[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

Mon Oct 25 15:18:13 UTC 2010

Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote in his blog http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2668 :

"Bibliography is the soul of scholarship. I thought that by collecting bibliography and turning it into an intelligent semantic resource then we would start a new era in the library."

Me too.  Its disappointing but understandable that many librarians dont want to assist the transition.
Perhaps someone on this list could suggest how to get the library community more engaged in this effort?

To pick another point from Peter's BLOG.  Peter quoted a correspondent who wrote:

"And just for the record,  distributed security in REST  is not trivial nor simple at all ... there are no well accepted solutions currently.
This might be the major obstacle in front of any REST approach aiming at distributed services, rather than single REST site, as most 
major commercial REST services these days. ....
Just sharing what we are struggling with for two years already, having tens of distributed REST services over Europe , 5 independent implementations in two languages, covering at least half of the functionality listed in your email."

What exactly is the "distributed security" problem here?
The BKN idea is to have a large number of distributed REST biblio sites,
each running an open webservice, each managing its own security, responsible for its own backups, and each offering open reusable biblio 
data with local write and world read.
Aggregator sites may develop, and these would have to manage their own security concerns, picking and choosing data from whatever 
data providers.  But the security issues involved in such a network seem local to me,  not distributed.  
Is there a distributed security problem with this model?   
Or only with a model which supposes some more complex interactions between webservices?
Peter, perhaps you could forward question to your correspondent?

--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