Casey - very well said!
I see a lot of discussions as I've entered the library world this
year in overdose capacity. I'd rather us focus our energies on
building simple working systems that take baby steps of progress and
iterate. Exposing the data from these systems is trivial, and plain
makes sense. Why not?
Erik
On May 16, 2007, at 10:12 PM, Casey Bisson wrote:
> Don't take the following as suggesting I'm against such an idea, just
> a few thoughts about how I'd like it to work.
>
> Most of our systems require significant pre-coordination and absolute
> relationships, but the web (and much of its success) stands in
> contrast to that.
>
> Google could have been built by requiring all websites to register
> their content and report their links, but it wasn't. And I think we'd
> all agree that it wouldn't work as well if it was.
>
> The library world is smaller, so it's somewhat less fantastic to
> expect that type of relationship here, but still I think there's
> something to be learned from the loose relationships found on the web.
>
> It's harder to describe how such systems might work, but the web
> teaches us that it's easier to implement and build on systems that
> allow loose relationships than those that demand strict compliance.
>
> What I'm really arguing for is leveraging what we've already got:
> we're publishing our catalogs to the web, so let's make sure we're
> putting them out there with good semantic markup so it's easy to
> parse the data out of them. That way we could build spiders that
> harvest that data from all those decentralized catalogs.
>
> What we do with it from there is another matter, but here's the big
> win: the architecture allows us to try lots of things in parallel,
> each making our own decisions about how to use it. That's important,
> because it will take us a while to make sense of our theories of how
> this does or should work, and it'll allow us to evolve more
> organically than with a centralized database.
>
> --Casey
Received on Thu May 17 2007 - 02:00:16 EDT