0.11 Response to roger bagnall paper: integrating digital papyrology  (Page 7/10)

In this architecture, the web resources—transcripts, images, annotations—can be anywhere, and made by anyone. Now, this appears to conflict with the first rule of our community that I declared above: that we require rigorous and complete declarations of credit, responsibility and quality. Actually: it does not. The RDF system allows us to attach statements of credit, responsibility and quality to everything we make: the equivalent of the “I approve this advertisement” statement affixed to political messages. Accordingly, one could easily retrieve, and include in one’s interface, only the transcripts approved by (for example) the International Digital Project partners; or the International Greek New Testament Project, or any other body. At the same time, the system is open to materials from anyone, and one can imagine ways in which good work could be recognized and rise to the top of the sorting process, in parallel with formal academic reviewing systems. Our aim here is to unite the traditional scholarly virtues of formal structure and authority with the vigor and accessibility of the Web.

I do not assert that our scheme must be the way forward. But I do assert that some such scheme must be created if we are to have real open access, in perpetuity, to really open data. Hence my third rule : open data on the web must be available to any form of access through intelligent metadata . Thanks to Web 2.0 and other technologies, most of the tools and standards we need are in place. We have OWL, and multiple projects have developed experience in RDF and related technologies. I mentioned NINES; in Europe the Discovery and other projects have levered RDF into their infrastructures. We can do this.

Bagnall implies, without fully stating his reasons, that moving away from project-crafted interfaces will aid the sustainability of digital resources. I’d like to spell out, further than he does, why he is right. In our architecture, we propose that all the fundamental elements of digital data—both the data itself, and the metadata describing it—is expressed in forms readily stored within fundamental digital library systems. We are already doing this with our projects in Birmingham: we are moving the data and metadata from these into our institutional repository. Because we are able to express all our data in standard forms (as image files in TIFF and JPG; as text files in XML; as metadata in RDF; with further metadata generated automatically from the data we deposit), these are easily stored within the institutional repository. Because the institutional repository is seen as a core university service, as central to the university as email and the library catalogue, this gives the best guarantee I can imagine that our data will survive. Because, too, this is our local repository it is responsive to our particular needs, for example control over sensitive material. Bagnall points out that we must reduce costs if we are to achieve sustainability. This approach reduces the costs for fundamental storage to a level readily carried by a university. Further, linking this to the massive world of digital library software carries many benefits: as digital library software becomes ever more sophisticated, the access to and tools provided for our data in digital library stores will become ever better.