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| -rw-r--r-- | rfc.md | 39 |
1 files changed, 19 insertions, 20 deletions
@@ -1,4 +1,3 @@ - fatcat is a half-baked idea to build an open, independent, collaboratively editable bibliographic database of most written works, with a focus on published research outputs like journal articles, pre-prints, and conference @@ -22,7 +21,7 @@ A goal is to be linked-data/RDF/JSON-LD/semantic-web "compatible", but not necessarily "first". It should be possible to export the database in a relatively clean RDF form, and to fetch data in a variety of formats, but internally fatcat would not be backed by a triple-store, and would not be -bound to a specific third party ontology or schema. +bound to a specific third-party ontology or schema. Microservice daemons should be able to proxy between the primary API and standard protocols like ResourceSync and OAI-PMH, and bots could consume @@ -30,15 +29,15 @@ external databases in those formats. ## Licensing -The core fatcat database should only contain verifyable factual statements +The core fatcat database should only contain verifiable factual statements (which isn't to say that all statements are "true"), not creative or derived content. The goal is to have a very permissively licensed database: CC-0 (no rights reserved) if possible. Under US law, it should be possible to scrape and pull in factual data from other corpuses without adopting their licenses. The goal -here isn't to avoid all attibution (progeny information will be included, and a -large sources and acknowledgements statement should be maintained), but trying +here isn't to avoid all attribution (progeny information will be included, and a +large sources and acknowledgments statement should be maintained), but trying to manage the intersection of all upstream source licenses seems untenable, and creates burdens for downstream users. @@ -46,12 +45,12 @@ Special care will need to be taken around copyright and original works. I would propose either not accepting abstracts at all, or including them in a partitioned database to prevent copyright contamination. Likewise, even simple user-created content like lists, reviews, ratings, comments, discussion, -documentation, etc should go in separate services. +documentation, etc., should go in separate services. ## Basic Editing Workflow and Bots Both human editors and bots would have edits go through the same API, with -humans using either the default web interface or arbitrary integrations or +humans using either the default web interface, arbitrary integrations, or client software. The usual workflow would be to create edits (or creations, merges, deletions) @@ -89,17 +88,17 @@ an immutable, append-only log table (which internally could be a SQL table) documenting each identifier change. This log establishes a monotonically increasing version number for the entire corpus, and should make interaction with other systems easier (eg, search engines, replicated databases, -alternative storage backends, notification frameworks, etc). +alternative storage backends, notification frameworks, etc.). -## Itentifiers +## Identifiers -A fixed number of first class "entities" would be definied, with common +A fixed number of first-class "entities" would be defined, with common behavior and schema layouts. These would all be semantic entities like "work", "release", "container", and "person". -fatcat identifiers would be semanticly meaningless fixed length random numbers, +fatcat identifiers would be semantically meaningless fixed-length random numbers, usually represented in case-insensitive base32 format. Each entity type would -have it's own identifier namespace. Eg, 96 bit identifiers would have 20 +have its own identifier namespace. Eg, 96-bit identifiers would have 20 characters and look like: fcwork_rzga5b9cd7efgh04iljk @@ -110,7 +109,7 @@ characters and look like: fcwork_rzga5b9cd7efgh04iljk8f3jvz https://fatcat.org/work/rzga5b9cd7efgh04iljk8f3jvz -A 64 bit namespace is probably plenty though, and would work with most databse +A 64-bit namespace is probably plenty though, and would work with most database Integer columns: fcwork_rzga5b9cd7efg @@ -118,13 +117,13 @@ Integer columns: The idea would be to only have fatcat identifiers be used to interlink between databases, *not* to supplant DOIs, ISBNs, handle, ARKs, and other "registered" -persistant identifiers. +persistent identifiers. ## Entities and Internal Schema Internally, identifiers would be lightweight pointers to actual metadata objects, which can be thought of as "versions". The metadata objects themselves -would be immutable once commited; the edit process is one of creating new +would be immutable once committed; the edit process is one of creating new objects and, if the edit is approved, pointing the identifier to the new version. Entities would reference between themselves by identifier. @@ -298,14 +297,14 @@ Should contributor/author contact information be retained? It could be very useful for disambiguation, but we don't want to build a huge database for spammers or "innovative" start-up marketing. -Would general purpose SQL databases like Postgres or MySQL scale well enough -told hold several tables with billions of entries? Right from the start there +Would general-purpose SQL databases like Postgres or MySQL scale well enough +to hold several tables with billions of entries? Right from the start there are hundreds of millions of works and releases, many of which having dozens of citations, many authors, and many identifiers, and then we'll have potentially dozens of edits for each of these, which multiply out to `1e8 * 2e1 * 2e1 = 4e10`, or 40 billion rows in the citation table. If each row was 32 bytes on average (uncompressed, not including index size), that would be 1.3 TByte on -it's own, larger than common SSD disk. I think a transactional SQL datastore is +its own, larger than common SSD disk. I think a transactional SQL datastore is the right answer. In my experience locking and index rebuild times are usually the biggest scaling challenges; the largely-immutable architecture here should mitigate locking. Hopefully few indexes would be needed in the primary @@ -337,8 +336,8 @@ open bibliographic database at this time (early 2018), including the 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 unambigiously. Potential advantages fatcat -would have would be a focus on a specific scope (not a general purpose database +(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. |