Some interesting posts elsewhere

I’m sorry for the gap in posting; I’ve been taking a couple of weeks of leave at the end of my trip to Australia. Since return I’ve been catching up on my blog reading, and there are some interesting posts around.

A couple of people (Robin Rice and Jim Downing in particular) have mentioned the post Modelling and storing a phonetics database inside a store, from the Less Talk, More Code blog (Ben O'Steen). This is a practical report on the steps Ben took to put a database into a Fedora Commons-based repository. He details the analysis he went through, the mappings he made, the approaches to capturing representation information, to making the data citable at different levels of granularity, and an interesting approach that he calls “curation by addition”, which appears to be a way of curating the data incrementally, capturing provenance information of all the changes made. It’s a great report, and I look forward to more practical reports of this nature.

Quite a different post on peanubutter (whose author might be Frank Gibson): The Triumvirate of Scientific Data discusses ideas that he suggests relate to the significant properties of science data. His triumvirate comprises

"content, syntax, and semantics, or more simply put -What do we want to say? How do we say it? What does it all mean?"

Oddly, the discussion associated with this blog post is on Friendfeed rather than associated with the blog itself. Very interesting to see the discussion recorded like that, and in the process see at least one sceptic become more convinced!

To me, there seemed to be strong resonances between his argument and some of the OAIS concepts, particularly Representation Information. However, context, syntax and semantics might be a more approachable set of labels than RepInfo!