FW: [Taxacom] European Virtual Library of Taxonomic Literature - Requirements Survey
Dear Rod,
Thank you for your pertinent comments.
The questions for the online survey were formulated following brainstorming sessions with colleagues at the Natural History Museum, London and during the EDIT WP6 meeting last week. My aim, at this stage, is to capture actual user requirements (a wish-list, if you like) and the resulting report may hopefully be of use beyond EDIT (informing BHL and development routes for Commercial products, for instance).
I am not sure that EDIT WP5 has the resources to develop a bespoke solution and it is likely that (due to time pressure, amongst other factors) we may go with an 'off-the-shelf' solution - which will probably only be able to deliver a reduced set of our requirements. Nevertheless, in gathering the requirements, we may have a roadmap for the future.
EDIT is all about integration and making the process of taxonomic research and publication more efficient. Core to this, will be providing tools for taxonomists working together on a particular group to discover and collate relevant bibliographic resources, to classify them, and share them. Obviously there are several different architectures that could be deployed - I don't want to be prescriptive and it is very interesting to see the different suggestions being offered.
If we had been having this debate even two years ago, the possibilities (and solutions) would have been different, and in 2 - 5 years from now, they will be different again. The challenge to discern what is achievable within the scope (and lifetime) of the EDIT opportunity, whilst also producing a legacy that is scalable, sustainable and can evolve together with changing taxonomic practice and available technology.
Regards,
Charles Hussey,
Science Data Co-ordinator, Data and Digital Systems Team, Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD United Kingdom
Tel. +44 (0)207 942 5213 Fax. +44 (0)207 942 5559 e-mail c.hussey@nhm.ac.uk Species Dictionary project: www.nhm.ac.uk/nbn/ Nature Navigator: www.nhm.ac.uk/naturenavigator/
-----Original Message----- From: Roderic Page [mailto:r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk] Sent: 04 May 2007 13:15 To: Charles Hussey Cc: 'Taxacom'; tdwg@lists.tdwg.org; Vincent Smith Subject: Re: [Taxacom] European Virtual Library of Taxonomic Literature - Requirements Survey
Some quick comments:
This survey suggests the potential for a project that, in my opinion, is far too big and unwieldy. I suggest focussing on a core set of functions, and leave the rest to projects that do this sort of thing much better. I think the two most important things this project could do are:
1. provide an OpenURL service that will resolve a bibliographic citation (or a GUID)
2. provide GUIDs (e.g., SICIs and BICIs) that cost nothing for articles, books, and book chapters, and provide a resolver for these GUIDs.
3. provide a service to parse bibliographic citations (along the lines of Paratools).
If you have 1, then you have a web service that people can use. For example, Connotea users can specify an OpenURL resolver to try and find an article online. By default it is CrossRef's service, which relies on DOIs. Imaging having a service that also supports literature that uses other GUIDs (such as Handles and SICIs).
If you have 2, then everything in this project has a URI and therefore exists on the web (or, at least it's metadata does). This is one of the motivations behind the bioGUID project.
If you have 3, then you have a service that would be useful in automatically integrating bibliographies from a range of sources (e.g., parsing lists of the literature on the web, or in bibliographies of papers).
In terms of a portal, etc., in an age of Connotea this seems wasted effort -- they do this sort of thing well, why duplicate effort? Community tagging, etc., relies of communities, and Connotea already has one.
The other lesson to learn from Connotea is that relies on existing web services, such as CrossRef's OpenURL resolver (to extract metadata associated with a DOI), and NCBI's PubMed service. By using these services, the developers could concentrate on other things. What I an arguing is that if you develop services, the "portal" (or whatever) becomes either (a) easy, or (b) largely irrelevant because you can use existing tools.
Regards
Rod
On 3 May 2007, at 17:08, Charles Hussey wrote:
The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) is a Network of Excellence project, funded by the EU for 5 years (http://www.e-taxonomy.eu/). One of the deliverables of the project will be a Bibliographic Resource to be known as the European Virtual Library of Taxonomic Literature (E-ViTL).
This part of the project is being managed by the Natural History Museum, London and we are in the process of defining detailed specifications for such a service. We are keen (naturally!) to ensure that the service will meet actual user needs and so, if this is an area dear to your heart, you are warmly invited to participate in an online survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?A=193016818E830 (the survey will close at midnight on 11th May)
This will ensure that your views are taken into account.
NOTE: E-ViTL is likely to be a resource discovery tool rather than a repository of full text articles. It could, however, point users to repositories, such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://bhl.si.edu/), online journals and other sources.
There is some debate over whether E-ViTL should attempt to provide reference management functions, in addition to providing access to literature. Also whether it should be a repository for reference lists, rather than a portal to search distributed repositories. However, the purpose of this survey is to gather user requirements and, although it is unlikely that E-ViTL will be able to incorporate all possible requirements, your views will provide a useful pointer for future development.
Yours sincerely,
Charles Hussey,
Science Data Co-ordinator, Data and Digital Systems Team, Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD United Kingdom
Tel. +44 (0)207 942 5213 Fax. +44 (0)207 942 5559 e-mail c.hussey@nhm.ac.uk Species Dictionary project: www.nhm.ac.uk/nbn/ Nature Navigator: www.nhm.ac.uk/naturenavigator/
Taxacom mailing list Taxacom@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
Dear Charles,
I am not sure that EDIT WP5 has the resources to develop a bespoke solution and it is likely that (due to time pressure, amongst other factors) we may go with an 'off-the-shelf' solution - which will probably only be able to deliver a reduced set of our requirements. Nevertheless, in gathering the requirements, we may have a roadmap for the future.
This raises the immediate question is there anything "off the shelf", and if it delivers only a reduced set of requirements, is this really progress?
If we had been having this debate even two years ago, the possibilities (and solutions) would have been different, and in 2 - 5 years from now, they will be different again. The challenge to discern what is achievable within the scope (and lifetime) of the EDIT opportunity, whilst also producing a legacy that is scalable, sustainable and can evolve together with changing taxonomic practice and available technology.
Well yes and no. I would argue that some of the core underlying technologies, especially those used by publishers and libraries, such as OpenURLs, DOIs, and Handles, have been around for a while now, and aren't likely to go away any time soon. The things being build on top of these are a lot more volatile. In other words, DOIs will be here in 2-5 years, tools like Connotea, Cite-U-Like might not be.
Hence, I would argue strongly that what we need is infrastructure (i.e., simple web services) that can support the kind of things we want to do. The ability to take a bibliographic citation and find whether an electronic version of the article exists is desirable, and the technology exists right now. These services could easily be embedded in tools such as the Drupal-based scratch pads EDIT is developing, and I think would be a more lasting contribution than a fancy web interface.
Regars
Rod
Regards,
Charles Hussey,
Science Data Co-ordinator, Data and Digital Systems Team, Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD United Kingdom
Tel. +44 (0)207 942 5213 Fax. +44 (0)207 942 5559 e-mail c.hussey@nhm.ac.uk Species Dictionary project: www.nhm.ac.uk/nbn/ Nature Navigator: www.nhm.ac.uk/naturenavigator/
-----Original Message----- From: Roderic Page [mailto:r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk] Sent: 04 May 2007 13:15 To: Charles Hussey Cc: 'Taxacom'; tdwg@lists.tdwg.org; Vincent Smith Subject: Re: [Taxacom] European Virtual Library of Taxonomic Literature
- Requirements Survey
Some quick comments:
This survey suggests the potential for a project that, in my opinion, is far too big and unwieldy. I suggest focussing on a core set of functions, and leave the rest to projects that do this sort of thing much better. I think the two most important things this project could do are:
- provide an OpenURL service that will resolve a bibliographic
citation (or a GUID)
- provide GUIDs (e.g., SICIs and BICIs) that cost nothing for
articles, books, and book chapters, and provide a resolver for these GUIDs.
- provide a service to parse bibliographic citations (along the lines
of Paratools).
If you have 1, then you have a web service that people can use. For example, Connotea users can specify an OpenURL resolver to try and find an article online. By default it is CrossRef's service, which relies on DOIs. Imaging having a service that also supports literature that uses other GUIDs (such as Handles and SICIs).
If you have 2, then everything in this project has a URI and therefore exists on the web (or, at least it's metadata does). This is one of the motivations behind the bioGUID project.
If you have 3, then you have a service that would be useful in automatically integrating bibliographies from a range of sources (e.g., parsing lists of the literature on the web, or in bibliographies of papers).
In terms of a portal, etc., in an age of Connotea this seems wasted effort -- they do this sort of thing well, why duplicate effort? Community tagging, etc., relies of communities, and Connotea already has one.
The other lesson to learn from Connotea is that relies on existing web services, such as CrossRef's OpenURL resolver (to extract metadata associated with a DOI), and NCBI's PubMed service. By using these services, the developers could concentrate on other things. What I an arguing is that if you develop services, the "portal" (or whatever) becomes either (a) easy, or (b) largely irrelevant because you can use existing tools.
Regards
Rod
On 3 May 2007, at 17:08, Charles Hussey wrote:
The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) is a Network of Excellence project, funded by the EU for 5 years (http://www.e-taxonomy.eu/). One of the deliverables of the project will be a Bibliographic Resource to be known as the European Virtual Library of Taxonomic Literature (E-ViTL).
This part of the project is being managed by the Natural History Museum, London and we are in the process of defining detailed specifications for such a service. We are keen (naturally!) to ensure that the service will meet actual user needs and so, if this is an area dear to your heart, you are warmly invited to participate in an online survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?A=193016818E830 (the survey will close at midnight on 11th May)
This will ensure that your views are taken into account.
NOTE: E-ViTL is likely to be a resource discovery tool rather than a repository of full text articles. It could, however, point users to repositories, such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (http://bhl.si.edu/), online journals and other sources.
There is some debate over whether E-ViTL should attempt to provide reference management functions, in addition to providing access to literature. Also whether it should be a repository for reference lists, rather than a portal to search distributed repositories. However, the purpose of this survey is to gather user requirements and, although it is unlikely that E-ViTL will be able to incorporate all possible requirements, your views will provide a useful pointer for future development.
Yours sincerely,
Charles Hussey,
Science Data Co-ordinator, Data and Digital Systems Team, Library and Information Services, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD United Kingdom
Tel. +44 (0)207 942 5213 Fax. +44 (0)207 942 5559 e-mail c.hussey@nhm.ac.uk Species Dictionary project: www.nhm.ac.uk/nbn/ Nature Navigator: www.nhm.ac.uk/naturenavigator/
Taxacom mailing list Taxacom@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
Taxacom mailing list Taxacom@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
participants (2)
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Charles Hussey -
Roderic Page