Re: Audiences & defining LLD

On 3/3/11 8:18 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
> Quoting "ZENG, MARCIA" <mzeng@kent.edu>:
>
> Thought this might be useful. It was from the recent 'Making the
>> Case' session [1] of OntologySummit2011 where Peter Yim identified the following
>> audiences for the Open Ontology Repository group's messages to be delivered:
>>
>> (i) policy makers, (ii) budget holders, (iii) Technology Decision Makers
>> (CIOs and Architects), (iv) Implementers (engineers and developers), (v)
>> users/consumers of the technology, and (vi) educators
>
> Thanks, Marcia, that is very helpful.


+1


>> My suggestion to this statement is to widen the 'libraries' part to include information centers. I found the following description of is also helpful (still not inclusive enough):
>> "the library and information science (LIS) community, which is inclusive of museums, archives, and other cultural institutions." [3]
>>
>> What I have in mind are three examples of the open bibliographic data contributors that may be beyond regular libraries: The National Science Digital Library (U.S.) [4] , the Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository (in progress), [5] and AGRIS of FAO [6]
>
> So then we get to the question of: what is *bibliographic* data? And is that what we are interested in, not just library data?
>
> I feel cautious about expanding much beyond libraries because we need to make some generalizations about circumstances, needs, and motivations. To do that, we have to define a fairly coherent set of organizations. One reason to avoid expanding to "bibliographic data" is that there are many commercial enterprises that have bib data as their product, and their circumstances are very different to that of the (generally) non-profit, quasi-governmental institutions that libraries generally are. I don't know much about the situation of research organizations that also produce bibliographic data. There are, for example, professional organizations that make income off of their publications, including indexes to their publications, which is bibliographic data.
>
> Here was what I was thinking of in terms of defining "library data":
>
> - data describing information resources that is created by and/or curated by libraries.
>
> The purpose here was to exclude things like patron data, acquisitions and funding data, circulation data, etc. The focus is on information resources only. But defining the *institution* is also difficult. Language expanding beyond libraries but not too far tends to refer to "cultural and educational institutions". I don't know if people would interpret that to include research organizations like the ones you mention. We also need to think about what people might consider to be "information resources." Is the data in a genome database "information resources?"
>
> As I think this through, I sometimes feel like leaving it at libraries may be the easiest thing to do. ;-)
>


:-)

That being said, why not try to keep our life simple and just say that our scope encompasses the data which is the focus of our use cases? I think it covers pretty much all kind of data we've been discussing so far, and perhaps even a bit more.
That's perhaps conceptually less satisfying, but that's a quite practical way around the problem. And it is something we can defend, I believe. It is data that is relevant for libraries, after all, and libraries may end up hosting quite a bit of it.

Antoine

Received on Thursday, 3 March 2011 21:50:08 UTC