Ed, Corey -
I also assumed that Ed wasn't suggesting that we literally use github as
our platform, but I do want to remind folks how far we are from having
"people friendly" versioning software -- at least, none that I have seen
has felt "intuitive." The features of git are great, and people have
built interfaces to it, but as Galen's question brings forth, the very
*idea* of versioning doesn't exist in library data processing, even
though having central-system based versions of MARC records (with a
single time line) is at least conceptually simple.
Therefore it seems to me that first we have to define what a version
would be, both in terms of data but also in terms of the mind set and
work flow of the cataloging process. How will people *understand*
versions in the context of their work? What do they need in order to
evaluate different versions? And that leads to my second question: what
is a version in LD space? Triples are just triples - you can add them or
delete them but I don't know of a way that you can version them, since
each has an independent T-space existence. So, are we talking about
named graphs?
I think this should be a high priority activity around the "new
bibliographic framework" planning because, as we have seen with MARC,
the idea of versioning needs to be part of the very design or it won't
happen.
kc
On 8/27/12 11:20 AM, Ed Summers wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Corey A Harper <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I think there's a useful distinction here. Ed can correct me if I'm
>> wrong, but I suspect he was not actually suggesting that Git itself be
>> the user-interface to a github-for-data type service, but rather that
>> such a service can be built *on top* of an infrastructure component
>> like GitHub.
> Yes, I wasn't saying that we could just plonk our data into Github,
> and pat ourselves on the back for a good days work :-) I guess I was
> stating the obvious: technologies like Git have made once hard
> problems like decentralized version control much, much easier...and
> there might be some giants shoulders to stand on.
>
> //Ed
--
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
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