[open-bibliography] Sharing bibliographic user data

[Peter Murray-Rust]

Thanks Tim, This is definitely in scope. We are particularly keen that
people start using the Bibliography that is coming out of the Open
Bibliography project

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Tim Spalding <tim at librarything.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the reply. I broadly agree. Let me put part of my question
> in concrete terms.
>
> 1. Most users on LibraryThing make their tags and reviews public.
> 2. LibraryThing exposes their tags on library catalogs (our
> LibraryThing for Libraries product). Users don't object to this. (If
> they do, they can opt out on the reviews side.)
> 3. BUT users know that the data is coming from LibraryThing. If they
> change their review, it will soon change on the libraries too. If they
> removed it, it would get removed.
> 4. I believe that if LibraryThing merely released the data, with no
> obligation to refresh it, people would be VERY upset.
>
> See? The problem isn't openness. It's respect for the user. Users are
> happy with their data going other places, but they still think of it
> as theirs, and want to make sure they can change or remove it.
>
> My view is that this is a community problem and there is no single answer.
I don't believe it can be solved by licences - licences that say you must do
this if you want to use it tend to crash. There is no doubt that Open
Knowledge can in principle rebound to the disadvantage of the releaser - if
someone takes my work and edits it without indication (which many licences
permit) then many people will assume I said something I didn't. There are
many cases where changing a document is dangerous to human life.

A technical approach which the software community uses is checksums (MD5,
etcd.) - that can be used to assert that the contents of the document are
unaltered. But most people don't have the technology to operate this .

In many communities misuse of documents is highly discouraged and may incur
penalties - in others nobody cares. I think it's valuable to create norms
for their usage and to promote these. We are seeing this general type of
problem everywhere - if information is accessible who has the moral right to
do something with it. It'll take at least 10 years of social experiments to
resolve some of these.


> How is that solved, in an open context?
>

Generally the more we can anticipate problems and inform people, the fewer
surprises.

-- 
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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