Developing a 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics Research (2014) / Chapter Skim
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4 Strategic Plan
4 Strategic Plan
Pages 72-90
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From page 72... ...
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES The committee envisions the next step in advancing mathematics to go beyond traditional mathematical publications and take advantage of the mathematical information and knowledge stored in those publications to create a network of information that can be easily explored and manipulated. There is a compelling argument that through a combination of machine learning methods and editorial effort by both paid and vol 72
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From page 73... ...
The committee feels that today -- through reliance on a broad, distributed community, adherence to emerging standards and best practices, the use of new distributed collaboration and editing workflow models, and reliance on the affordances of emerging technologies such as linked open data and machine learning methods -- these content and metadata analyses can be accomplished successfully in a distributed fashion -- that is, without having to acquire, process, or store the entire universe of all mathematics publications centrally. While the approach outlined would require the central (or at least centrally coordinated)
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From page 74... ...
, which standardized mathematical typesetting and revolutionized research mathematics publications. The DML architecture should adhere as much as possible to contemporary and evolving Web architecture standards for all its services, especially the standards of linked open data for publishing structured data on the Web so that it can be interlinked and become more useful.
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From page 75... ...
Recommendation: The Digital Mathematics Library should serve as a nexus for the coordination of research and research outcomes, includ ing community endorsements, and encourage best practices to facilitate knowledge management in research mathematics. Competition and Cooperation with Other Organizations To the greatest extent consistent with its goals and principles, the DML should seek to cooperate with and not to compete with existing information services and communication and desktop tools that are widely used by the mathematical community.
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From page 76... ...
In areas where data standards are well established, such as for basic bibliographic data elements, such cooperation may be achieved by the DML organization with different data sources and services individually. For more complex data objects, especially those representing mathematical concepts, a community process, such as those commonly conducted by the World Wide Web Consortium,4 should be involved in the selection and adoption of data standards by the DML.
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From page 77... ...
9 European Digital Mathematics Library, EuDML Metadata Schema Specification (v2.0-final) , https://project.eudml.org/eudml-metadata-schema-specification-v20-final, accessed January 16, 2014.
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From page 78... ...
It should also provide guidance for best practices in managing various data and metadata formats and support basic communication spaces, such as an email list or help desk for data managers encountering issues in cleaning and converting diverse data sets of interest to the DML community. Examples of conversion tools for bibliographic data that are already very useful, although relatively unknown, are pdftotext,10 MREF,11 EJP-ECP Reference List Formatter,12 inSPIRE-HELP,13 BibSonomy Scapers,14 Google Refine,15 and Beautiful Soup.16 The creation of such data-conversion tools is typically a fairly straightforward programming task in which the difficulty depends on the complexity of the tool.
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From page 79... ...
Summary of Principles Consistent application of the principles in this section to the representation of mathematical information and conceptual knowledge in the World Wide Web will enable the mathematical community to achieve the most effective instantiation of the DML as an openly navigable representation of the universe of mathematical concepts, formulas, and relations. To achieve this, the DML would be just as accessible to human users as Wikipedia is today, with the same open license for text contributions and 17 OpenURL COinS: A Convention to Embed Bibliographic Metadata in HTML, Stable Version 1.0, http://ocoins.info/, accessed January 16, 2014.
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From page 80... ...
Recommendation: A Digital Mathematics Library organization should be created to manage and encourage the creation of a knowledge-based library of mathematical concepts such as theorems and proofs. Recommendation: The Digital Mathematics Library organization should be an advocate for the mathematics community and help develop plans for development and funding of open information systems of use to mathematicians.
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From page 81... ...
The committee envisions the DML organization as a coalition of member partners with commitment to the DML concept -- the creation of a substantial digital representation of an open collection of mathematical information and knowledge -- and to the DML development principles. The DML organization could be governed by the mathematical sciences community through an organization such as the International Mathematics Union (IMU)
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From page 82... ...
INITIAL DEVELOPMENT Initial development of the DML would benefit from focusing on recruiting partners with potential data sources and resources, beginning a collection of mathematical entities to achieve some of the desired capabilities described in Chapter 3, and providing a foundational platform on which most of these capabilities might imaginably be achieved in a 10- or 20-year time frame. The committee sees value in separate groups working on the technological infrastructure and on the administration of these projects, because they require different kinds of technical expertise, community input, and project management for their success.
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From page 83... ...
and its member societies, FIZ Karlsruhe, European Mathematical Society, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and similar organizations outside North America, existing mathematics digital libraries (such as HathiTrust and the EuDML)
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, Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/, accessed January 16, 2014) , and various library catalog tools.
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From page 85... ...
This would aid in the creation of a Web of mathematical information that supports further processing by modern methods of graphical data analysis and may yield unexpected visualizations and insights into the structure of the mathematical universe. The proposed development would likely benefit from starting small, demonstrating the successful ingestion of data and exposure of various facets incrementally, leveraging available ontologies and services, and building new ones as needed.
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From page 86... ...
However, the amount of financial resources necessary is obviously an important component of evaluating the future development of the DML, and the committee provides the following recommendation for evaluating these resources before DML development. Recommendation: The initial DML planning group should set up a task force of suitable experts to produce a realistic plan, timeline, and prioritization of components, using this report as a high-level blueprint, to present to potential funding agencies (both public and private)
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From page 87... ...
However, three of the four team members have written multi-volume books about mathematics, as well as websites each having more than 10,000 pages, so they had some experience in covering a wide range of mathematics. There was not enough time in a 1-year project to cover the 100,000 pages of printed continued fraction literature, so the team tried to explore and cover various content and presentation aspects to see what might be possible in future efforts.
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From page 88... ...
The committee believes it is essential to include a distinguished mathematician in the senior management of the DML to provide credibility to the academic mathematics community and to gain startup funding and respectability in the nonprofit world. • Academic director.
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From page 89... ...
This would likely be a full-time staff person or contractor. Technical Resources A mathematics digital library requires a technical infrastructure.
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From page 90... ...
, • American Mathematical Society (MathSciNet) , • Wolfram, and • European technical partners in EuDML, including FIZ Karsruhe (zbMATH)
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