[Foundation-l] IEEE LOM

Sun Jun 5 00:57:29 UTC 2005

Hi. I find it rather odd that nobody so far seems to have responded to this 
interesting proposal. So I am making a modest attempt. I have to admit that 
I just ask questions & clarifications mostly, and I am not sure if others 
have the same questions. 

----- Original Message -----
From: Gerard Meijssen 
Sent: Sat, 04 Jun 2005 08:10:53 +0200
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] IEEE LOM

>>However if 50% of the Dutch data is of an universal nature, it would 
>>mean that this 50% does not need to be entered for the articles in other languages. 
>>Hosting this metadata on the Wikimedia servers makes sense; 

I think I want to learn more about this part. What do you mean by the universal data? 

Some of the IEEE data are common to all Wikipedia (or Wikimedia) articles/pages so that 
they do not have to be manually entered for individual articles/pages separately, but 
could simply be implemented at a different level? 

>>it allows for the opening up of Free content in a proprietary world. 
>>It would make a huge deduction in cost for every second language implementing the IEEE LOM data.

I want to know more about these statements, too. 

What are some of the expected benefits of tagging the contents with IEEE LOM? Are you suggesting 
many commercial content providers will take Wikipedia contents and offer them as part of their 
contents? That sounds good to me (reuse of contents is good in principle in my opinion).

I also wonder about how they will comply with GFDL that requires, among other things, that 
contents should not be technically protected for people to read or copy, and that no other 
terms than license will be applied. Well, that's their (those commercial content providers) 
business to figuire things out, so perhaps the question is not very relevant to our discussion. 

>The questions I put to you are:
>*   Are we willing to host open standard meta data for the educational world.
>*   Are we willing to cooperate with organisations that are interested in implementing this data.
>*   How will we manage such things; funds can be found to pay people doing this kind of work - can we consider this
>
>Thanks,
>  GerardM

Am I correct in assuming that what they want is that somehow we (Dutch Wikipedians, or Wikipedians 
in general) will tag our contents in the way specified in IEEE LOM? And they will pay for the server and 
traffic in return? Is that the deal they are proposing? 

Immediate question that I have, in that case, is that:
*Do they want to somehow host the Dutch Wikipedia only, on a separate server? 

*Did they consider creating a mirror themselves, and do all the tagging by themselves? In that case, 
for good or not, they perhaps need only a few experienced Wikipedians as advisors/consultants. Not 
particularly an exciting choice, but could be quite sensible. 

Cheers, 

Tomos