[open-bibliography] BibSoup/BibServer collaboration model?

Fri Feb 3 15:32:29 UTC 2012

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry at gmail.com> wrote:

> Glad we all agree.
>
> but blasted! ... they have a Ferrari and we still have a VW Bug (but now
> with one turbo and leather seats thanks to Mark. :)
>

I am extremely impressed by what Mark and the team have developed. It is
not necessarily inferior to Mendeley. [I do not know the guts of that
system]. Our main feature is that the design has been built by the
community for the community and that the community can control where we
steer it. It gives a very rapid development cycle.

The design is very clean. For me I can see the following use cases which
are potentially quite distinct from Mendeley:
* management of non-traditional objects. This can include datasets,
publishers (as first-class objects). One immediate application is to manage
Ross Mounce's list of licences in hybrid journals. That's a day or two to
create. Another is to manage post-publication commentary on objects such as
through the blogosphere
* community annotation as in the malaria project
* crawling the Open web and making collections of objects for
re-dissemination and algorithmic re-use. In my case it's crystal structures.
* working with organizations such as Wikipedia, public libraries, etc,

I see Bibserver/BibJSON as a set of well-engineered components. Engines,
gearboxes, differentials, etc. You can build something WITH them. The
toolset isn't quite complete but it's not far off and there is enough today
to do valuable stuff.

It's not easy selling tools. I've been trying to do this for 20 years in
chemistry. We are just now starting to get appreciation. of the value of
tools against "applications". The area where it works well is ICT - the
UNIX tools were (and are) one of the great intellectual creations of the
last decades.  I'm literally today stripping my chemical software library
back to the commandline. It's the honest, efficient, clean way to build
systems.

If you want an analogy think of Wikipedia. Bibserver/BibJSON could create a
new way of community thinking about bibliography. That's my vision at least.

-- 
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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