Linked Data—The Right Time?

For many in the library field, linked open data (LOD) is both a common and an enigmatic phrase. Linked data has been the topic of many articles, books, conference presentations, and workshops in recent years. The topic, however, is one that many are still working to understand. This article is a brief primer and survey of the current LOD landscape for those who are either new to LOD or wish to reacquaint themselves with LOD. The article will start with a basic introduction to LOD, including some of the standards and formats involved. The second half will describe some of the major LOD projects and efforts in various fields, including libraries, archives, and museums, and provide links to selected resources for those who want to learn more.

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 2017

2017

Library special collections are valued by scholars and relied on to support both research and teaching. In recent years, libraries have invested heavily in digitizing many of these collections. Unfortunately, less effort and fewer resources have been expended post-digitization and many digitized library special collections today exist on the Web only in isolated information silos, difficult to find and disconnected from other resources that could provide users with valuable context. This begs the question: Can Linked Open Data (LOD) approaches be leveraged to help contextualize & enrich item-level descriptions of such collections and provide links to related information resources? This project report describes preliminary results from Exploring the Benefits for Users of LOD for Digitized Special Collections, a project still in progress which is examining this and related questions. Among the findings reported here: while special collections metadata are typically rich and ripe with ...

2013

Miller described what the concept of linked data is, practical applications for linked data space, and how libraries can contribute to linked data efforts. He defined linked data as the next phase of the World Wide Web. Whereas the Web made it possible to link and connect documents, linked data are leveraging the Web to connect data regardless of where those data reside. Miller suggested new opportunities for libraries to assist organizations with their information needs and to weave knowledge workers, library users, and librarians together in a new enterprise.

2019

The concept of linked Data and Semantic Web have been gaining importance to revolutionise the world of the internet. The idea behind Linked Data can be used to create a huge database of the Internet interlinked by relationships that will be easily understood by machines as well as humans. We tried to compare some libraries that have published their content via linked open data. The advantages and disadvantages have also been highlighted. libraries should benefit by adopting linked Data but there are many challenges that will come up in its implementation. The BIBFRAME Initiative is a possible framework that will enable libraries to link their resources on to the web attracting users with high-quality content. Various initiatives have been undertaken by the libraries in order to make resources accessible to all users.

JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 2012

Public and private organizations increasingly release their data to gain benefits such as transparency and economic growth. The use of these open data can be supported and stimulated by providing considerable metadata (data about the data), including discovery, contextual and detailed metadata. In this paper we argue that metadata are key enablers for the effective use of Linked Open Data (LOD). We illustrate the potential of metadata by 1) presenting an overview of advantages and disadvantages of metadata derived from literature, 2) presenting metadata requirements for LOD architectures derived from literature, workshops and a questionnaire, 3) describing a LOD metadata architecture that meets the requirements and 4) showing examples of the application of this architecture in the ENGAGE project. The paper shows that using metadata with the appropriate metadata architecture can yield considerable benefits for LOD publication and use, including improving find ability, accessibility, ...

2019 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), 2019

By interlinking internal Linked Data (LD) entities to related LD entities published by authoritative creators and holders of data, libraries have the potential to expose their collections to a larger audience and to allow for richer user searches. While increasing numbers libraries are devoting time to publishing LD, the full potential of these datasets has not been explored due to limited LD interlink-ing. In 2018 we conducted a survey which explored the position of Information Professionals (IPs), such as librarians, archivists and cataloguers, with regards to LD. Results indicated that IPs find the process of data interlinking to be a particularly challenging step in the creation of Five Star LD. Consequently, we developed NAISC, an interlinking approach designed specifically for the library domain aimed at facilitating increased IP engagement in the LD interlink-ing process. Our paper provides an overview of the design and user-evaluation of NAISC. Results indicated that IPs found NAISC easy-to-use and useful for creating LD interlinks.

2014

Plans are currently underway at the Kent State University Library to migrate digital objects into a different content management system to address the needs of growing collections. The plan will involve shifting to a framework to enhance all current digital collections, as well as anticipating the growth of future projects and formats. The poster will touch in particular on the topic of enhancing search capabilities in this new framework, through use of a single, cross-collection searchable index and also discuss the benefits of applying Linked Data concepts. Two current digital collections that will be highlighted and discussed in the poster are the May 4 Digital Archive and the KSU Shootings Oral Histories.

2012

Within the cultural heritage field, proprietary metadata and vocabularies are being transformed into public Linked Data. These efforts have mostly been at the level of large-scale aggregators such as Europeana where the original data is abstracted to a common format and schema. Although this approach ensures a level of consistency and interoperability, the richness of the original data is lost in the process.

2012

Nowadays, the social networks are spreading abroad different application domains. Also, the digital libraries are improving how their users exploit the catalog services with social capabilities. More recently, the Linked Data model defines a novel vision for the near future web applications. Our paper approaches a solution for managing users in a digital library with a semantic fashion.

2020

IGI-Global, 2019

The present society is considered an information society. A society where the creation, distribution, use, integration, and manipulation of digital information have become the most significant activity in all aspects. Information is producing from every sector of any society, which has resulted in an information explosion. Modern technologies are also having a huge impact. So managing this voluminous information is really a tough job. Again WWW has opened the door to connect anyone or anything within a fraction of a second. This study discussed the Semantic Web and linked data technologies and their effect and application to libraries for the handling of various types of resources.

Journal of Documentation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to detail a low-cost, low-maintenance publishing strategy aimed at unlocking the value of Linked Data collections held by libraries, archives and museums (LAMs). Design/methodology/approach The shortcomings of commonly used Linked Data publishing approaches are identified, and the current lack of substantial collections of Linked Data exposed by LAMs is considered. To improve on the discussed status quo, a novel approach for publishing Linked Data is proposed and demonstrated by means of an archive of DBpedia versions, which is queried in combination with other Linked Data sources. Findings The authors show that the approach makes publishing Linked Data archives easy and affordable, and supports distributed querying without causing untenable load on the Linked Data sources. Research limitations/implications The proposed approach significantly lowers the barrier for publishing, maintaining, and making Linked Data collections queryable. As such, it...

In this paper, we present an analysis of metadata mappings from different providers to a Linked Data format and model in the domain of digitized manuscripts. The DM2E model is based on Linked Open Data principles and was developed for the purpose of integrating metadata records to Europeana. The paper describes the differences between individual data providers and their respective metadata mapping cultures. Explanations on how the providers map the metadata from different institutions, different domains and different metadata formats are provided and supported by visualizations. The analysis of the mappings serves to evaluate the DM2E model and provides strategic insight for improving both mapping processes and the model itself.

2013

Semantic Web technologies and Linked data form a new reference framework for libraries. The library community aims to integrate its data with the Semantic Web and as a result new library data models have been developed. In this context, significant research effort focuses on the alignment between the library models with relevant models developed by other communities in the cultural heritage domain. However there exist several issues concerning the interoperability between all these data models. This paper seeks to contribute in the interoperability of four models, namely FRBR, FRBRoo, EDM and BIBFRAME. It highlights the commonalities and the divergences between them by using a case bibliographic record and by exploring how this record is represented by each one of them.