Dr Simon Buckingham Shum writes
> The social processes by which a community comes to agree on a common
> technical vocabulary such as a metadata scheme, and the tools to facilitate
> its evolution by a distributed community, are of great interest to me --
> anyone got any case studies on how this works (or fails to)?
In my own discipline Economics, there has been a prolongued hostility between
people in favour of a central archive of preprints (a la Ginsparg) and
supporters of a more decentralised approach. There now seems to be a
convergence towards a flavour of the decentralised approach that allows for
any number of archives of papers and metadata to coexist, with a special
archive that only holds metadata on the other archives. A simple
attribute:value metadata format (a la ROADS) supports that scheme. You may
consult the web pages of this project at http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/RePEc, and
the archives of the RePEc-admin mailing list on mailbase.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
