RE: Scope of the STEM Task Force

+1

I was going to make the same comment when we ran out of time.

That was the strategy that Madi and I used: she drilled vertically within a publisher (Pearson) and I took a more horizontal approach (in the case of metadata, encompassing different types of publishers-trade, magazine, scholarly, STEM, news [including IPTC, an organization, not a publisher], etc.-as well as interviewing consultants and service providers like CrossRef and Firebrand). She produced one consolidated report; I wrote up a report of each individual interview. We will now work to pull all that together in a single document, based on the insights from those interviews and the discussions in the IG.

Specifically for STEM, I think Tim's suggestion of interviewing some researchers and librarians is spot-on, and essential in this context.

--Bill K
From: Tim Cole [mailto:t-cole3@illinois.edu]
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2014 1:29 PM
To: public-digipub-ig@w3.org
Subject: 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_Metadata_Survey_W3C_DigiPub.docx
[3] http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18619
[4] http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?org=DUE