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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Species Dictionary project: www.nhm.ac.uk/nbn/
Nature Navigator: www.nhm.ac.uk/naturenavigator/
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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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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
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