Session 3 response

I apologize that I have no notes for Paul Ell's interesting response, touching on the Grid, e-Science and issues of arts and humanities gazetteers and related data, but I was busy watching my laptop make a mess out of his powerpoint presentation.

Here's the text of the slides I used for my response:

Aside: Pleiades

http://icon.stoa.org/pleiades-beta

Organized by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S.A., Pleiades brings together a global community of scholars, students and enthusiasts to expand and enhance continually the information originally brought together by the Classical Atlas Project (1988-2000) to support the publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (R.J.A. Talbert, ed., Princeton, 2000). Our name, "Pleiades" (the daughters of Atlas in Greek Mythology) reflects both this heritage and the forward-looking goal of collaborative diversification.

Combining community approaches (like those used by Wikipedia) with academic-style editorial review, Pleiades enables anyone — from university professors to casual students of antiquity — to suggest updates to geographic names, descriptive essays, bibliographic references and geographic coordinates. Once vetted for accuracy and pertinence, these suggestions become a permanent, author-attributed part of future publications and data services.

Gazetteer interoperability axes

  • systems ↔ systems
  • datasets ↔ systems
  • users ↔ information
  • scale and size
  • time
  • modes of production

What are “interoperable gazetteers”?

  • Systems/Services?
    • assumes sustained hosting, funding, management
    • implies agreement on:
      • data formats
      • conventions
    • how to address:
      • purpose
      • audience
  • Datasets/Documents
    • assumes persistence of result – how achieved?
    • also implies agreement on formats and conventions
    • again, how to address purpose and audience

Long-term availability: a publication model

“the distinctive role of publication in the scholarly world is to serve as the permanent record of reference for scholarly work … published works constitute the sole record of scholarly work that other scholars, present and future, can reliably refer to and cite.”

  • Neel Smith, “Digital publication for digital libraries,” Digital Incunabula Pre-Release, Nov. 2004, http://chs75.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/digitalpub
  • contrast the “archive” to the “publication”
  • identically replicable
    • identical content in copies
    • helps guarantee permanence of a work
  • alienation of the work from its author(s)
    • form is fixed and outside the further control of the author once published
    • author can change views or correct errors—but such changes can only enter the public record through a further published work
  • citability in a fixed version
    • editions unambiguously identified
  • “works, possessing an explicitly identified edition and explicitly identified citation scheme, that can be irrevocably and identically replicated.”

Formats and standards

  • Keeping it simple?
    • Building a submarine to cross the Tiber?
  • Ideals
    • no special formats, purpose-built tools or essential behaviors
    • computationally actionable citations/references
  • Rivers flow to … the sea
    • but don’t reinvent the wheel!
    • basic metadata (Dublin Core)
    • languages and scripts
      • RFC 4646: Tags for Identifying Languages (September 2006)
    • bibliographic citations (TEI)
    • thesauri (IMS vdex)
    • coordinates (GML, georss)
    • wrappers (Atom XML)
  • Say exactly what you mean … don’t assume users will understand
    • degrade gracefully

Harvesting concerns

  • Is it adequate to assume harvesting is a services-and-protocols-based interaction between two systems?
  • How to harvest (accession) documents?
    • OAI vs. the little guy
      • “that’s no moon … it’s a space station”
    • Guidance and stand-alone tools for the creation of gazetteers
    • Guidance and support for the publication of gazetteers
    • Mechanisms for uptake and propagation of published gazetteers

Development concerns

  • How do you know when your gazetteer is done?

Demystification