[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

> Quoting Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.Berkeley.EDU>:
>
>  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?
>>
>
> Jim, this work is underway, at least on two fronts. One is that the W3C has
> an incubator group for linked library data [1] that will make some specific
> recommendations for how to move this forward. The other is that some of us
> in library-land have been writing, speaking, and doing. There are RDF
> representations for a number of library vocabularies [2] [3], I published
> two guides for the US library association [4] [5] (and will be speaking next
> month in Germany and England on the topic, as well as in Norway in January),
> and this week is the first of a series of 3 webinars done by the library
> association to provide continuing education in this area. We also did a
> one-day training session on linked data at the main US library meeting and
> will have an ongoing group meeting about linked data in libraries at those
> conferences twice a year. There are numerous efforts outside of the US which
> I am not as well versed in, but Germany has a Semantic Web in Libraries
> conference that is now an annual event, as I understand it. And, as you've
> seen, some libraries are beginning to publish their data in a linked data
> format.
>
> So, what else should we be doing? :-)
>

Creating Open Data. Nothing else works. Without Openness you are linked into
unmanageable contractual agreements


>
> What we lack at this point is applications, but of course they are harder
> to create than the data.


I am not sure that is true. Of course it depends what the applications are.
Software to manage a process - especially with security - is harder than
sofware than manages Open semantic web objects.


> Also, we depend on vendors to provide the applications that allow libraries
> to create data and provide user services.


And that's a major part of the problem. The vendors control the users.
That's why we are creating an infrastructure of Open Source and Open Data
tools in chemistry - the Blue Obelisk.

I am not saying it's easy but until we reclaim our independence from vendors
we shall have second class solutions


> Analogous to other complex software, like word processing, this isn't
> something that you can just whip up but something you need to buy.


It certianly can't be whipped up but it can be created outside the
commercial sector. Of course management has costs and management of
resources needs supported. But there is no reason why the world's libraries
shouldn't be based on open Source and it's actually one of the potentially
best areas to do so.

And, guess what! the economy is in the toilet and no one has any money to
> buy new software.


So that's the best time to think about doing it a different way. We are
building the computational chemistry "library" of the future out of Open
Source and it could be done for other sectors as well.



-- 
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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