#ImpactOCR - Digital publications and the national libraries

According to the #ISBN standard, the "format/means of delivery are irrelevant in deciding whether a product requires an ISBN". However, it is often assumed that a publication requiring an ISBN number is a commercial publication. In the USA and the UK for instance you have to buy your ISBN number or bar code while in Canada they are free because Canada stimulates Canadian culture.

When a standard is not universally applied, it loses application. When all publications are not registered a national library will have to maintain its own system when it is to collect a copy of all publications. As a result the ISBN is dysfunctional as a standard because it does not function as a standard.

When the Wikisourcerers finish the transliteration of a book, it deserves an ISBN number and, national libraries should be aware of these publications. This recognises and registered the work done in the Open Content world. When these books are registered, all the Open Content projects may know that they can concentrate on another book or source.

As the ISBN does not register all publications, it does not do what it is expected to do; function as a standard. 
Thanks,
       GerardM

Ordnance Survey data for #Wikimedia Commons III

With Multichill progress can be rapid. Earlier today I posted a template, this is the same template. It starts to come together :)

Thanks,
     GerardM

Ordnance Survey data for #Wikimedia Commons II

The Ordnance Survey 1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster map is being prepared. The skeleton for all the good stuff is being build. It looks like this and as it is, it is good for nothing..

Thanks,
    GerardM

Ordnance Survey data for #Wikimedia Commons

On its website, the Ordnance Survey, makes mapping data available in both a vector and a raster format. The cool thing is that this data is available under a license that is compatible with what we do.

The template

Because of the license and because such maps are so useful, Multichill is working on making the raster data available on Commons. All these separate rasters are not really convenient to browse these map of Britain. Needed is a tool that helps with moving from one map to the next. Multichill is working on a template called "Map tile navigation" that is to do the trick.
Thanks,The template
     GerardM

The #location of the Ruïnekerk is 52°40'10"N, 4°42'1"O

The Ruïnekerk is one on a list of monuments in Bergen (NH). This list is available on the Dutch Wikipedia and, this list was provided to the Dutch chapter by what can be considered the "copyright holder" for this data.

This is a well defined subset of clean data that exists in a Wikipedia. The problem that we face is that we do not know for many data-items who the copyright holder is. This is not only a problem in the free content world, it is no less a problem in the commercial world.

In Techcrunch there was an article proposing an open database with the kind of data we want to express in OpenStreetMap format. The funny thing is that almost all these commercial organisations have much of their data because of the cooperation of the public. That is in and of itself not enough of a reason to make such an open database freely licensed. What should be convincing is the ability of mashing data .. particularly with Wikipedia.
Thanks,
     GerardM

One website to inform about them all

The Dutch government announced "rijksoverheid.nl". It is the website where all Dutch governmental departments will provide data to the Dutch people. The roll-out started today and should be finished by the fourth quarter of 2010.

The information is available under a CC0 license. This is just another thing that makes me feel good about being Dutch.
Thanks,
      GerardM