Open Corpus Adaptation++ in GALE : friend or foe?

"Open" has quickly become the hottest topic in any field related to information, including open government data, open learning resources, open user models, … Open Corpus Adaptation has been defined as the ability to perform adaptation to resources located anywhere on the Web. This leaves the definition of and control over the adaptation in a central place. GALE adds the ability to have the adaptation (definition) distributed over the Web. In this paper we describe how GALE achieves this functionality and we raise the question whether this is actually a desired feature or potentially a dangerous addition with unintended consequences.