wrote:
>
> This is a great initiative.

Hi Esther. Thank you very much.

> In the Netherlands we did a SURF funded project to make a tool to make
> enhanced publication environments on the web using OAI-ORE, the ESCAPE
> project. See: http://escapesurf.wordpress.com/about/ The result of
> this project in our library is greater awareness on the relevance of
> making bibliographical metadata machine readable.
>
> Researchers involved in our project are determined that a tool to make
> machine readable aggregates is really vital for societal impact of
> research, for instance adding research to public service information.
> They expect the library to provide such a service based on their
> extensive knowledge on bibliografical metadata and ontologies

I had not considered the problem in those terms. I have to think a bit
on how far we would get using aggregates as defined by the ORE
vocabulary (which I found by looking at http://escape.utwente.nl/).
Nevertheless "a tool to make machine (and human!) readable aggregates"
succinctly describes what we are hoping to accomplish.

> We found that at present the main bottlenecks are not technical but
> organisational. F.i. in the field of archeology - where the Malta
> treaty demand sharing research data- researchers tend to look to
> publishers to provide services to make publications available together
> with the relevant research data. At present in the Netherlands only a
> small group of librarians is really aware of the possibilities of open
> linked data. The same goes for researchers.

The possibilities are boundless but the almost all user interfaces we
have for linked data are rubbish (ours included, but one of our goals is
to make advances in this area). To an extent I agree it is a question of
awareness -- if the talented user interface developers were aware of
linked data we'd have better interfaces. Even publishers and libraries
that are clued about linked data don't have a piece of software they can
install for the researchers to use. Researchers have no useful browser
even if they are sufficiently motivated to write their own RDF by hand
with a text editor.

> Now I here that in the U.K. JISC is making an end to the funding of
> INTUTE (http://www.intute.ac.uk/)
> The work of researchers in INTUTE is exactly in accordance the aim of
> Bibliographica.

I wasn't aware of INTUTE myself nor of their funding status. It seems to
be a project of MIMAS which themselves are not likely to go away any
time soon.

> My question is the following:
>
> Are there any plans to see that the valuable network of INTUTE is
> fostered to give a flying start to Bibliographica or to integrate the
> linked data service into a new version of the INTUTE website?

None that I know of.

I don't doubt that the INTUTE site would be better if it contained
richly interlinked data, and better still if the sites it references
provided such data and there were some way to see it. To the extent to
which we succeed in making a useful tool for visualising and editing
linked data, it is free software and I'm sure we would be happy to help
INTUTE use it. On an implementation level our concept of "bibliographic
data" is wide enough that it could include statements about websites.

A key next step for us after this development cycle is going to be
recruiting communities  of researchers to adopt and improve materials
relating to their areas of interest - in particular making (RDF)
statements about books and works and papers that wouldn't normally be
found in a library catalogue. Anything we can learn from INTUTE would be
useful, I would be happy to hear from them.

Incidentally, I notice that http://escape.utwente.nl/ mentions the
faculty of law at the top of the page -- this area is  interesting to me
because of the depth of references and dialogue between the judiciary
and legislature particularly in countries with a common-law tradition.
Can we turn the statute and case-law books into linked data?

Cheers,
-w

-- 
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK

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