[Chris Morris]

HI Punkish,
That’s a huge increase in scope for the RDA.
“Responses to queries” that are used for research include scientific papers and the output of supercomputer simulations. It would be great to be able to make legally interoperable everything that is binary encoded. But I suggest that it’s useful to start with the results of experiments and observations. There’s plenty of work to do there.
Regards,
Chris
—–Original Message—–
From: punk.kish=***@***.***-groups.org [mailto:***@***.***-groups.org] On Behalf Of punkish
Sent: 16 November 2015 01:40
To: Enrique Alonso García; RDA/CODATA Legal Interoperability IG
Cc: Jean-Bernard Minster
Subject: [rda-legalinterop-ig] Re: [rda-legalinterop-ig] Food of thought
…
To me, data are “something” used by researchers and scientists irrespective of where they come from and how they are stored, managed and accessed. In a computing sense, they are a response to a query. What happens behind the scene to deliver that response is out of scope for this IG. All that matters is the legal interoperability (not semantic or technological or any other interoperability) of that data with other data. If we establish and promote that, in my view we’d have performed a very valuable service.
Many thanks.
…

Discussion

[Puneet Kishor]

So, the scope of my semantics was too broad because I made some assumptions about context. When I alluded to “response to queries,” I didn’t mean a query like, “Hey Chris, could I have the paper on the great unconformity that you published last year?” A response to that query will be, hopefully, a research paper, but that is not what I was suggesting. Instead, how about, “Oi Chris, could you please point me to the netCDF file on temperature model for Greenland that you used in March?” If I am lucky enough to get that netCDF file from you, I want to make sure I can mix it with some water isotope data I have in ERDAS format without running afoul of any legal restrictions.
It doesn’t matter how I get the data—by calling and asking you for it, over FTP, by `scp`, on a 5¼ floppy via FedEx, through a RESTful service, or, lord have mercy, in an email attachment—what I want is legal clarity for its use. Clearly, some results will be copyrightable and others not, some will have certain other restrictions and others not. The key is clarity so we can maximize interoperability.
Let me say two things again:
1. While data come in a gazillion formats and modes, but I don’t understand what is so fundamentally different about them that they can’t be made legally interoperable. Would love to know.
2. If after three years of work, we come up with recommendations for only ‘simple databases’ and observations, I would be very disappointed.
—
Puneet Kishor
Just Another Creative Commoner
http://punkish.org/About

[Author]

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