[Foundation-l] Dublin Core and TEI

[John Vandenberg]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Aubrey <zanni.andrea84 at gmail.com> wrote:
>...
>
> The issue of metadata is nontheless serious, because it's one of the most
> important flaws of Wikisource: not applying standards (i.e Dublin Core) and not
> having a proper tools for export/import and harvest metadata is still make us
> amateurs, at least for "real" digital libraries (who focus mainly on the
> metadata stuff, and sometimes provide either texts or images (it is really rare
> to have both)).

This is also a problem with Wikimedia Commons.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Dublin_Core

> The Perseus project is an *amazing* project, but I regard them far more ahead
> than us. The PP is actually a Virtual Research Environment, with tools for
> scholars and researcher for studying texts, (concordances and similar stuff).

I agree.  I would go further; PP will always be far more advanced than
a mediawiki system.

They store their data in TEI format, which is an extremely rich
standard.  Wikisource can incorporate some of the TEI concepts by
using templates, but I doubt we could ever be a leader in this area,
nor do I think we want to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative

> It happens that I just finished my Master thesis about collaborative digital
> libraries for scholars (in the Italian context), and the outcome is quite clear:
> researcher do want collaborative tools in DLs, but wiki system are
> to simple and (right now) too naive to really help scholars in their work (and
> there's a lot of other issues I'm not going to explain here).
>
> I would love to have PP people involved in collaboration with Wikisource, just
> don't know if this is possible.

I agree.  PP and Wikisource are too different, and have very little to
gain from the other.  PP wants to improve/increase collaboration &
community, but not at the expense of loosing the quality of their
metadata.  Wikisource wants to improve quality and metadata, but not
at the expense of the ability to collaboration and our simple editing
interface.

Again, interoperability is the first step towards useful
'collaboration'.  i.e. Wikisource needs to export TEI.  Then we could
feed our poorly annotated/described sources into PP, where the
academic community would then add the metadata.

TEI export would also be useful for wiktionary.

> Just one more thing: why this awesome thread has not been linked to the
> source-l? Probably that would have been the best place to discuss.

;-)

--
John Vandenberg