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diff --git a/guide/src/overview.md b/guide/src/overview.md index 8e6279ed..ef631b87 100644 --- a/guide/src/overview.md +++ b/guide/src/overview.md @@ -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/> - |