Without wanting to disappear up an ontology of ....
On 12 Mar 2009, at 16:43, Leslie Carr wrote:
> On 12 Mar 2009, at 16:36, Peter Burnhill wrote:
>
>> I think repositories are a place to store things.
> Store? Get? Keep? They're all services :-)
well, they are verbs/actions, and as noted below, I am wary of using
repository as a word for every set of managed data - as a variant of
database, say.
I need a bit of assistance to separate Store & Keep, but would expect
that Put (deposit/ingest) & Get have to be among the minimum set of
verbs. In a source repository, which has that set, there is greater
need to attend to amend/edit and provenance/trail than is usual among
the repositories of objects usually included in discussion. Being a
'data person', I am aware of some of the natural history of data
generation (manufacture/collection) and the management of databases
and datasets but not yet convinced that there is as much carry-over
as supposed.
>
>> I've never signed up to the idea that they are a set of services,
>> except that a repository might be thought to be capable of
>> supporting three essential services: ingest (deposit), keep-safe
>> and access (use). Of course, for a digital/network repository
>> each of those may have multiple interpretation: typically m2m as
>> well as hci for the ingest and access, say. At least that is how
>> we conceived the minimally sufficient functionality for Jorum.
>> Keep-safe also needs some interpretation.
>
> Perhaps the key part of a source repository is that it is made to
> look after (store, get, keep) a large number of highly
> synchronised, formally interpretable modules. The services (oops)
> that it offers are related to the business of using (and reusing)
> software code. Of course, code is manufactured and used by users,
> so the whole social network thingy might look very familiar.
>
> As for code preservation (language migration, version retrofitting
> etc) well, that is an issue, but no-one is suggesting that a
> specialised group of librarians will do it instead of the code
> producers themselves.
data librarians and data curators do deploy information management
skills, rather than leave it to the data producers (nstrumentalists?)
or even the researchers, but I digress
Peter
> --
> Les
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