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authorBryan Newbold <bnewbold@robocracy.org>2018-09-20 20:20:43 -0700
committerBryan Newbold <bnewbold@robocracy.org>2018-09-20 20:20:43 -0700
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@@ -8,95 +8,3 @@ file-level metadata.
fatcat is currently used internally at the Internet Archive, but interested
folks are welcome to contribute to design and development.
-
-## Goals and Ecosystem Niche
-
-For the Internet Archive use case, fatcat has two primary use cases:
-
-- Track the "completeness" of our holdings against all known published works.
- In particular, allow us to monitor and prioritize further collection work.
-- Be a public-facing catalog and access mechanism for our open access holdings.
-
-In the larger ecosystem, fatcat could also provide:
-
-- A work-level (as opposed to title-level) archival dashboard: what fraction of
- all published works are preserved in archives? KBART, CLOCKSS, Portico, and
- other preservations don't provide granular metadata
-- A collaborative, independent, non-commercial, fully-open, field-agnostic,
- "completeness"-oriented catalog of scholarly metadata
-- Unified (centralized) foundation for discovery and access across repositories
- and archives: discovery projects can focus on user experience instead of
- building their own catalog from scratch
-- Research corpus for meta-science, with an emphasis on availability and
- reproducibility (metadata corpus itself is open access, and file-level hashes
- control for content drift)
-- Foundational infrastructure for distributed digital preservation
-- On-ramp for non-traditional digital works ("grey literature") into the
- scholarly web
-
-## Scope
-
-The goal is to capture the "scholarly web": the graph of written works that
-cite other works. Any work that is both cited more than once and cites more
-than one other work in the catalog is very likely to be in scope. "Leaf nodes"
-and small islands of intra-cited works may or may not be in scope.
-
-fatcat would not include any fulltext content itself, even for cleanly licensed
-(open access) works, but would have "strong" (verified) links to fulltext
-content, and would include file-level metadata (like hashes and fingerprints)
-to help discovery and identify content from any source. File-level URLs with
-context ("repository", "author-homepage", "web-archive") should make fatcat
-more useful for both humans and machines to quickly access fulltext content of
-a given mimetype than existing redirect or landing page systems. So another
-factor in deciding scope is whether a work has "digital fixity" and can be
-contained in a single immutable file.
-
-## References and Previous Work
-
-The closest overall analog of fatcat is [MusicBrainz][mb], a collaboratively
-edited music database. [Open Library][ol] is a very similar existing service,
-which exclusively contains book metadata.
-
-[Wikidata][wd] seems to be the most successful and actively edited/developed
-open bibliographic database at this time (early 2018), including the
-[wikicite][wikicite] conference and related Wikimedia/Wikipedia projects.
-Wikidata is a general purpose semantic database of entities, facts, and
-relationships; bibliographic metadata has become a large fraction of all
-content in recent years. The focus there seems to be linking knowledge
-(statements) to specific sources unambiguously. Potential advantages fatcat
-would have would be a focus on a specific scope (not a general-purpose database
-of entities) and a goal of completeness (capturing as many works and
-relationships as rapidly as possible). However, it might be better to just
-pitch in to the wikidata efforts.
-
-The technical design of fatcat is loosely inspired by the git
-branch/tag/commit/tree architecture, and specifically inspired by Oliver
-Charles' "New Edit System" [blog posts][nes-blog] from 2012.
-
-There are a whole bunch of proprietary, for-profit bibliographic databases,
-including Web of Science, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Graph, aminer,
-Scopus, and Dimensions. There are excellent field-limited databases like dblp,
-MEDLINE, and Semantic Scholar. There are some large general-purpose databases
-that are not directly user-editable, including the OpenCitation corpus, CORE,
-BASE, and CrossRef. I don't know of any large (more than 60 million works),
-open (bulk-downloadable with permissive or no license), field agnostic,
-user-editable corpus of scholarly publication bibliographic metadata.
-
-[nes-blog]: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2012-07-10-nes-does-it-better-1.html
-[mb]: https://musicbrainz.org
-[ol]: https://openlibrary.org
-[wd]: https://wikidata.org
-[wikicite]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2017
-
-## Further Reading
-
-"From ISIS to CouchDB: Databases and Data Models for Bibliographic Records" by Luciano G. Ramalho. code4lib, 2013. <https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4893>
-
-"Representing bibliographic data in JSON". github README file, 2017. <https://github.com/rdmpage/bibliographic-metadata-json>
-
-"Citation Style Language", <https://citationstyles.org/>
-
-"Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records", Wikipedia article, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records>
-
-OpenCitations and I40C <http://opencitations.net/>, <https://i4oc.org/>
-