A Linked-Data based approach for managing digital libraries

Sir Tim Burners-Lee created quite the stir with the introduction of Linked Data. Instead of having hyperlinks link to static documents online, Burners-Lee proposes that data be linked together semantically online in a concept he calls Linked Data. This paper will explore the many facets of Linked Data. This will be accomplished with an overview of the principles and standards of Linked Data to include concepts such as RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. To provide the audience with a better understanding of how Linked Data can function, it will illustrate current projects such as DBpedia, BabelNet, and MeLOD. Finally, there will a discussion on how libraries are impacted by Linked Data and some initiatives being explored such as BIBFRAME.

2013

The term linked data is entering into common vocabulary and, as most interests us in this instance, into the specific terminology of library and information science. The concept is complex; we can summarize it as that set of best practices required for publishing and connecting structured data on the web for use by a machine. It is an expression used to describe a method of exposing, sharing and connecting data via Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) on the web. With linked data, in other words, we refer to data published on the web in a format readable, interpretable and, most of all, useable by machine, whose meaning is explicitly defined by a string of words and markers. In this way we constitute a linked data network (hence linked data) belonging to a domain (which constitutes the initial context), connected in turn to other external data sets (that is, those outside of the domain), in a context of increasingly extended relationships. Next is presented the Linked Open Data cloud (LOD), which collects the open data sets available on the web, and the paradigm of its exponential growth occurring in a very brief period of time which demonstrates the level of interest that linked data has garnered in organizations and institutions of different types.

The term linked data is entering into common vocabulary and, as most interests us in this instance, into the specific terminology of library and information science. The concept is complex; we can summarize it as that set of best practices required for publishing and connecting structured data on the web for use by a machine. It is an expression used to describe a method of exposing, sharing and connecting data via Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) on the web. With linked data, in other words, we refer to data published on the web in a format readable, interpretable and, most of all, useable by machine, whose meaning is explicitly defined by a string of words and markers. In this way we constitute a linked data network (hence linked data) belonging to a domain (which constitutes the initial context), connected in turn to other external data sets (that is, those outside of the domain), in a context of increasingly extended relationships. Next is presented the Linked Open Data cloud (LOD), which collects the open data sets available on the web, and the paradigm of its exponential growth occurring in a very brief period of time which demonstrates the level of interest that linked data has garnered in organizations and institutions of different types.

Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology, 2011

This book gives an overview of the principles of Linked Data as well as the Web of Data that has emerged through the application of these principles. The book discusses patterns for publishing Linked Data, describes deployed Linked Data applications and examines their architecture.

Using semantic web technologies in digital library offers a new level of flexibility, interoperability and way to enhance peer communication and sharing knowledge. It expands the usefulness of the digital libraries that will contain majority of data in future. Paper outlines the emerging concepts of social semantics digital library and explores the potential of using semantic web technologies for the digital libraries.

International Journal of Librarianship

For the past ten years libraries have been working diligently towards Linked Data and the Semantic Web. Due to the complexity and vast scope of Linked Data, many people have a hard time to understand its technical details and its potential for the library community. This paper aims to help librarians better understand some important concepts by explaining the basic Linked Data technologies that consist of Resource Description Framework (RDF), the ontology, and the query language. It also includes an overview of the achievements by libraries around the world in their efforts to turn library data into Linked Data including those by Library of Congress, OCLC, and some other national libraries. Some of the challenges and setbacks that libraries have encountered are analyzed and discussed. In spite of the difficulties, there is no way to turn back. Libraries will have to succeed.

Enterprise Content Management Systems have been embraced by organisations to manage enterprise knowledge and facilitate the cooperation and collaboration among employees. The current techniques and social tools such as free-tagging or content syndication that widely employed in enterprise 2.0 paradigms are normally seen in blogs, corporate wikis, forum and so forth, which facilitate the knowledge creating, storage, retrieval and sharing within the enterprise. However, these prevalent approaches have some distinct limitations in web content management, especially in the context of enterprise scale systems. This can be examplified by the deficiencies of full-text document retrieval and various issues concerning data sharing, reusing and merging across heterogeneous platforms or applications (a.k.a “data silo” issues). It has been an initiative for a long time that leverage semantic web techonologies to support more powerful discovery, indexing, search, annotation, classification and navigation of unstructured and semi-structured content across heterogeneous data stores. Enterprise content management systems are therefore investigated as a vehicle in this thesis so as to explore how the state-of-the-art in semantic web domain and most importantly Linked Data technology can be employed to address the pressing problems. This thesis identifies the best practices from current successful linked data based applications and further evaluates corresponding benefits from them. A proof-of-concept is then proposed to link enterprise data and the web of data. The scenario of the prototype implemented herein is based on the Alfresco platform, which is one of the most popular open source enterprise content management system, where our implements intend to enable the user to produce semantic site content and link them to the web of data without requiring extensive knowledge on semantic web technologies. This is achieved by using our linked data based web application to annotate and publish structured data, and employing the state-of-the-art of Name Entity Extraction technologies to facilitate processing unstructured content and making the link among the documents within the content repository, which are originally formatted as wiki, event blog and so forth, and reside in either internet or intranet. Moreover, the RDF-based vocabularies designed herein embrace current common practices from industry including FOAF, SKOS, SIOC and MOAT, therefore enhancing the portability and reusability of the data. In addition, the prototype features a lightweight solution publishing content as linked data through a linked data server, which attempts to research the potential benefits brought about through improving the availability of corporate data as well as the high accessibility for human and user agents accessing to the enterprise knowledge base in multiple perspective. The project is built on our semantic web system architecture and we believe the approach designed herein can be applied to help the application of Linked Data technology in an enterprise level, adhering to current design principles and meanwhile leveraging the power of linked data technologies easier. The thesis will finally evaluate our solutions and study how the state-of-the-art of semantic web technologies can be deployed to add value to existing enterprise content management systems.

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.

2010

Although social sharing websites are currently employing Semantic Web techniques to structure the data, these websites still stand in isolation since most of the data is not linked. Therefore, this paper proposes a prototype system called LinksTo that provides users the functionality to link resources from the Web at large. These links are described in RDF adhering to vocabularies recommended by the linked data best practices. The links described in RDF are transparent to the user. However, the system also provides functionalities to access the RDF data that can be utilised by the linked data community.

Traditionally, in most digital library environments, the discovery of resources takes place mostly through the harvesting and indexing of the metadata content. Such search and retrieval services provide very effective ways for persons to find items of interest but lacks the ability to lead users looking for potential related resources or to make more complex queries. In contrast, modern web information management techniques related to Semantic Web, a new form of the Web, encourages institutions, including libraries, to collect, link and share their data across the web in order to ease its processing by machines and humans offering better queries and results increasing the visibility and interoperability of the data. Linked Data technologies enable connecting related data across the Web using the principles and recommendations set out by Tim Berners-Lee in 2006, resulting on the use of URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) as identifiers for objects, and the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework) for links representation. Today, libraries are giving increasing importance to the Semantic Web in a variety of ways like creating metadata models and publishing Linked Data from authority files, bibliographic catalogs, digital projects information or crowd sourced information from another projects like Wikipedia. This paper reports a process for publishing library metadata on the Web using Linked Data technologies. The proposed process was applied for extracting metadata from a university library, representing them in RDF format and publishing them using a Sparql endpoint (an interface to a knowledge database). The library metadata from a subject were linked to external sources such us another libraries and then related to the bibliography from syllabus of the courses in order to discover missing subjects and new or out of date bibliography. In this process, the use of open standards facilitates the exploitation of knowledge from libraries. Keywords: Linked Data, Semantic Web, Library Catalogs, RDF.