Balisage Paper: Inconsistent XML as a barrier to reuse of Open Access Content
Daniel Mietchen
Museum für Naturkunde - Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions - und Biodiversitätsforschung, Germany
Open Knowledge Foundation, Germany
Chris Maloney
PMC/NCBI/NIH, Bethesda, MD
Nils Dagsson Moskopp
Humboldt University, Germany (student)
Abstract
In this paper, we will describe the current state of some of the tagging of articles within the PMC Open Access subset. As a case study, we will use our experiences developing the Open Access Media Importer, a tool to harvest content from the OA subset for automated upload to Wikimedia Commons.
Tagging inconsistencies stretch across several aspects of the articles, ranging from licensing to keywords to the media types of supplementary materials. While all of these complicate large-scale reuse, the unclear licensing statements had the greatest impact, requiring us to implement text mining-like algorithms in order to accurately determine whether or not specific content was compatible with reuse on Wikimedia Commons.
Besides presenting examples of incorrectly tagged XML from a range of publishers, we will also explore past and current efforts towards standardization of license tagging, and we will describe a set of recommendations related to tagging practices of certain data, to ensure that it is both compatible with existing standards, and consistent and machine-readable.