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Libraries: Time To Take Your Place On The Web Of Data

Jennifer Zaino — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 01:20:53 +0000

At The Semantic Technology and Business conference in San Francisco Monday, OCLC technology evangelist Richard Wallis broke the news that Content-negotiation was implemented for the publication of Linked Data for WorldCat resources. Last June, WorldCat.org began publishing Linked Data for its bibliographic treasure trove, a global catalog of more than 290 million library records and some 2 billion holdings, leveraging schema.org to describe the assets.

“Now you can use standard Linked Data technologies to bring back information in RDF/ XML, JSON, or Turtle,” Wallis said. Or triples. “People can start playing with this today.” As he writes in his blog discussing the news, they can manually specify their preferred serialization format to work with or display, or do it from within a program by specifying to the http protocol for the format to accept from accessing the URI.

“Two hundred ninety million records on the web of Linked Data is a pretty good chunk of stuff when you start talking content negotiation,” Wallis told the Semantic Web Blog.

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The Future of Libraries, Linked Data and Schema.Org Extensions

Jennifer Zaino — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:00:19 +0000

Image Courtesy Flickr/ Paul Lowry

Yesterday The Semantic Link Podcast featured Karen Coyle, a consultant in library technology who’s consulted for esteemed institutions including the Library of Congress. Coyle discussed libraries’ long history with metadata, including with the MARC (machine-readable cataloging) format for nearly 50 years, and of sharing that metadata. That history helps explain why libraries, she said, are looking at semantic web technology – but also why changes to established processes are huge undertakings. “The move toward Linked Data will be the most significant change in library data in these two centuries,” she said, requiring the move from mainly textual data into using identifiers for things and data instead of strings.

Today, The Semantic Web Blog continues the discussion by sharing some perspectives on the topic from OCLC technology evangelist Richard Wallis. As noted in yesterday’s podcast, change has its challenges. “Getting the library community to get its head around Linked Data as a replacement for MARC … will be a bit of a challenge,” Wallis says. While more members of the library community are starting to “get” Linked Data, and what can be accomplished by extracting entities and linking between them, some still struggle with why change can’t just occur within the MARC format itself or its successor Resource Description and Access (RDA), that provides atomistic, machine-actionable data and machine-interpretable relationships. RDA, Wallis reminds us, took a decade from inception to publication and business model.

“The ramifications of turning into the Linked Data world are quite deep and meaningful but it will be a few years for that to be established in the library world,” Wallis says.

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The Semantic Link – February, 2013: “Libraries” with Karen Coyle

Eric Franzon — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:55:50 +0000

On Friday, February 8, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Eric Franzon, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about libraries, an area that has seen a great deal of activity in the Linked Data space recently.

“The Linkers” were joined by a very special guest to discuss what’s been happening in the library world: Karen Coyle.
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Richard Wallis Talks About New Role At OCLC

Jennifer Zaino — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:40:41 +0000

Linked data is becoming even more interesting to the OCLC, a non-profit, membership, computer library service and research organization of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories around the world. It’s named Richard Wallis — formerly of the U.K.’s Talis Linked Data and Semantic Web Technology company and one of our frequent Semantic Web Blog guest authors — to the position of Technology Evangelist.

The OCLC has as a major asset Worldcat, a global catalog comprising the collections of more than 10,000 libraries and adding up to more than 258 million records and 1.8 billion-plus holdings, in traditional library metadata format. WorldCat.org is the publicly searchable view of their core data in library format based upon library records (Marc records). More semantic web-oriented is other work the OCLC been doing over the last couple of years, Wallis explains, including experiments with using RDF/Linked Data at viaf.org, where the Virtual International Authority File publishes authoritative descriptions of names or organizations, and something similar for the Dewey Decimal Classification system at dewey.info.

In his new role, Wallis will collaborate with members and facilitate projects with OCLC teams as libraries and the cooperative drive efforts to expose WorldCat data as linked data, and will represent OCLC and WorldCat to the global library and web/IT leader communities. The VIAF and Dewey projects certainly provided an opportunity for OCLC to see the benefit of linking things together. On top of that, “the climate for Linked Data and libraries has changed dramatically over the last 12 months,” Wallis says.

Interest was evident at the Linked Data in Libraries event he ran for Talis this past summer, for example, and efforts like the W3C’s Linked Data in Libraries interest group, the Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums work, the British Library’s work on the British National Bibliography as Linked Open Data, and the Library of Congress’s Bibliographic Framework Initiative General Plan all are adding fuel to the fire.

The opportunity is there for the OCLC to take the lead on Linked Data in the somewhat fragmented library world as those organizations start to hear more and more about the concept. “Linked Data is starting to be something talked about in the library world, but like any other world, it’s still a bit of an enthusiast environment,” Wallis says. As he evangelizes to the library community what Linked Data is about – and to the web community about what the OCLC is doing with its chunk of data that is relevant to the wider Linked Data and Web of Data world – he hopes “to be in at the beginning of a process where those two communities come together to help come up with the best way of applying Linked Data principles to library data.”

In a statement announcing the appointment, Robin Murray, OCLC Vice President, Global Product Management, said, “Richard Wallis is a leader in Semantic Web and Linked Data technology, and we believe he will help the OCLC cooperative extend our efforts to help libraries move to Webscale.”

Data Liberate, the consultancy Wallis began upon leaving Talis, will continue as a personal blogging site. “I still have interest wider than the library community and I believe that those interests can keep me up to date with the wide world and advise my advice into the OCLC,” he says.

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Linked Data, Libraries, and Telescopes

Angela Guess — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:00:33 +0000

Richard Wallis recently commented on the incorporation of linked data and linked open data at libraries. Wallis writes, “Last summer, it was great to play a small part in the release of the British National Bibliography as Linked Data by the British Library – openly available via Talis and their Kasabi Platform. Late last year the Library of Congress announced that Linked Data and RDF was on their roadmap, soon followed by the report and plan from Stanford University with Linked Data at its core. More recently still, Europeana have opened up access to a large amount of cultural heritage, including library, data. Even more recently I note that OCLC, at their EMEA Regional Council Meeting in Birmingham this week, see Linked Data as an important topic on the library agenda.” continued…

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LoC Uses Linked Data and RDF for New Bibliographic Framework

Angela Guess — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:00:20 +0000

The Library of Congress is working on a bibliographic framework for the digital age. According to the article, “The new bibliographic framework project will be focused on the Web environment, Linked Data principles and mechanisms, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a basic data model. The protocols and ideas behind Linked Data are natural exchange mechanisms for the Web that have found substantial resonance even beyond the cultural heritage sector. Likewise, it is expected that the use of RDF and other W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) developments will enable the integration of library data and other cultural heritage data on the Web for more expansive user access to information.” continued…

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The Semantic Link – Episode 8, July 2011

Eric Franzon — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:30:35 +0000

On Monday, July 18, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the eighth installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about Google+, the recent Open Data Challenge in Europe, the British Library, BioBlitz, and more.
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Treating Search Engines like the Big Babies They Are

Angela Guess — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:30:52 +0000

A quirky new article likens search engines to humongous babies. The article states, “You can’t expect it to understand complicated things. You would never try to teach language to a human baby by reading it Nietzsche, and you shouldn’t expect a baby google to learn bibliographic data by feeding it MARC (or RDA or METS or MODS, or even ONIX). When a baby says ‘goo-goo’ to you, you don’t criticize its misuse of the subjunctive. You say ‘goo-goo’ back. When Google tells you that that it wants to hear ‘schema.org’ microdata, you don’t try to tell it about the first indicator of the 856 ‡u subfield. You give it schema.org microdata, no matter how babyish that seems.” continued…

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