[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

Mon Oct 25 17:38:14 UTC 2010

Quoting Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.Berkeley.EDU>:

> Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote in his blog   
> http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2668 :
>
> "Bibliography is the soul of scholarship. I thought that by   
> collecting bibliography and turning it into an intelligent semantic   
> resource then we would start a new era in the library."
>
> Me too.  Its disappointing but understandable that many librarians   
> dont want to assist the transition.
> Perhaps someone on this list could suggest how to get the library   
> community more engaged in this effort?

Jim, this work is underway, at least on two fronts. One is that the  
W3C has an incubator group for linked library data [1] that will make  
some specific recommendations for how to move this forward. The other  
is that some of us in library-land have been writing, speaking, and  
doing. There are RDF representations for a number of library  
vocabularies [2] [3], I published two guides for the US library  
association [4] [5] (and will be speaking next month in Germany and  
England on the topic, as well as in Norway in January), and this week  
is the first of a series of 3 webinars done by the library association  
to provide continuing education in this area. We also did a one-day  
training session on linked data at the main US library meeting and  
will have an ongoing group meeting about linked data in libraries at  
those conferences twice a year. There are numerous efforts outside of  
the US which I am not as well versed in, but Germany has a Semantic  
Web in Libraries conference that is now an annual event, as I  
understand it. And, as you've seen, some libraries are beginning to  
publish their data in a linked data format.

So, what else should we be doing? :-)

What we lack at this point is applications, but of course they are  
harder to create than the data. Also, we depend on vendors to provide  
the applications that allow libraries to create data and provide user  
services. Analogous to other complex software, like word processing,  
this isn't something that you can just whip up but something you need  
to buy. And, guess what! the economy is in the toilet and no one has  
any money to buy new software. So that part is being slow, but I think  
we'll get there.

kc

[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/Main_Page
[2] http://id.loc.gov
[3] http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm
[4]  
http://www.alatechsource.org/library-technology-reports/understanding-the-semantic-web-bibliographic-data-and-metadata
[5]  
http://www.alatechsource.org/library-technology-reports/rda-vocabularies-for-a-twenty-first-century-data-environment

>
> To pick another point from Peter's BLOG.  Peter quoted a   
> correspondent who wrote:
>
> "And just for the record,  distributed security in REST  is not   
> trivial nor simple at all ... there are no well accepted solutions   
> currently.
> This might be the major obstacle in front of any REST approach   
> aiming at distributed services, rather than single REST site, as most
> major commercial REST services these days. ....
> Just sharing what we are struggling with for two years already,   
> having tens of distributed REST services over Europe , 5 independent  
>  implementations in two languages, covering at least half of the   
> functionality listed in your email."
>
> What exactly is the "distributed security" problem here?
> The BKN idea is to have a large number of distributed REST biblio sites,
> each running an open webservice, each managing its own security,   
> responsible for its own backups, and each offering open reusable   
> biblio
> data with local write and world read.
> Aggregator sites may develop, and these would have to manage their   
> own security concerns, picking and choosing data from whatever
> data providers.  But the security issues involved in such a network   
> seem local to me,  not distributed.
> Is there a distributed security problem with this model?
> Or only with a model which supposes some more complex interactions   
> between webservices?
> Peter, perhaps you could forward question to your correspondent?
>
> --Jim
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------
> Jim Pitman
> Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
> http://www.bibkn.org/
>
> Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
> University of California
> 367 Evans Hall # 3860
> Berkeley, CA 94720-3860
>
> ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
> e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
> URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman
>
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>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet