[openbiblio-dev] BibServer and approaching contacts

Thu Feb 2 17:45:11 UTC 2012

All,

Please see below from Jim which follows the discussion from Wednesday's
stand-up - see line 15 of http://openbiblio.okfnpad.org/catchup - all
comments welcome:

Before approaching BibSonomy, DBLP, or any other major biblio data
provider, we should confirm between us what we are asking, and have a
roadmap for technical communication and a clear sequence of steps to
proceed. We should have a fairly standard email communication, which e.g. I
or someone else with previous contact could send the right person, and
there is a clear sequence of actions that person can take, and responses
that can be expected on our side. Strategic issues are: do we write a
parser first and show them a demo?
I am concerned about raising expectations of our performance until we are
sure we can deliver. Can we embed all of BibSonomy or DBLP in BibSoup?
Would we want to do that? Or do we only want to embed selected subsets? Or
allow users to curate selected subsets? This issue arises generically with
any large source. With DBLP we have an open license already, so I think we
should demo capability before asking for anything more. I already wrote a
crude DBLP parser, and this could easily be improved/installed. We should
have a plan for these things, before we open up negotiations. I think our
strategic aim should be to recruit DBLP and BibSonomy as early nodes of the
BKN which will  provide proof of concept and demo the value of BibJSON and
BibServer installations over BibJSON. I'd like to hear what Mark thinks
about the technical feasibility of our operating on this scale before
continuing.

> secondly, re Rufus's discussion points and your following comments, 'a)
installation of at least one public facing bibserver on a machine not
controlled by cottagelabs/OKF', please could you follow up with people @
Berkeley about getting a BibServer installed there, as this is an easy win
if that can be sorted!

This is easier said than done. I can keep pushing on this, but I cannot
promise you a time line. My own personal interest puts higher priority on a
SaS arrangement with Mark for the Probability Web. I am sick and tired of
pleading with sys admins and other dept staff to provide adequate support.
Peter is familiar with the problem. I just want a BibServer that I can
easily manage and control and that will serve the communities I care about.
I continue to hope Mark can provide that on a SaS basis. I think Mark you
need to be looking at other places for installs so you get direct feedback
with about what the obstacles are to be overcome. I do have a number of
possible places we could consider approaching.
--VTEX which is a previous BibServer developer/maintainer
--PlanetMath
--Distributome
--Seminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire
--EJP/ECP (but they need a server, so probably better embed in ProbWeb)

In all cases I can provide initial contacts, and I can help with initial
data conversions. But there will be some parsing/scripting work to be done.
Probably we should proceed in parallel on these and others. But I am
unclear what the steps are, because we have not even done one yet.

------------------------------
----------------
Jim Pitman
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

-- 
Naomi Lillie
Foundation Administrator and Community Coordinator (Open Bibliography)
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org/
Skype: n.lillie
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