[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

Tue Oct 26 07:35:50 UTC 2010

I think Ross makes a really good point here. We're past the stage of the 
early adopters who will do it because it's a neat idea. One of the big 
ongoing issues of linked data is that it's always 'sold' to people in 
one of two ways;

1. It really benefits the rest of the community (why should I bother 
doing work for people beyond our own library, I'm already overworked and 
underpaid!)

2. Someone above you paygrade has decreed it thus (in which case what's 
the minimum I need to do to comply)

I think that take up could be improved if there were some (more, clear) 
benefits directly to the library & the library staff. What might be 
useful to gain uptake:

1. define some recommended patterns for how a library should publish 
semantic data so that it's more a case of filling in the blanks than 
training in a new field.

2. provide some excellent tools (for scholars, students, mobile devices, 
facet based searching, library management etc.) which can work with one 
or more of these standard patterns. Include open licenses and URI 
structures as part of these patterns.

At which point the community gets open, semantic data which is of value 
to all, but the local users & staff have got an immediate return on 
investment.

I'm attempting this strategy with my programme ontology -- for 
conferences & arts festivals. My goal is to get them all publishing RDF 
programmes and lists of speakers/acts etc and my plan is to provide a 
very simple XML file they can copy (eg. 
http://programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk/1.0/examples/overlaps.rdf ) which can 
be turned into slick HTML and iCal by free tools; 
http://programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk/tool.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fprogramme.ecs.soton.ac.uk%2F1.0%2Fexamples%2Foverlaps.rdf 
it's slow work as it's unfunded and mostly done in my spare time, but 
it's beginning to get a little traction but the tools are still not 
killer apps. Yet.

The hardest part of all this is the 'Linked' in Linked Data. There's a 
whole bunch of entities which could be linked between bibliographies; 
people, publishers, aspects of a FRBR model (which I'm not convinced 
works with digital materials), events, places of publication, licensing, 
genres, formats, etc. In EPrints we go as far as 'minting' resolvable 
URIs for people, organisations, events, places, journals but makes no 
attempt to link them to items in the rest of the semantic web,  beyond 
the use of urn:issn:xxx and urn:isbn:xxx. Local administrators can 
modify the logic used to generate these URIs or even add triples (eg. on 
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/export/eprint/18176/RDFN3/ecs-eprint-18176.n3?mimetype=text/plain 
notice the owl:sameAs attached to the author). I think linking these may 
be a job beyond the remit of most libraries and more likely to be 
handled by online services who analyse many sites and work out which 
entities are (probably) the same...

Ross Singer wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>   
>> 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?
>>     
>
> Why should libraries be tasked with this?
>
> -Ross.
>
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-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

/ Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
/ Web Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
/ Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/