Thursday 19th January – Open Biblio Sprint: Day 3

Today we were joined by additional members of the OKFN team from various parts of the world – Ira, Sam and Primavera. Then the fun began…

• Sam and Mark discussed the interface between Open Biblio and the TEXTUS project, looking at text and image processing. Project Gutenberg was suggested as one possible avenue, exploring scanned archives being processed in order to provide searchable text. It was agreed that openphilosophy.org would be the best central point of reference for this data, as an instance of TEXTUS with BibServer support in the background.
• Mark and Ira discussed how to present CKAN / BibServer at events such as Dev8D – there is cross-over between the two, and we took the opportunity to learn more about both projects. CKAN is a purpose-built data catalogue with flexible addons and a mature open source product. Both are part of the OKFN and, combined, are an easy way to publish and find data and references. It was agreed that working more closely together would be of mutual benefit as well as to the wider community.
• Peter and Mark discussed BibServer in terms of where we could offer CKAN and other services to academic / research groups, as a stack of tools that would find beneficial to their work. There is a lots of talk just now about using dspace, e-prints or some as yet uninvented system for storing research data – JISC is funding some projects, and we will be having a discussion about this at Dev8D.
• Sam, Primavera and Etienne hacked some code and Etienne also continued his work on the parsers.
• Peter, Mark and I discussed BKN – the Bibliographic Knowledge Network – which is Jim Pitman’s project and the first BibServer… Follow-up happening next week.
• Peter and I interviewed Mark Williamson, a post-doctoral researcher at the Chemistry Department, about using BibSoup (which he’d only looked at for a few moments before we put him on the spot – thanks Mark!). Mark also gave us a demonstration of using BibSoup for the blog which is a good ‘how to’ for people who haven’t used it before. Peter’s excellent summary of BibSoup goes as follows: “BibSoup is a philosophy rather than a technology – ie having local control over bibliographic data. The idea is to get people to share data together and to sign-up to supporting it in 5 years’ time”. We will follow up soon with links to the videos we made.

The main aim for the past few days was to get all the people working on the project together, with the aim of Getting Stuff Done: do some coding, boot up some dataset demos, plan more demos and integrations, plan further community engagement and coding over the next six months, integrating BibServer with other projects, etc… Amongst all the lively discussions, I think it’s safe to say the aim was achieved!

Many thanks to all involved – if anything from this week strikes you as particularly interesting, please do get involved.