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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Richard Wallis of DataLiberate recently wrote, “Back in September I formed a W3C Group – Schema Bib Extend.  To quote an old friend of mine ‘Why did you go and do that then?‘  Well, as I have mentioned before Schema.org has become a bit of a success story for structured data on the web.  I would have no hesitation in recommending it as a starting point for anyone, in any sector, wanting to share structured data on the web.  This is what OCLC did in the initial exercise to publish the 270+ million resources in WorldCat.org as Linked Data. At the same time, I believe that summer 2012 was a bit of a watershed for Linked Data in the library world.  Over the preceding few years we have had various national libraries publishing linked data (British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Deutsche National Bibliothek, National Library of Sweden, to name just a few).  Read more

Richard Wallis has followed up his recent announcement that WorldCat data can now be downloaded as RDF triples with an explanation of how to put that data into a triple store. He begins: “Step 1: Choose a triplestore.  I followed my own advise and chose 4Store.  The main reasons for this choice were that it is open source yet comes from an environment where it was the base platform for a successful commercial business, so it should work.  Also in my years rattling around the semantic web world, 4Store has always been one of those tools that seemed to be on everyone’s recommendation list.” Read more

Richard Wallis has written an article about the latest updates to WorldCat.org. He writes, “After we experimentally added RDFa embedded linked data, using Schema.org markup and some proposed Library extensions, to WorldCat pages, one the most often questions I was asked was where can I get my hands on some of this raw data? We are taking the application of linked data to WorldCat one step at a time so that we can learn from how people use and comment on it. So at that time if you wanted to see the raw data the only way was to use a tool [such as the W3C RDFA 1.1 Distiller] to parse the data out of the pages, just as the search engines do.” Read more

As we reported a few days ago, WorldCat.org pages now include schema.org markup. Richard Wallis has provided further insight into this news in a new article: “OCLC have been at the leading edge of publishing bibliographic resources as linked data for several years.  At dewey.info they have been publishing the top levels of the Dewey classifications as linked data since 2009.  As announced yesterday, this has now been increased to encompass 32,000 terms, such as this one for the transits of Venus.  Also around for a few years is VIAF (the Virtual International Authorities File) where you will find URIs published for authors, such as this well known chap.  These two were more recently joined by FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology), providing usefully applicable identifiers for Library of Congress Subject Headings and combinations thereof.” Read more

OCLC has announced that WorldCat.org pages now include schema.org descriptive mark-up.

Created over the last four decades with the participation of thousands of member libraries, WorldCat is the world’s largest online registry of library collections. As the official press release states, “WorldCat.org now offers the largest set of linked bibliographic data on the Web. With the addition of Schema.org mark-up to all book, journal and other bibliographic resources in WorldCat.org, the entire publicly available version of WorldCat is now available for use by intelligent Web crawlers, like Google and Bing, that can make use of this metadata in search indexes and other applications.”

On the heels of the announcement earlier this week about Dewey Decimal Classifications also being available as Linked Data, this certainly marks an exciting week in the world of library information and the Semantic Web. However, this should also prove to be exciting for non-librarians, as these resources are now available beyond the world of library sciences.

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I was toying with another title for this post – Yet Another Perfect Storm, but I think that particular metaphor (although appropriate here) has been somewhat over done.  So what sparked this one then?

I am on the long flight back from the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco to the good ol’ UK, to see how they got on with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee festivities.  I am reflecting on what my week at the conference has told me.  It has told me that things are a changing – I got that impression last year too, but more so this year.  Obviously, from the title of this post, it has something to do with Schema.org, Wikidata, and the Google Knowledge Graph….

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Richard Wallis has provided his take on the schema.org panel at SemTechBiz this week. Wallis reports, “This well attended panel started with a bit of a crisis – the stage in the room was not large enough to seat all of the participants causing a quick call out for bar seats and much microphone passing.  Somewhat reflective of the crisis of concern about the announcement of Schema.org, immediately prior to last year’s event which precipitated the hurried arrangement of a birds of a feather session to settle fears and disquiet in the semantic community.” Read more

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.

Amazon Web Services have added CloudSearch to their increasingly comprehensive portfolio of everything a developer would ever want.

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the service then automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys a highly tuned search index.

In their press release they say CloudSearch is based on technology that has been rattling around on their network for a while – A9.
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