It’s time to talk a bit about Bibliographica, a new project of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Bibliographica is designed to make it easier for scholars and researchers to share and collect information about work in their field. It provides an open source software platform to create and share semantically rich information about publications, authors and their works.
As readers of the Open Knowledge Foundation blog will know we have a long-standing interest in open bibliographic data - from our efforts starting in 2005 to build a database of public domain works, our coordination of the response to the Library of Congress’ Future of Bibliographic Control (2007) and the recent creation of a new working group on open bibliographic data in March this year.
Bibliographica itself, is a long-held dream of Jonathan Gray, OKF’s Community Coordinator - a commons of open data surrounding scholarly communications. Thanks to collaboration and support from IDEA Lab at the University of Edinburgh, the dream is a bit closer to reality.
The primary “technical” features of Bibliographica are:
+ Rich (FRBR-based) domain model
+ Semantic web and linked open data to the core providing for very flexible metadata and easy integration of external material
+ Wiki-like revisioning of all changes enabling easier and freer collaboration
+ Software and a Service
+ Designed to be installed and run by others
+ Distributed — can run different nodes with pull (and push) of data between them
Easy collaboration by scholars and librariains in creating bibliographies and enhancing catalogues
Often the people who know most about what is published in a given field are the researchers who are active in that field. Bibliographica will enable scholars to directly collaborate on annotated bibliographic indexes for their subject area. A revisioned (wiki-like) approach to adding metadata allows for more open collaboration, and a semantic web base means support for rich metadata with a good standard structure.
We think that letting researchers directly add or edit details about publications in their field — which they can then export, publish, or do whatever they like with — is a good way to keep this information accurate and up to date.
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