Developing a 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics Research (2014) / Chapter Skim
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3 Issues to Be Addressed
3 Issues to Be Addressed
Pages 55-71
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From page 55... ...
Historically, many of the most important ontologies, taxonomies, and other knowledge organization systems and services in mathematics started as the research project of an individual mathematician or a small handful of mathematicians working in close collaboration. There are both social and technical challenges to establishing such partnerships.
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From page 56... ...
Cognizant of the variety of ways to serialize ontologies and taxonomies and of the realities of how idiosyncratic serialization schemes adopted by individual researchers can be, it will be incumbent on the DML to work with partners to develop mappings and automated tools for transforming ontologies from one standard to another and from an idiosyncratic 1 Currently,the Representational State Transfer (or RESTful) model of Web services enjoys broad consensus for this kind of scenario (see Pautasso et al., 2008)
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From page 57... ...
Here, the primary challenge is to be seen as complementary and enhancing, not competitive, while navigating constructive and effective partnerships with publishers, societies, Web services, and others, both specific to mathematics and those serving the much broader scholarly community. These entities control access to much of the mathematical literature under copyright.
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From page 58... ...
ENGAGING THE MATHEMATICS COMMUNITY As discussed throughout this report, it is essential that the DML engage the mathematics community as it works to cultivate and make sense of available mathematics knowledge. This report does not attempt to recommend how to do this but simply states that this is an important consideration for a future DML planning.
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From page 59... ...
If the DML is to be successful as a platform that enables mathematical users to access information and each other more easily in their pursuit of mathematical learning, then these users will be a huge resource to the DML. Like in Wikipedia, individual items such as papers, theorems, formula, comments, or open problems will be followed and maintained by volunteers.
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From page 60... ...
Dealing with Highly Distributed Data Sources The base layer of mathematical publications is stored in a large number of widely distributed repositories owned and controlled by a ariety of v agents -- commercial and academic publishers and various digital libraries (JSTOR, Project Euclid, arXiv, etc.) -- as is the secondary indexing layer (bMATH, MathSciNet, Google Scholar, Scirus, Microsoft Academic z Search, CrossRef, etc.)
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From page 61... ...
, the acknowledgement of primary sources through citation, and, more recently in the digital environment, the use of digital object identifiers and http links to point to sources. Born-digital enhancements, such as the creation of derivative works from the existing base layer of book and journal data, will necessarily require indications of provenance, but the committee believes that this can be accomplished through open licensing.10 For bibliographic data in the 10 Two options include the Creative Commons Attribution -- Share Alike License, which has been adopted widely and successfully by Wikipedia for user-contributed content such as anno tations and reviews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_ Commons_ ttribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License, last modified on May 13, 2013)
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From page 62... ...
Two separate issues with validating bibliographic data need to be considered: • The provision and maintenance of adequate schemas for the repre sentation of mathematical bibliographic data records and the capa bility to check that the structure of a particular record is compliant with the schema; and • The correctness or accuracy of particular data elements as they appear in a particular record. Regarding the first issue, the committee expects multiple schemas for the representation of mathematical bibliographic records to coexist for a long time to come, due to a lack of heterogeneity of potential data sources and because normalizing records from different sources to confirm to a single schema would be an unnecessary cost.
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From page 63... ...
The level of interoperability required varies according to service requirements. The committee anticipates that as the DML moves increasingly beyond formally published mathematics literature to also deal with nonbibliographic metadata, the resources needed for metadata remediation and higher levels of interoperability will grow.
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From page 64... ...
These services would require enhanced data security. This would, however, impose a considerable administrative and legal burden on the organization managing the DML.
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From page 65... ...
Keeping these data segmented from other data and not selling them or giving out user lists can preserve user privacy. Another reason to have users register is to provide automated links to various social media systems and other online search systems, making it possible for the user to maintain a consistent user profile across tools.
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From page 66... ...
While it might be tempting to build a system based on openly available material, such as mathematics heritage literature, the committee is convinced that the DML can be productive only if it has systematic input from and enthusiastic support by the mathematical community, which is unlikely to happen if the scope is restricted to open literature. In addition, it is envisioned that the DML computational services will be hospitable to new forms of mathematical scholarly communication (preprints, review papers, books, video material, etc.)
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From page 67... ...
Finding practical solutions to the challenges of compartmentalization, navigation, access, and maintenance -- or at least compromises that allow progress -- is the main challenge facing DML development. Recommendation: The Digital Mathematics Library should be open and built to cooperate with both researchers and existing services.
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From page 68... ...
Community information projects often require both an inspired creator, often unrewarded at the start, and eventually a transition to a paid staff a fter the work grows beyond the capacity of an individual, even an individual assisted by a crowd-sourced effort. For example, arXiv was started by Paul Ginsparg alone at Los Alamos National Security Laboratory but is now run by the Cornell University Library.
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From page 69... ...
The DML software would include mathematical knowledge, so that it could display properly formatted theorems and recognize structural similarities, often not possible in the numerous existing collaborative software offerings. If the DML can provide a good software solution for managing mathematical entities, and deal with the management of that software in a central way, it can provide something that a large number of different mathematical communities could adapt for their own purposes, hopefully maintaining some centrally supported capabilities (version control, linking, math display, search, etc.
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From page 70... ...
Both Google Scholar22 and Microsoft Academic Search23 do a huge amount of fully automated data processing of general academic bibliographic data. The methods behind these services could undoubtedly be brought to bear on more specialized data mining and data structuring tasks of the kind relevant to text mining the mathematical literature for formulas and the like.
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From page 71... ...
ISSUES TO BE ADDRESSED 71 von Ahn, L
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