A recent article from LibConf.com discusses the implementation of semantic web technologies in public libraries. The article begins, “Why do we need a new Web?  We often forget the kinds of problems we have with the tools available to us, such as high recall and low precision with Google.  The web is very vocabulary dependent.  Today’s Web search engines do not group web pages, pull out concepts, or understand them.  There is no access to the deep web.”

This is where the semantic web comes in: “We do have tools that can handle complex queries such as Scopus.  These search engines can do this because they have clearly tagged relational databases on the back end.  The semantic web solution is to turn the Web into something like a database, with structured data, controlled vocabularies, and linking.  The point is to create machine-actionable data because computers visit websites as often as people do.”

The article goes on to discuss some obstacles to implementing semantic web technologies in libraries, including, “Competing vocabularies: how many ways can you describe a book, article, or place? Co-referencing: different URIs are being created for the same thing… Linked data sets are being released without good examples or good ways to search the data… Preservation:  What happens when an ontology or linking hub disappears?  Chaos could result…. Ownership:  Who owns the data?  In an academic environment, we do not own the data; the vendors do.”

The article concludes, “All of these issues involve hard work on top of what librarians do now.  We are in an age of chaotic innovation in libraries.  Fortunately, there are some ‘chaos tamers’ available to help us.” These “tamers” include the W3C Linked Library Data Incubator Group, the IFLA Semantic Web Interest Group, and the CKAN Linked Library Data Group.

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ Yinghai

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