[Esip-preserve] Data Citations in the Age of Electronic Publication

[Curt Tilmes]

The the PDF, in addition to the page number I would include
the section reference "Book IV, Chapter II"  Still a pretty
blunt tool, but it will survive printings with different
formats.

For the satellite example, I think you've got to consider
both humans and machines trying to figure out certain
information.  The reference could follow a similar scheme,
with Volume, Book, Chapter, Section, Part, etc. serving
to narrow down a text reference, we can use things like
Granule, File, SDS (for HDF and friends), channel, tile
number, scan number, etc. For XML files, XPath provides
a very nice, very precise way of navigating the structured
data file to the fields of interest.

Curt

On 9/2/12 9:08 AM, Bruce Barkstrom wrote:
> For "recreational reading", I decided to peruse Adam Smith's
> "The Wealth of Nations" to see if I could find some context
> on his use of the famous term "invisible hand".  I thought this
> referencing would be trivial and so I dug out my edition of the
> printed book from Barnes and Noble.  Getting this copy was a
> mistake - there's no index
>
> I wanted to make some notes for comparison with works by other
> authors.  With print works, I would usually reference a page number.
> Not having an index is thus a serious impediment
> to referencing the term in the original text.  I then tried the Internet
> and found a free, downloadable version of the text as a pdf file.
> Luckily, this version of the book's text included page numbers,
> although I don't think there's a reference to which print edition
> the copy came from.  The electronic copy is in pdf, so
> I could use full text search.  Then, I could compare page numbers
> in the Barnes and Noble edition with the ones in the on-line pdf.
> The term "invisible hand" appears in the B&N edition on p. 300,
> while the electronic file has it on p. 364.  The term is apparently
> used just once.  As a mild added frustration, the pdf file doesn't
> have an index either.  Could just be that Smith's original work
> doesn't have an index, since it was published in 1776 and as
> far as I can recall, adding an index to a book was not standard
> until much later in the history of publishing.
>
> If I extend the issue of specific references to material in Earth
> science data, it creates some interesting scenarios.  Our usual
> discussion of citations seems to treat these references as a pretty
> "blunt" tool.  If I recall correctly, annotation schemes in the
> humanities have a great many details for making the cited
> material precise.  I'm not sure our discussion of citations have
> the same level of precision.
>
> If all we care about is giving credit to the "authors" or "editors",
> the approach we've taken so far is probably adequate.  I think
> it would let other researchers provide entries for bibliographies
> or lists of references in published papers.  These would add to
> professional credit for younger members of the academic
> communities.
>
> However, there are other cases where we need much more careful
> references.  As a concrete example, consider trying to develop the
> appropriate citation of the calibration gain used to derive the
> reflected radiance in a channel of a satellite-borne instrument that was
> going
> to be used in determining whether a scene was cloudy.  Changing
> the gain might change the pixels identified as "cloudy", so the
> calibration is critical to determining the cloud cover or
> the vegetation properties of the scene in some interesting part
> of an image.  To complicate the context, assume that the measurement
> was being made several years after launch and that the data production
> source code that produced the data had undergone several revisions.
> The same is true of the calibration coefficients.  How do we create
> citations that will reference the proper pixels of interest in the data
> file, along with the proper version of the source code and the proper
> version of the calibration coefficients?  Note that neither the data
> nor the calibration coefficients are necessarily in pdf files for which
> it would be possible to do a "full-text" search - and it might very
> well be that there would be so many references to particular numerical
> values that a human reserarcher would be overwhelmed.  In addition, while
> "provenance tracking" is certainly an element in this scenario,
> it isn't necessarily the only part of the problem.  For "scholarly" work
> at the
> resolution of humanities work, we're also going to need to be
> able to deal with references to subsets of data and context in
> ways that allow us to find things -- even if the data format in
> an archive rearranges the order of the data elements - or separates
> the original content into new containers.
>
> Any notion about how to deal with this kind of issue?
>
> Bruce B.
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Mark A. Parsons <parsonsm at nsidc.org
> <mailto:parsonsm at nsidc.org>> wrote:
>
>     Sorry small change to the first one
>
>     Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). 2012.  Data
>     Citation Guidelines for Data Providers and Archives. edited by M. A.
>     Parsons, B. Barkstrom, R. R. Downs, R. Duerr, C. Tilmes  and the
>     ESIP Data Preservation and Stewardship Committee. ESIP Commons. [DOI
>     or ARK].
>
>     -m.
>
>     On 31 Aug 2012, at 10:47 AM, Mark A. Parsons wrote:
>
>      > Hi Erin and Commons Committee
>      >
>      > The Preservation and Stewardship has agreed on how we think our
>     two documents should be cited:
>      >
>      > Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). 2012.
>       Data Citation Guidelines for Data Providers and Archives. edited
>     by M. A. Parsons, B. Barkstrom, R. Downs, R. Duerr, C. Tilmes  and
>     the ESIP Data Preservation and Stewardship Committee. ESIP Commons.
>     [DOI or ARK].
>      >
>      > Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). 2012.
>     Interagency Data Stewardship Guidelines . edited by H. K.
>     Ramapriyan, R. Duerr, and the ESIP Data Preservation and Stewardship
>     Committee. 2012. ESIP Commons. [DOI or ARK].
>      >
>      > Please advise when identifiers have been assigned.
>      >
>      > Cheers,
>      >
>      > -m.
>
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>


-- 
Curt Tilmes, Ph.D.
U.S. Global Change Research Program
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