Scope of the STEM Task Force

On Mon, 2014-06-09 at 14:59 +0200, Peter Krautzberger wrote:

...

I added a few use cases to the STEM section recently (chemistry, diagrams,
graphing). I'm trying to come up with something along the lines of Madi's
excellent report on metadata that I could take to the MathJax sponsors
(mostly scientific publishers). However, I found it hard to identify the
scope of the DPIG here (progressive enhancements? new standards? UA
suggestions?). I hope today's discussion will get us started towards a
clearer position by collecting potential options.
 
Peter.

...

 

My comment (in response to your post last week and to tail end of today's
discussion) that I was going to make when we ran out of time on today's
call:

 

I think the idea of seeking priorities, identifying additional use cases and
vetting use cases so far gathered via interviews along the lines of what
Bill and Madi did with metadata [1][2] makes good sense, but I wonder if we
should also consult as stakeholders in addition to publishers a few
researchers, librarian types and other consumers/authors of published STEM
content  as well. For example in regard to mathematics I'm thinking in
addition to the MathJax sponsors (who are mostly commercial and society
publishers) about people like Ingrid Daubechies and Cliff Lynch who
co-chaired the NAS/NRC Committee that produced the recent "Developing a 21st
Century Global Library for Mathematics Research" report [3], or Peter Olver
who also was involved in that report and who chairs the International
Mathematics Union's Committee on Electronic Information and Communication.
(Full disclosure, I am a member of the CEIC and was also involved in
creating the NAS/NRC report, which is why these names come so quickly to
mind - obviously there are others as well.)

 

I don't want to make the process of further data gathering unwieldy, and I
don't want to dilute publisher inputs, but I think these additional sources
would provide some complementary insights regarding use cases and
priorities. I'd be happy to help with regard to data gathering for
mathematics, and I think I could also get some help here as well for
Engineering data gathering. (For the moment I'm using the most common
NSF-DUE definition of  STEM as Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics, [4] though I realize we're still figuring this out.) 

 

Anyway, that was the gist of the comment I was going to make when the clock
ran out - looking forward to next week's call and happy to be of help if
needed with the work of your task force since this is an area of long-term
interest here at Illinois.

 

Tim Cole

University of Illinois at UC

 

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-digipub-ig/2014Apr/0062.html

[2]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-digipub-ig/2014Jun/att-0000/The_M
etadata_Survey_W3C_DigiPub.docx 

[3] http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18619 

[4] http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?org=DUE