[Air-L] Looking for examples of aggregation communities

[Baden Hughes]

Derek

Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) might fit. www.language-archives.org

The overall community architecture is of local repositories of
language/linguistic content, each described using a specific schema and
volcabulary (OLAC extends OAI), and then OLAC central services are provided
which aggregate this content into a larger collection.

The volunteer angle is that the catalogue of local repositories is published
by anyone from individual researchers through projects through educational
and research institutions through libraries/museums/archives. While OLAC as
a whole has had some funding from agencies like NSF, essentially the whole
community is driven by contributing to a larger goal of an extensive online
catalogue and repository of language materials.

Baden

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 1:03 PM, Derek Hansen <shakmatt at gmail.com> wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
> I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help
> amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them. The
> example we are examining is the Encyclopedia of Life, which aggregates
> data from many different scientific databases (and user-generated
> content such as Flickr images) into a coherent whole. The participants
> are called "curators" and their main role is to validate and approve
> content rather than create it. They also do a lot of work to integrate
> the original content into a coherent whole.
>
> What similar examples exist on the web today? What examples have
> existed for decades or centuries?
>
> Thanks ahead of time for any examples or thoughts.
> Derek Hansen
> Assistant Professor
> iSchool
> University of Maryland
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