Linked Data and Libraries Marlene van Ballegooie August 12, 2015

Current Scenario in Libraries Libraries and other cultural institutions are experiencing a time of huge, tumultuous change. Library standards Goodbye AACR2 & MARC Hello RDA, Bibframe, RDF ILS platforms evolving Movement to cloud-based services Changing nature of discovery Dominance of web search engines

Intelligible by humans and machines Where Are We Going? We must forge new pathways, but where we are going is not entirely clear…yet. Web based Interlinked Structured Collaborative Intelligible by humans and machines

All Signs Point To…Linked Data

Linked Data A set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the web Builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs It is about making data on the web: machine-readable linked to and from other data sets Enables data from different sources to be connected and queried

Traditional Web link link link link link link link link link link link

Linked Data city_in capital_of lives_in author_of born_in located_in born_on founder_of educated_by founder_of author_of likes likes

…of Linked Data

Resource Description Framework (RDF) Primary data model for Linked Data It’s not a format; it’s a framework for describing data. Can be used to represent information about things. (i.e. book, person, idea, etc.) RDF allows you to link a resource to other resources on the Web. RDF will enable greater precision in Web searches.

RDF Triples Describe Relationships Triples are used to describe a relationship between two things dc: creator Pride and Prejudice Austen, Jane Subject Predicate Object Each triple is a statement about a resource.

http:// www.worldcat.org/oclc/881025115 RDF Triple By using URIs as names for things, this makes the statement “machine actionable”. http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator http:// www.worldcat.org/oclc/881025115 http://viaf.org/viaf/102333412 Subject Predicate Object

From Strings…

To Things… Pride and Prejudice Austen, Jane (OCoLC)881025115 title same_as author Graphic novels England genre geographic term Social classes subject adapted_by King, Stacy subject isbn Courtship 9781927925171 subject subject subject Bennet, Elizabeth (Fictitious character) Sisters Darcy, Fitzwilliam (Fictitious character)

RDF graphs create a 'web of data' LCSH WorldCat VIAF Geonames Publisher Web Site DBpedia

Linked Open Data Cloud Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/

Why Linked Data for Libraries? We have a huge store of valuable, trusted data Library catalogue is a self contained data silo with no connection to the data on the Web MARC not popular outside the library community Provides a framework for sharing semantically rich data in a Web-friendly way. Will allow libraries to be part of the Web of Data.

Think of the possibilities…

Serendipitous discovery Oslo Public Library “Active shelves”

Sharing records rather than copying them Evolution from cataloguing to “catalinking”

Greater interoperability RDM Sirsi T-Space Linked Data Discovery Layer Collections UofT ERM(s) Summon MyMedia

Building virtual collections … …Together

Searching multiple datastores simultaneously Yale University Harvard University Columbia University University of Toronto

Re-Thinking What We Do …And How We Do It Convergence of Linked Data and traditional library metadata Constructing vocabularies Describing properties of resources Identifying and linking resources Exchanging and aggregating metadata We need to change the way we do things to respond to the needs and expectations of our users Creative. Innovative. Inspired.