towards a DataLink IVOA Note

[Norman Gray]

Françoise, hello.

On 2011 Oct 15, at 18:06, Francoise Genova wrote:

> I tend to think that having sustainable solutions
> for data citation is a critical requirement
> (ie, the funding model and its sustainability is
> not a detail). I remember very well at the
> beginning of the web, when CDS/ADS/NED and
> the journals decided to use the bibcode/refcode
> to network bibliographic services:  
> at that time it was not at all evident to see
> who was going to win the battle which was finally
> won by the DOI for which concerns bibliographic
> reference citations. 

Ah, I didn't mean to suggest that the funding model was just a detail, just that the people involved seem comfortable that the remaining problems are not technical ones (of course the non-technical problems can be the hardest ones).

I was this morning in touch with some of the UK DataCite people, and they said:

> Scalability of the level you suggest [I'd said: what about 10^8 DOI/yr?] has not been tested but we see no reason why our service cannot provide for this. Essentially we're happy to do this but suggest that some planning and staging is required.

They're talking about a flat subscription, around GBP 1000 + GBP500/year.

----

But I say all this with some diffidence.  I don't really have standing here -- I'm not an archive, and I'm more likely to be a consumer of the IVOA's citation solution than a provider for it.

However, as a result of projects over the last couple of years I've ended up talking to library people, and people involved in whole-academy digital preservation (as of course will you and others in the DC&P group), and I have the uncomfortable perception that the rest of the academy seems to be pressing ahead with plausible solutions while astronomy -- which would be a natural leader, given its experience -- seems disconnected from this activity.

Of course, this is at base due to a lack of FTEs, and perhaps due to a lack of obvious community urgency.  So this is me being Community, calling out from the floor!

> I'll post the talk I have prepared
> for the DataCP meeting.
> It contains two links to recent meetings/actions
> which tend to show that the debate on solutions for
> which concerns citations of data (or even on a
> compilation of best practices in that domain) is not over:

This is very reassuring, from my point of view.

> I would be interested to know if there is detailed information
> somewhere about the scalability of the DataCite solution.
> People I know from other disciplines who push for it
> want to declare 'campaign' data sets, and not each observation
> of a large observatory which is operated for many years.


I hope the comments above are relevant to this.  My impression is that the DataCite people haven't dedicated resources to experimenting with large-scale performance, because there hadn't been a community banging on their door demanding it.

It sounds as if we're on the edge of a substantial step forwards.  But we seem to have been on this threshold for quite a long time, now.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK