In a recent post at danbri.org, Dan Brinkley documents some of his work on NoTube (a European research project exploring Semantic Web and TV), reflects on the possibilities of linking bibliographic data with other web content, and calls for a contest to engage researchers in linked TV and bibliographic data.
Responding to Brinkley’s call via the DPLA listserv, Karen Coyle observes:
“A big and powerful chunk of knowledge organization that is just begging for exploitation is the fact that library records have classification numbers and subject headings from thesauri. All of this could now be correlated with an analysis of the full text. It’s only another step to associate this same information with non-library materials. The classifications have the advantage of being organized knowledge with implicit class membership and lots of interesting sibling relationships. What libraries have is not complete nor perfect, but it’s a seed to be built on, something that doesn’t exist when you do keyword indexing without any semantics.”
As part of LODLAM-DC, Jon Voss will deliver a free talk called “An Introduction to Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, & Museums” on Friday, September 16.
Based on an earlier talk given at NYPL Labs, Voss’s presentation will “explore the fundamental elements of Linked Open Data and discover how rapidly growing access to metadata within the world’s libraries, archives and museums is opening exciting new possibilities for understanding our past, and may help in predicting our future.”
This event is free and open to the public, so register soon. For a sneak peek, check out this slideshow from Voss’s earlier talk.
This just in: the New York Times recently launched Longitude, an interactive map of the day’s news leveraging Linked Open Data, as a featured project of its larger beta620 website.
As described by Evan Sandhaus, its developer, Longitude links NYT subject headings to geographic and corporate or biographical data from Geonames and Freebase:
“When you open Longitude you’ll see a number of “Times T” pins plotted out in a Google Map. The locations for these pins were all derived from Geonames. Click on any pin and you’ll be presented with a pop-up balloon containing a list of the ten most recent, relevant Times articles. But wait, there’s more! For some locations such as Missouri, your balloon will have one or two additional tabs: “Natives” and/or “Companies.” Click on one of these tabs and you’ll be presented with list of locally-born people and locally-headquartered organizations. You can even view Times articles for these people and organizations.”
Read Sandhaus’s pitch for Longitude, in which he also promises future posts about technical details of the app.
In an article for Wired Magazine titled “Why Open Data Alone is Not Enough,” Jesse Lichtenstein acknowledges the data divide and suggests how it could be bridged:
“The concern that open data may simply empower the empowered is not an argument against open data; it’s an argument against looking at open data as an end in itself. Massive data dumps and even friendly online government portals are insufficient. Ordinary people need to know what information is available, and they need the training to be conversant in it. And if people are to have anything more than theoretical access to the information, it needs to be easy and cheap to use. That means investing in the kinds of organizations doing outreach, advocacy, and education in the communities least familiar with the benefits of data transparency. If we want truly open government, we still have to do the hard work of addressing basic and stubborn inequalities. However freely it flows, the data alone isn’t enough.”
Linked Data and Libraries 2011 was held at the British Library Conference Centre in London on Thursday, July 14, 2011. Below find a selection of sessions and slideshows.
View the afternoon session below, or view the morning session here.
On the day of the conference, the British Library also introduced their new approach to publishing the British National Bibliography using linked data practices. Users can now preview the first subset of the LOD BNB, including books published or distributed in the UK since 2005, via the search service, the describe endpoint, and the SPARQL endpoint. Below are slides from a presentation by Neil Wilson, who heads the British Library’s Metadata Services, outlining the process behind creating the library’s LOD model.
Play with example records of an organization and a publication from the BNB preview, or check out the data model. To view more slides from Linked Data and Libraries 2011—including contributions from the Library of Congress and the University of Münster—visit the conference’s resource page.
Laura Campbell, CIO of the Library of Congress, delivered the keynote address at the 2011 SemTech Conference in San Francisco, CA. Her talk focused on “how linked data is helping us to do more with less” while managing the Library’s existing collections; maintaining its role as a leader in the distribution of canonical information; and following its mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to a born digital collection.
During her talk, Campbell said she hoped the takeaway would be that ”We need to get very clever about new methods of doing our mission, new methods of executing both getting the material and managing it and providing access to it.”
David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center, filmed these interviews at the LOD-LAM Summit in San Francisco on June 2-3, 2011.
Want to join the conversation? Respond to the W3C Linked Library Data Incubator Group‘s call for public comment on the draft of their report. Feedback can sent as comments to individual sections posted on their dedicated blog or by email to an archived public mailing list at public-lld@w3.org using descriptive subject lines such as ‘[COMMENTS] “Benefits” section.’
Via The Signal, LC’s compulsively readable blog on digital preservation:
“We have a vast amount of information on the internet, but we are missing the relationships needed to reach, discover and use this information to its fullest potential. Cultural heritage institutions and gatekeepers of knowledge are looking to provide open, linked data and help to build a better internet. Ed Summers, an Information Technology Specialist for the Office of Strategic Initiatives here at the Library maintains, ‘Linking makes the provenance of the items explicit, which will continue to be important to researchers on the Web. But perhaps more importantly it gives institutions a reason to participate in the project as a whole.’”
The W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group has been chartered from May 2010 through August 2011 to prepare a series of reports on the existing and potential use of Linked Data technology for publishing library data. The group is currently preparing:
A report which consists of, Benefits, Vocabularies and Datasets, Relevant Technologies, Implementation challenges, and Recommendations
We (LLD XG) invite comments from interested members of the public.
Feedback can sent as comments to individual sections posted on our dedicated blog or by email to an archived public mailing list at public-lld@w3.org using descriptive subject lines such as ‘[COMMENTS] “Benefits” section.’
Comments will be especially welcome through 22 July.
Reviewers should note that as with Wikipedia, the text may be revised and corrected by its editors in response to comments at any time, but that earlier versions of a document may be viewed by clicking on the History tab.
It is anticipated that the three reports will be published in final form by 31 August.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has received a $49,500 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conduct an in-depth survey of publications, projects, tools, and environments pertaining to semantic web, linked data, and RDF triples technologies. Simultaneously, Stanford University Libraries has received a parallel grant of $50,000 to conduct an invitational workshop intended to incorporate the results of the CLIR survey into a design for a scalable prototype system.
Linked data offers libraries, universities, and scholarly projects improved ability to cross-search and discover digital information. The survey will provide background for participants in a workshop to be held at Stanford University Libraries in summer 2011 that aims to develop specifications, requirements, and a basic technical design for a multinational, multi-institutional prototype demonstrating the viability and efficacy of a linked data environment for improving discovery and navigation. CLIR will publish the survey report following the workshop. The documents emerging from the workshop will also be published online.
“This is a significant grant for CLIR/DLF, as it builds upon our history of rigorous research and analysis of issues that are fundamentally important to our constituencies, as well as marking a new direction,” said CLIR President Chuck Henry. “Linked data has the potential to align and federate digital resources across thousands of institutions. It is thus an aspect of large-scale solutions that CLIR has placed at the core of its strategic mission.”
“We are at a point where the need is for leading libraries to get real about this technology,” commented Stanford University Librarian Mike Keller. “Using the CLIR study as a baseline for the state of the art, we intend to come out of the workshop with concrete, actionable plans for collaborative, distributed development of metadata conversion tools, as well as for access and visualization tools.”
