Culture for Semantic Materials and the Semantic Web

The semantic web depends on shared cultural values which include:

  • Sharing (resources, tools, data, etc.)
  • Collaboration
  • Use of and contribution to semantic web resources

Watch this short, compelling video http://www.youtube.com/user/nyuhsl/videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2zK3sAtr-4 ) from NYU Health Sciences Library on why we MUST share data. Then…

…As we give and listen to presentations let’s ask ourselves:

  • Can I get hold of the data reported?
  • Can I read it into my machine?
  • Can I get the program used?
  • How would I know if I got the same results?

And when I run programs…

  • Could others repeat the work?
  • Could others build on my work?

What are we going to do to change this? Follow TBL: http://5stardata.info/

  • Make ALL our data available under open licence. Use CC-BY for text, CC0 for data.
  • Structure it. Use tables, not free text.
  • Use non-proprietary formats. Not Word, Not Excel.
  • Use W3C tools (XML, RDF, MathML, SVG) and their extensions to science (CML, etc.)
  • Create discipline-dependent dictionaries (see IUCr for crystallography http://www.iucr.org/resources/cif ).
  • Make our code OPEN (cf http://www.blueobelisk.org )
  • Put code and data on shared resources such as Bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org/petermr/pdf2svg ) and GitHub.
  • Build Wikipedia-like and OpenStreetmap-like communal resources. See http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye for crystals
  • develop unique identifier systems
  • link to other resources

And let’s do this through HACKFESTs.

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