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diff --git a/guide/src/goals.md b/guide/src/goals.md index e7ef1512..9bb64b62 100644 --- a/guide/src/goals.md +++ b/guide/src/goals.md @@ -1,14 +1,14 @@ ## Project Goals and Ecosystem Niche -The Internet Archive has two primary use cases for fatcat: +The Internet Archive has two primary use cases for Fatcat: - Tracking the "completeness" of our holdings against all known published works. In particular, allow us to monitor progress, identify gaps, 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: +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](), @@ -22,8 +22,8 @@ In the larger ecosystem, fatcat could also provide: 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 +- On-ramp for non-traditional digital works (web-native and "grey literature") + into the scholarly web [KBART]: https://thekeepers.org/ [CLOCKSS]: https://clockss.org @@ -35,22 +35,22 @@ What types of works should be included in the catalog? 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 does not include any fulltext content itself, even for cleanly licensed -(open access) works, but does have "strong" (verified) links to fulltext -content, and includes 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. +than one other work in the catalog is likely to be in scope. "Leaf nodes" and +small islands of intra-cited works may or may not be in scope. + +Fatcat does not include any fulltext content itself, even for clearly licensed +open access works, but does have verified hyperlinks to fulltext content, and +includes file-level metadata (hashes and fingerprints) to help identify content +from any source. File-level URLs with context ("repository", "publisher", +"webarchive") 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 immutable files or can be captured by +web archives. ## References and Previous Work -The closest overall analog of fatcat is [MusicBrainz][mb], a collaboratively +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. @@ -60,23 +60,23 @@ 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 unambiguously. Potential advantages fatcat has +(statements) to specific sources unambiguously. Potential advantages Fatcat has are 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). With so much overlap, the two efforts might merge in the future. -The technical design of fatcat is loosely inspired by the git +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, +There are a number 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. We do not know of any large (more than 60 million works), -open (bulk-downloadable with permissive or no license), field agnostic, +MEDLINE, and Semantic Scholar. Large, general-purpose databases also exist that +are not directly user-editable, including the OpenCitation corpus, CORE, BASE, +and CrossRef. We do not 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 |