What is Linked Data, and What Does It Mean for Libraries?

What is Linked Data, and What Does It Mean for Libraries? Emily Dust Nimsakont NLA/NEMA Conference October 15, 2010 Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mklingo/245562110/

What is Linked Data, and What Does It Mean for Libraries? Emily Dust Nimsakont NLA/NEMA Conference October 15, 2010 Could Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mklingo/245562110/

This is an overview… Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/magnusvk/4090803400/

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 Data vs. Semantic Web vs. 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

hypertext vs. hyperdata

web of documents vs. 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

documents vs. things

HTML
<h1>This is a heading.</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

RDF/XML
<rdf:Description rdf: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 Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brenda-starr/3509344100/

People can understand relationships between things.
But machines should be able to understand these relationships too.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ksawyer/2075159262/

We are used to connecting pieces of information based on their context.
Title: A Christmas Carol
Author: 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?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eirikref/727551264/ Getting rid of silos

“ Our services must not only be on the Web, but need to be of the Web.”
- Karen Coyle

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 records vs. bibliographic data

In traditional cataloging, a record is one package. Author Title 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 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 Record The 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 /

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 Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/webwizzard/3931165612/

Metadata Standards
http:// www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap /

Linked Data is on the horizon. And it has the potential to greatly change how libraries work. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinet/52740846/sizes/z/

Questions? Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/12364944/

Thank you!
Emily Dust Nimsakont
[email_address]
http://www.delicious.com/enimsakont/linkeddata/nla2010
http://www.slideshare.net/enimsakont

What is Linked Data, and What Does It Mean for Libraries?

by Emily Nimsakont on Oct 11, 2010

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What is Linked Data, and What Does It Mean for Libraries? — Presentation Transcript