[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

Tue Oct 26 08:21:37 UTC 2010

The real point about this discussion is whether we wish Bibliography and
related content, metacontent , services to be Open or vendor-controlled. The
analogy is between Ordnance Survey and OpenStreetMap. OS sells and rents
content and services. THEY control what is done. Library vendors sell and
rent content and services. They control what we can do. The open
semantification of bibliography is about freedom, noit technology. It's
clrear from these and other discussions that libraries and librarians don't
care about freedom of books, etc. and are more oriented towards reader
services supplied by vendors. (This is all academic anyway as shortly
vendors will be selling directly to students - we've seen the first signs of
this in tha last few days. There will be no need for libraries to negotiate
terms - all we require is purchasing officers).

I had hoped to find some feeling among libraraians that they cared about
this but I haven't seen any - I've blogged, tweeted, etc. and I know these
get around.

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Christopher Gutteridge <cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk
> wrote:

> I think Ross makes a really good point here.

I have a lot of good things to say about Talis, but Talis represents the
vendors, not the readers or the public. Talis's role is selling systems to
libraries. There is no guarantee that any vendor will protect fundamental
rights. That's what the OKF is about.

> We're past the stage of the early adopters who will do it because it's a
> neat idea. One of the big ongoing issues of linked data is that it's always
> 'sold' to people in one of two ways;
>

And if we don't do something about the OPEN soon - it will be sold, and
copyrighted and DRM'ed

>
> 1. It really benefits the rest of the community (why should I bother doing
> work for people beyond our own library, I'm already overworked and
> underpaid!)
>

Why should I publish Open Source chemistry. Why should I work voluntarily
for the OKF. It's a free world.

>
> 2. Someone above you paygrade has decreed it thus (in which case what's the
> minimum I need to do to comply)
>

This does not prevent grass-roots e-democracy. That's what Open Bibliography
is about. People doing what organisations don't

>
> I think that take up could be improved if there were some (more, clear)
> benefits directly to the library & the library staff. What might be useful
> to gain uptake:
>
> 1. define some recommended patterns for how a library should publish
> semantic data so that it's more a case of filling in the blanks than
> training in a new field.
>

That's what Open Bibliography is about. The way we are developing it anyone
can  play - like OSM, like Geograph, like Galaxyzoo. let people in general
take this over. The question  is how to reach them but we will

>
> 2. provide some excellent tools (for scholars, students, mobile devices,
> facet based searching, library management etc.) which can work with one or
> more of these standard patterns. Include open licenses and URI structures as
> part of these patterns.
>

Again that's what the OKF wants to do. And yuou won't get Open licences
anywhere unless you make an effort to make them happen. Vendors won't

>
> At which point the community gets open, semantic data which is of value to
> all, but the local users & staff have got an immediate return on investment.
>

And in which other sector has this happened other than with a bottom up
revolution?

>
> I'm attempting this strategy with my programme ontology -- for conferences
> & arts festivals. My goal is to get them all publishing RDF programmes and
> lists of speakers/acts etc and my plan is to provide a very simple XML file
> they can copy (eg.
> http://programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk/1.0/examples/overlaps.rdf ) which can be
> turned into slick HTML and iCal by free tools;
> http://programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk/tool.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fprogramme.ecs.soton.ac.uk%2F1.0%2Fexamples%2Foverlaps.rdfit's slow work as it's unfunded and mostly done in my spare time, but it's
> beginning to get a little traction but the tools are still not killer apps.
> Yet.
>

Congratualtions. And that's the way to do it. And I'm sure that some of what
comes out of Open Bibliography

>
> The hardest part of all this is the 'Linked' in Linked Data.

No, the hardest is when the word OPEN is omitted. Because then you have to
negotiate licences and that kills it

> There's a whole bunch of entities which could be linked between
> bibliographies; people, publishers, aspects of a FRBR model (which I'm not
> convinced works with digital materials), events, places of publication,
> licensing, genres, formats, etc. In EPrints we go as far as 'minting'
> resolvable URIs for people, organisations, events, places, journals but
> makes no attempt to link them to items in the rest of the semantic web,
>  beyond the use of urn:issn:xxx and urn:isbn:xxx. Local administrators can
> modify the logic used to generate these URIs or even add triples (eg. on
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/export/eprint/18176/RDFN3/ecs-eprint-18176.n3?mimetype=text/plainnotice the owl:sameAs attached to the author). I think linking these may be
> a job beyond the remit of most libraries

I agree

> and more likely to be handled by online services who analyse many sites and
> work out which entities are (probably) the same...

I fervently hope not. I hope it will be done by committed people.

>
>
>
>
>
> Ross Singer wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> 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?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Why should libraries be tasked with this?
>>
>
Given their present disinterest they shouldn't. But in that case I don't see
much of a future for them.

-- 
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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