Greetings.
On 2012 Nov 7, at 11:05, Chris Rusbridge wrote:
> It's a fair question, Matthew. I think this effort could be more useful and achieve better coverage than previous file format "registry" efforts because it is not centralised, and recognises and builds on the good will and needs of people rather than institutions. PRONOM is focused on the needs of government, and does not have the resources to "vet" contributions from citizens. I don't understand the governance or contribution model of UDFR (if it is indeed more than a completed project), but its system is far too complicated for us poor citizens to understand and use. At least the information on the JustSolve wiki is accessible to all of us, and useful to many.
I have the same anxieties as Matthew, and a response very similar to Chris's.
My first reaction to Chris's announcement was 'here we go again', but on reflection I think that a wiki is exactly the right place for this sort of thing, since wikis have a 'heuristic air' which is sympathetic to a naturally rather heuristic problem.
The problem with wikis, of course, is that their content can be hard to repurpose. If there were some templates in the wiki, which could support infoboxes, they would be very naturally harvestable (MediaWiki is good at those).
I can imagine, for example, seeing in the justsolve.archiveteam.org pages
{filetype|name=FITS|extension=.fits,.fts|name=Flexible Image Transport System|seealso=http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/|mime=image/fits,application/fits}
(I may have my MediaWiki syntax awry). That would produce a very useful infobox on the page, and be eminently scrapable into some other database.
All the best,
Norman
--
Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
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