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

Jim Pitman pitman at stat.Berkeley.EDU
Thu May 27 22:03:30 UTC 2010


Tom Morris <tfmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Bibliographica, an Introduction
> > It’s time to talk a bit about Bibliographica, a new project of the Open
> > Knowledge Foundation.
> > Bibliographica is designed to make it easier for scholars and researchers to
> > share and collect information about work in their field. It provides an open
> > source software platform to create and share semantically rich information
> > about publications, authors and their works.
>
> Instead of starting yet another "one, true, open bibliographic
> database," was there any consideration given to attempting coordinate
> and improve communication among the existing efforts like BibKN, Open Library, and the raft of others out 
> there?  

Yes. There are ongoing discussion between William and Rufus and myself about cooperation
between Bibliographica and BibKN. I'd be glad to see OL engaged as well. I've been in contact
with OL people, but to date the cost of OL/BibKN cooperation has exceeded the apparent benefits.
There is at present a disconnect between OL data and academic researcher article data which is
the primary interest of BibKN. I'd love to be able to extract out of OL the subset of book titles and
authors of interest to academic researchers e.g. in mathematics or statistics or economics or some
other discipline, but I dont have the resources to do this and maintain the results. Anyone able to help 
with that?

I welcome suggestions from this group about how to to improve cooperation, and how to get
further resources directed towards the common goals of  these projects.

> It seems like that would be a lot more useful and productive than ratcheting up the level of
> competition and duplication yet another notch.  

I hope so too.

--Jim
----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
http://www.bibkn.org/

Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman

> It certainly seems true that the existing efforts aren't particularly collaborative in
> their approaches, but I don't see how adding yet another stovepipe to the mix is going to improve things.
> "Open" is about more than just putting the word in your project title
> -- whether it be Open Library or Open Knowledge Foundation.
>
> Tom
>
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