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November 7, 2011

W3C Library Linked Data Reports

Filed under: Semantic Web,Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 17:16
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The Library of Congress main reading room, Jef...

The main hall of the Library of Congress

There was an official news a few days on the publication of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group final report. The report is an interesting read even though I am probably not part of the “typical” target readership. After all, the primary goal of this report is really to convince the reader on the interest and importance of combining the activities of libraries with Linked Data… But the key recommendations of the report are worth repeating:

  • That library leaders identify sets of data as possible candidates for early exposure as Linked Data and foster a discussion about Open Data and rights;
  • That library standards bodies increase library participation in Semantic Web standardization, develop library data standards that are compatible with Linked Data, and disseminate best-practice design patterns tailored to library Linked Data;
  • That data and systems designers design enhanced user services based on Linked Data capabilities, create URIs for the items in library datasets, develop policies for managing RDF vocabularies and their URIs, and express library data by re-using or mapping to existing Linked Data vocabularies;
  • That librarians and archivists preserve Linked Data element sets and value vocabularies and apply library experience in curation and long-term preservation to Linked Data datasets.

However, what was not absolutely clear from the original announcement is that the official report also has two “companion” documents, namely a Use Case collection, and a list of references to metadata element sets in RDF, to relevant vocabularies, and to published element sets (e.g., the sets of URI-s, set up by the US Library of Congress, listing all countries in the World). This document, entitled “Datasets, Value Vocabularies, and Metadata Element Sets” is a real, somewhat hidden gem: a possible starting point for practitioners who wants to work with Library Linked Data! Thanks to Antoine Isaac and his friends for collecting these. I wonder how we could get it regularly updated…

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March 13, 2011

Example for the power of open data…

Filed under: General,Private,Semantic Web,Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 12:22
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Earthquakes around the globe on the week of the 11th of March

I wish I would not have to use this example… But I just hit it this morning via a tweet of Jim Hendler. RPI has an example on how can one combine public gov data (in this case, a Data.gov dataset on Earthquakes), its RDF version with a SPARQL query, and a visualization tool like Exhibit. The result is an interactive map on Earthquakes of the last week. Running the demo today reveals an incredible amount (over 160) of events on the coast of Honshu, Japan, which led to the earthquake and tsunami disaster on the 11th of March. I do not know how much time it took for Li Ding to prepare the original demo, but I suspect it was not a big deal once the tools were in place.

The demo is dynamic, in the sense that in a week it will probably show some other data than today. So I have made a screen dump for memento (I hope it is all right with Jim and Din). If you are looking at it now, it is worth zooming into the area around Japan to gain some more insight into the sheer dimensions of the disaster: there were  325 quakes (out of 411 around the globe) in that area during the week! I must admit I did not know that…

I have the, hopefully not too naïve, belief that tools like this may not only increase our factual knowledge, but would also help, in future, to help those who are now struggling in coping with the aftermath of this disaster. Yes, having open data, and tools to handle them and integrate them, is really important.

October 16, 2010

Open Data as a Tangram

Filed under: Semantic Web,Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 14:59
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The Open Data Tangram of the W3C Brazil Office


Many of us have seen, or heard of Tim’s talk on linked open data using a bag of potato chips as an example. I have just stumbled into another analogy for the usefulness of open data yesterday. It is not my idea, just telling about it…

I have spent a day at the W3C Brazil Office in São Paulo yesterday. As part of their goodies to distribute, the Office has produced a small Tangram. (For those who do not know, a Tangram is an old Chinese puzzle: it consists of a small set of simple geometric forms that can be arranged in a square. The cute thing is that there is a large number of figures that can be created by simply rearraning those pieces.) The distributed Tangram has puzzle pieces that are annotated with terms like (I hope I get it right, I do not speak Portuguese) “Compatibility”, “Transparency”, etc.

And indeed. Organizations would publish their data in some configuration (say, a square…). The rich possibilities come from the fact that anybody can take those pieces of data, rearrange them and produce different, cute configurations, i.e., applications using the very same data. And that is where the power of open data comes…

July 12, 2010

Experiences of LOD publication

Filed under: Semantic Web,Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 10:39
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Frank van Harmelen’s tweet drew my attention on a paper of Jan Hannemann and Jürgen Kett on Linked Data for Libraries. I hope Jan and Jürgen will not be upset if I copy some quotes from their paper, but I thought that giving more publicity to some of their experiences in deploying linked data at the German National Library is worthwhile. Reproduced here without change though somewhat shortened:

  • Setting up a service is not trivial. […] the essential software solutions (tools) involved have not reached full maturity yet. […] documentation may be lacking the required depth. […] multiple software components need to be setup to work together  […] which requires appropriate expertise.[…]
  • Data modeling can be complex. When publishing data on the web, it is advantageous to use existing, registered ontologies. Unfortunately, these ontologies do not always match the data representation of each individual library […] the definitions of individual properties can vary considerably. […] There is no simple answer to the question which is the right thing to do.[…]
  • Open data exchange mentality does not exist everywhere. Even before linked data, libraries have exchanged and aligned their data sets. The results of such projects could be prime information sources for connecting linked data sets. Sadly, not all institutions involved share the open exchange mentality, and shared ownership may make it difficult to publish these results.
  • Best practices are seen as rules. Linked open data is based largely on best practices rather than rules. However, this pragmatic aspect is not seen as essential in all areas of the linked data community. Deviations from perceived standards tend to be criticized, which can cause institutions new to the semantic web to doubt their decisions – even if they make sense for the organization in question. Libraries should not be deterred by such feedback and rather see this as a motivation to contribute their own experiences and knowledge to the community. Guidelines and best practices should be carefully considered in the context of each institution’s needs, especially in this early forming phase of the semantic cloud.[…]
  • Properly modeled data is very useful. Once the data modeling is completed and the data made available, it can be used by others. A colleague at the Technical University of Braunschweig has shown that with properly modeled data, this can result in very useful applications: within a day, he imported our data into a database, added a web interface and had thus created a searchable access to our data.

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