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What is Linked Data,
and What Does It Mean for Libraries?
Emily Dust NimsakontNLA/NEMA Conference
October 15, 2010
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What is Linked Data,
and What Does It Mean for Libraries?
Emily Dust NimsakontNLA/NEMA Conference
October 15, 2010
Could
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mklingo/245562110/
This is an overview…
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What is Linked Data?
Wikipedia says…
“The term Linked Data is used to describe a method of exposing, sharing, and connecting data via dereferenceable URIs on the Web.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data
Linked Datavs.
Semantic Webvs.
Web 3.0
“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all
the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.”
Tim Berners-Lee, 1999
hypertextvs.
hyperdata
web of documentsvs.
web of data
Currently the Web is a system of
interconnected documents.
People use hyperlinks to navigate from one
document to another.
resource
resource
resource
resource
resource links to
links to
links to
links to
documentsvs.
things
HTML
<h1>This is a heading.</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
RDF/XML
<rdf:Descriptionrdf:about="http://www.recshop.fake/cd/Empire Burlesque"> <cd:artist>Bob Dylan</cd:artist> <cd:country>USA</cd:country> <cd:company>Columbia</cd:company> <cd:price>10.90</cd:price> <cd:year>1985</cd:year></rdf:Description>
http://www.w3schools.com/rdf/rdf_example.asp
Relationships are key
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People can understand relationships between things.
But machines should be able to understand these relationships too.
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We are used to connecting pieces of information based on their context.
Title: A Christmas CarolAuthor: Charles Dickens
Linked Data makes the relationships explicit.
Charles Dickens is the author of A Christmas Carol.
Linked Data makes the Web into a database.
Linked Data principles
Tim Berners-Lee, “Linked Data-Design Issues.” http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
URIs
For Linked Data, we need to be able to identify things uniquely
Uniform Resource Identifiers do this already
URIs
Using HTTP URIs is one of the principles of Linked Data
http://www.example.com/thing1
URIs
URIs are like control numbers (LCCN, ISBN, etc.).
RDF
Resource Description Framework
Written in XML
Describes relationships based on triples:
subject-predicate-object
http://www.w3.org/RDF
RDF
subject object
Charles Dickens
A Christmas
Carol
is author of
predicate
RDF statements
The subject and predicate must be URIs.
The object can be a URI or a value.
RDF
RDF is not encoded in web pages directly.
Web browsers can’t read RDF.
Software is needed to translate markup into RDF.
Ontologies
An ontology is a vocabulary of specific terms to be used to describe resources.
Sound familiar?
What could Linked Data
mean for Libraries?
Part I:What could Linked Data
mean for Library Data?
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Getting rid of silos
“Our services must not only be on the Web, but need to be of the
Web.”- Karen Coyle
RDA Vocabularies for a Twenty-First-Century Data EnvironmentLibrary Technology Reports
February 2010
Library Catalogs
World Wide Web
More open standards
Our data standards are either not used by those outside libraries (MARC)
Or not very semantically rich (Dublin Core)
But Linked Data could get us to use standards that are both of these things.
bibliographic recordsvs.
bibliographic data
In traditional cataloging, a record is one package.
Author
Title
Bibliographic Record
Bibliographic Record
Records can be exchanged, but there is no way to exchange the individual pieces of information within a record.
Bibliographic Record
Bibliographic Record
Person
Is author of
Title
Bibliographic Record
With Linked Data, a bibliographic record is made up of many pieces of data.
And the relationships between these pieces of data are defined.
Person
Is author of
Title
Bibliographic RecordThe boundaries of the record can be dissolved…
Person
Is author of
Title
Bibliographic Record…and the data can interact with other information on the Web.
Are there examples of Linked Data in
libraries?
Library of Congress Authorities and Vocabularies
http://id.loc.gov/
Library of Congress Authorities and Vocabularies
http://id.loc.gov/
RDA Metadata Registry
http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm
Virtual International Authority File
http://viaf.org
Extensible Catalog
http://www.extensiblecatalog.org
So there’s a bunch of data out there.
Now what?
http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/
Library Linked Data Incubator Group
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/
Part II:What Could Linked Data
Mean for Librarians?
Different workflows
Catalogers could use URIs for things like authors’ names or subject headings.
If information changed, the URI could be changed and automatically update the
information in our catalogs.
Evaluating metadata
Metadata could come from various sources.
“Professional cataloging might be more of a job of aggregating and improving harvested or
contributed metadata, rather than developing new metadata, like MARC records, for
resources.”-Virginia Schilling
“The Catalogers’ Revenge: Unleasing the Semantic Web”PNLA Quarterly 74:3, 2010
New homes for librarians’ skills?
Example:The Internet Needs a Dewey Decimal System
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/206230/the_internet_needs_a_dewey_decimal_system.html
Are There Drawbacks to Linked
Data?
Training and Software Development
“Nobody but the geekily inclined is going to be willing to invest the time and effort necessary to code semantically tagged web pages from
scratch.”
Virginia Schilling“The Catalogers’ Revenge: Unleashing the Semantic Web.”
PNLA Quarterly 74:3 (Spring 2010).
Bandwidth and Accessibility
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Metadata Standards
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/
Linked Data is on the horizon.
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And it has the potential to greatly change how libraries work.
Questions?
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Thank you!
Emily Dust [email protected]
http://www.delicious.com/enimsakont/linkeddata+nla2010http://www.slideshare.net/enimsakont
