[openbiblio-dev] bibjson -request for feedback

Tue Feb 21 21:07:30 UTC 2012

Mark MacGillivray <mark.macgillivray at okfn.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> > It was at http://www.bibkn.org/bibjson/index.html which is I think under your control
> > but now returns a 404.  Also http://www.bibkn.org/ returns a blank page. I think you
> > picked up the files from beneath www.bibkn.org and stashed them somewhere.

> I was requested to copy the datasets that were on the old bibkn
> datasets site, and to renew the bibkn.org domain name when it came up
> for renewal, and have done so. 

Thanks, but did you not copy over the basic index.html page? I was expecting that
the basic view of the old site would be maintained. This was on the OKF controlled server
which was taken down a month or two ago. I really understood you to be copying
the data from that site, so it could be reconstructed. Please can you provide pointers to
all that you have?  In fact, I believe there may have been a JSON version of the BibJSON spec
among the datasets. In any case I have some effort at that somewhere.

For now, there are multiple places on the web including our STM OpenBiblio paper which
point to http://www.bibkn.org/bibjson/index.html for the old BibJSON spec. 
The best I can quickly provide to replace that file is 

http://web.archive.org/web/20100821035627/http://www.bibkn.org/bibjson/index.html

which should be adequate for present spec discussions. Please can you put a copy of that at
http://www.bibkn.org/bibjson/index.html  ?

At one time we had a version-controlled setup with the old spec as the first and 
various newer ones on the BibJSON site. I do think we should keep doing that, and to 
avoid further losses they should be copies, not links. I would like to see stable urls beneath  
bibjson.org for the old spec from the bkn grant,  and for newer versions since then, and a 
default spec address which always goes to the most current spec.

I think it is important to have some discipline and stability about versions of the spec.
If there is some way to say there is no spec, by adopting other standards for our purposes, then
great. But even then, we will need some documentation of how we are adopting those 
standards for our purposes. I presume that documentation will become operationally the 
latest BibJSON spec, right?
And even then, the earlier specs are artifacts of some historical importance, which are
already referred to on the web. It looks bad for our projects to have links e.g. from 
our STM paper to sites under our control yielding 404's or blank pages. Lets repair this
situation quickly as best we can before we put out the blog posts about transfer of the bkn name and assets to okf control, since those posts should refer to a presentable 
bibkn site with an adequate set of files to represent outcomes of the former bkn project.

I have similar concerns about the bibserver code.  Shouldn't this be versioned and
archived in some way as we proceed? 

--Jim

----------------------------------------------
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