FDsys US Government document archive as a social document? · Friday October 21, 2005
US historical and current Government publications are being put on the web, but are they missing a trick, by publishing a static document repository? Wouldn’t it be much more interesting to be able to annotate these historical documents?
The US Government’s Government Printing Office is running a future document content management system, the FDsys. They have an FDsys blog, where they are soliciting feedback. This GCN story talks about the project being fast tracked, thanks James. The GPO have published the FDsys project documents.
I wonder are they missing an opportunity, by solely treating the content as a publishing activity. They are planning on scanning the content and putting the documents online. Search and retrieval seem to to be the only end user tasks envisaged, see page 21 of the requirements document.
It doesn’t seem like they want to have these documents annotatable, like we did with the European Constitution, making it annotatable. They have fascinating historical content like the 1787 Federalist Papers with plans to go right to the present day.
It would seem a shame to lock this into a bunch of static pages, making it a commentable, linkable part of the web would be much more interesting. So if you are from the USA, then head to their FDsys blog and leave them a note. See the definition of a social document for what they could be making and have a look at talkeuro.
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More examples - annotated cpan NovelContext - a literature based social document project