[rclis] dblp & rclis

[Thomas Krichel]

  Hallo Michael,
  
  I am writing to you in connection with your work on DBLP and in
  relation to my contribution to a project called rclis. This is
  pronnounced like "reckless", and stands for "research in computing and
  library and information science." I cc the rclis mailing list.  The
  folks involved in are mainly from a library background but with good
  computing skills. We do not receive any financial support from anyone
  at the moment, all our work is a labor of love. Our idea is to build a
  public access dataset that document research in computing and library
  and information science. We hope that such a dataset will be a step
  towards implementing the idea of the open source software movement to
  the collection of metadata.  This is not a new idea. The RePEc project
  has been working on such dataset for the economics discipline for a
  long time, basically for over ten years, when I founded a small
  collection of online papers in Economics. The rclis has the same aims
  and share some of the method, but tries to apply more recent advances
  that are useful for this job such as XML and the OAI protocol. The
  cornerstone of the collection work are the Academic Metadata Format,
  see http://amf.openlib.org/doc/ebisu.html, and the Geneva protocol,
  see http://rclis.org/internal/geneva.html. These are not set in stone,
  but they should give you an idea of the sort of thing that we are up
  to. The final aim is a relational dataset with organization, people
  paper and collections. 
  
  Since you have already assembled a large collection of data, I hope
  you will work with our group. At least, we will certainly want
  to give you all the data that we will gather. We intend to work on
  three areas with your data (and other data that we are in the process
  of processing). Over the years, I have found that working together
  with others is a lot more fun, and may be a lot more productive
  than working on one's own.
  
  One is to work on the identification of full-text copies of the data
  refered to in the bibliographic information. We want to try this out
  on DBLP, initially, though we may later on extend application the
  technology to the RePEc. This is at the moment, as yet, at the ideas
  stage, see http://rclis.org/internal/konz.html.  No actual coding or
  results are available, when they are we would love to share them with
  you. You could incorporate it into the DBLP user services, and enable
  users to directly download the full text, provided we find the good
  one, which, for the more recent papers, I am pretty optimistic
  about. The system will not be ready for some time, I guess.  Once we
  have the full texts, other type of data gathering activities, such as
  citation analysis, are possible.
  
  Second, I have some funding from the Open Society Institute that will
  allow to building an author registration system.  This will allow
  authors to register and tell us which papers they have written. Such a
  system already work for 2500 authors in the RePEc databases through
  the RePEc author service. The funding pays for the development of an
  independent software to do this. The software is written by a
  consultant in Belarus, Ivan V. Kurmanov. I am staying in Minsk at his
  place now. I am writing the mail from there, the line is very slow and
  the delivery does not always work. I would like to include you in the
  steering committee for this project please let me know what you think
  about this. The project web site is at http://acis.openlib.org. Ivan
  and I hope to implement the software for RePEc, rclis and for the
  PhysNet connection of Ebs Hilf's team in Oldenburg. I am working with,
  them, the folks at arXiv, and Southampton. Southampton export citation
  data for the arXiv in AMF.
  
  Third, and more conservatively, we would like to export all the rclis
  in an OAI compatible interface. I have already built a such an
  interface for RePEc, and much of the code for this work should be
  reusable in this case. As a first step, I have translated some of your
  data into AMF, and given it a handle form as used by the Geneva
  protocol, the result is at http://netec.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/rclis/dbl.
  It under that form that I can put it in an OAI gatway, if you
  agree. I would hope that this would be a small further step
  in making sure that your work gains more of the international
  recognition that it deserves. 
  
  As I said, I am in Minsk now, but once I get back to NYC, 
  where I currently live, I can call you, costs about $1 an
  hour, and we can discuss a bit more where we see your and our work
  going to. I plan to come to my home in Saarland in May/June so 
  we could meet then. 
  
  Do svidanie ;-),
  

  Thomas Krichel                         http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                     RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel