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

Thu May 27 22:56:03 UTC 2010

dear Tom, all,

I enjoyed your previous email: "I'd encourage folks to think about how 
book related things are connected to the rest of the world. Books are 
cool, but they're just a tiny slice of the world..." but ultimately "Is 
the goal to try to get them to change or to propose/implement an 
alternative or just kvetch about the general state of bibliographic 
schemas?"

I see a lot of this in the geodata world where i belong (I Am Not A 
Library Scientist) - getting absorbed in complexity of our domain 
models, fiddling around with the imagined 90%/10% split of use cases, 
ultimately cutting ourselves off from a broader information ecosystem 
with domain specific standards, when the information that we've got has 
such potential to unite other domains.

However i meant to make a response to your words below:

On 27/05/2010 18:31, Tom Morris wrote:

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

In this case, open (source, standards, data).

One has to come to the table with a stake; how else to kick along a 
collaborative approach? Making the software open source from the outset, 
designed to network among instances.

Having an I Told You So Moment - sorry Jonny - technical discussions of 
models and formats can too quickly get bogged down. Perhaps better to 
focus on interfaces, interchangeability.

As Karen pointed out some time back, there are interesting and useful 
relations-between-media-objects defined in parts of the FRBR spec. These 
can be lifted out, reused in a Linked Data vocabulary without commitment 
to the vague-yet-specific core model of FRBR.

There is always and necessarily going to be a lot of duplication of 
records - so make APIs to de-duplicate combined streams of metadata 
records - and use RDF and the other standards to easily migrate data 
between places where it is stored and searched.

The alternative looks like one ring to rule them all, right, scary 
things like http://viaf.org/ , and power to the publishers...

best,

jo
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