It is impossible to categorize Eliot Christian. He is an advocate for search standards, a developer of a unified emergency warning system and ironically a man obsessed with cataloging the world's information. For 15 years, Christian, who manages of data and information systems at the U.S. Geological Survey, has prodded governments, industry and interest groups to create an electronic card catalog of human knowledge....In battling the digital chaos, Christian is an ardent promoter of the Global Information Locator Service (GILS), which is based on the International Organization for Standardization's specification for information search and retrieval. GILS, Christian's creation, responds to searches that reference information by title, subject, author, date and location. The original idea was to have employees assign those five labels to each piece of public government information, thereby systematically indexing and filing all public government data. But government officials dealt GILS a blow last month. National Institute of Standards and Technology officials proposed withdrawing it as a mandatory federal standard because modern search technology has eclipsed it....Besides dreaming of a more organized world of information, Christian has produced tangible results throughout his career. He has invented technologies and collaborated with lawmakers to improve access to government information. He has designed metadata maintenance code, client search software for Web browsers and Extensible Markup Language encoding rules....Christian is now detailed to the Federal Geographic Data Committee, an intergovernmental body created to make geospatial information accessible by anyone....Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, said Christian is one of his heroes. Kahle said it is because of people like Christian that the Internet has expanded and done as well as it has.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/08/2005 12:45:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
