The frequency of articles, blog posts and comments about the intersection of the Semantic Web and libraries is steadily increasing! Here are a few recent items -
Semantic Interoperability Proceedings
The proceedings of the First Workshop on Semantic Interoperability in the European Digital Library which was held on June 2 are now available. The EDL digitises and makes available Europe’s cultural heritage and works to make national library catalogues interoperable. The EDL is investingating the use of Semantic Web technologies to share and exchange data and objects. Definitely worth reading – I aim to make notes here about at least some of the included papers very soon.
Semantic Web and cataloguing
The Massachusetts Library Association blog reports on a talk about RDA, Dublin Core, and the Semantic Web and where they might intersect. Diane L. Hillmann from Cornell University said -
The world of bibliographic control I think has become stale and I think we have to try to get away from that awful word “control” and move to more cooperative approaches.
She mentions that the DCMI group are now partnering with the Semantic Web community.
The importance of linked data
At derivadow.com a provocative post, Semantic Web: Why Bother? concludes that publishing linked data is the “why bother”of the Semantic Web. Open data, shared widely in open formats, enables reuse and repurposing of data by others, with minimal effort on the original producer’s behalf -
As a publisher of linked data not only are you enabling others to build cool things with your data – helping you right now – you are also helping to insulate yourself against atrophy. If your data is as open and accessible as possible – then it is relatively straight forward for your future colleagues, working on a as yet unimagined product, to use the data you are publishing right now.
The blog’s author, Tom Scott, works for the BBC who are starting to do some fantastic things with sharing and opening up their data.
Allan Cho talks with Talis
The latest Talking with Talis podcast features Allan Cho, who often writes about the Semantic Web on his blog, Allan’s Library. He coauthored a paper on the Semantic Web and Libraries with Dean Giustini that I posted about recently.