Semantic Library

Via ACM TechNews, HPCwire reports on the semantic metadata underpinning Zotero, the free, Firefox-based bibliographic management tool that more and more of us in libraries are using and recommending to our clients. One of the developers, Daniel Cohen says,

“But what I think we have done is tackled the problem of citation and research management in such a way that it creates enormous potential in the next phase of the project: the use of Zotero as a digital research platform and as a means for the networked exchange of semantic and computational information. Our Zotero Server, connected to the client, will enable all kinds of new collaboration opportunities and data-mining of aggregated collections. We also plan to provide hooks into high-performance computing projects like the SEASR text-mining project based at UIUC.”

It is fantastic to see the humble bibliographic tool, bemoaned by librarians and researchers for so long as clunky, becoming something truly innovative and going beyond simply storing lists of articles you want to cite. Data mining is becoming a major trend in eResearch as computing power increases and more and more researchers have direct access to open data sets. In the future, we won’t just be citing articles, figures, images, movies, and books, we’ll also be citing specific data points. We’ll need the tools to be able to do this accurately and effectively.

I took the long road back from ALA Annual held a few weeks back (ie, vacation), and in that time there’s been a few interesting developments.

LITA Top Technology Trends

This year’s Top Tech Trends featured a dizzying array of trends and technologies, as well as technologies in the room that didn’t always work quite as they should. Despite the glitches, it was an interesting experience to participate in the Meebo room and ask questions of the panel and other attendees there, and update to Twitter all while trying to listen to the panel and digest their trends. Some of the trends that I was glad to see noted included:

• The importance of open data (Marshall Breeding)
• The need for librarians to be experts at data analysis (Roy Tennant)
• Importance of paying attention to developments in the Semantic Web (John Blyberg)
• Ubiquity of mobile devices (Karen Coyle)

The biggest trend - mobiles

Mobiles, in particular, are going to reach a critical mass very quickly as data plans become more generous and more people upgrade to smartphones (let alone the hysteria over the new iPhone). They are also becoming the primary way of accessing the Internet in countries where access to computers and broadband is difficult, such as Latin America and Africa.

It is not particularly difficult to get at least your website to function in a mobile-based browser, and this should be the first step for libraries. The next stage is to improve access to catalogue data, by providing mobile-friendly OPACs or GPS type location ability to find books on the shelf.

Libraries also need to be thinking about applications for mobiles. Peter Brantley posts about the absence of library applications from the iPhone when it was launched last week, and says that surely we could do better -

“Was there some mysterious barrier that prevented libraries, and publishers, from grokking that their content might be desirable to have on a hip phone? That reading can be portable? That the sooner they figure out how to facilitate the integration of their content into the media flow of the user, the better off they will be?”

The iPhone SDK is readily available from Apple’s Developer Connection (the SDK is free but the Developer program starts at $99). So, what kinds of applications might we see on the iPhone? eBook readers? Federated search engines to access databases in a more phone-suitable interface? GPS-enabled catalogue searching? Although the iPhone is dominating the news at the moment, development should equally be taking place for Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile powered devices, as well as services for non-smartphone capable phones, like notifications by humble SMS.

Read more about getting started with mobile services for libraries on my earlier post, the importance of the mobile web. You may also be interested in picking up Ellyssa Kroski’s new Library Technology Report on the mobile web -

“In the report, author and library-technology blogger Ellyssa Kroski outlines the components of the mobile Web — the users, devices, the operating systems, the services, the content — and illuminates the research tracking how users currently engage with information on the World Wide Web via their mobile devices. Kroski also delineates several library mobile initiatives and provides a “how to” chapter for libraries interested in developing a mobile experience for their users.”

She has also put together an update on the iPhone 3G, released after the report was published.

Conferences on Semantic Web and libraries

There is a small, but growing, number of conferences which include the semantic web as a theme. If you are thinking of doing some travelling, a pre-conference to the IFLA Congress to be held in Milan 2009 will feature the semantic web and search technology. “Emerging trends in technology: libraries between Web 2.0, semantic web and search technology” [PDF, page 6] will be held in Florence in August 2009 -

“In this two-day conference we would like to address the synergies and potential use of all these three different aspects, the new web technologies, the semantic web and the existence new search technologies, which are having a deep impact in the services of the library-scene.”

Learning Program

The learning program over on the Semantic Library wiki is also taking shape with some excellent contributions. Feel free to make contributions of your own, and I’m hoping we can look at starting the program in the next few months. Many thanks to everyone who has already worked on it so far! 

Libraries and their websites are becoming more user-centred. From wayfinding, to subject guides, to online services, a focus on user experience will help to make all library services more integrated and intuitive. When it comes to designing new services, such as those built upon the Semantic Web, it is more important than ever to ensure that the user is at the forefront of development. So often in the past amazing new technologies and services have been launched, but been frustrating to use. In addition to technical standards, there should be more consideration of user standards and needs when when considering “does anyone want this?” but more importantly “does anyone need this?’

What is user experience all about, anyway? Valeda Dent writing on ”The Total User Experience” at Designing Better Libraries has a good description -

Think about how many different help screens and directions we need for users to find and use resources on our websites. Think about all the maps and directions they need to find resources in our buildings. Then think about shifting that burden of understanding how to use something or find something away from the user. That’s the power of UX. 

There are many components to user experience (often abbreviated to UX) including audience research, heuristic analysis, HCI, but the key is “make it easy”.

At this stage, the Semantic Web is in its infancy. It could be the next big thing or it could disappear into obscurity, remembered only by standards and start ups. Making the Semantic Web seamless, integrated, and intuitive for both authors of content and users of content has to be a priority. Matt Hartley writing on “Semantic Web And Overall User Experience” warns -

I believe finding a balance between machine-processable info andthe general user experience has begun to create something of a paradox of sorts. So much so as a matter of fact, that I see the user experience being swallowed up in we are not careful.

Right now, a lot of the early tools and plugins for using semantically-marked up content are less than ideal. Many are clunky or unintuitive. That said, for a long time the same could be said of early web pages. Unnecessary links, images, badly worded navigation and frames abounded. It is too early to tell where user experience fits in the development of the Semantic Web, but as recognition of the importance of UX increases and expertise grows, it seems the only logical way forward is with UX leading the way.

ReadWrite Web has a recent article on how semantic search works, Semantic Search: Myth and Reality. The article points out that semantic search will not solve all our search problems, it’s simply impossible. For those working with datasets, there will always be a great deal of cross-tabulation, manipulation (to reformat and present data) and manual work to be done to bring together answers to queries. Yes, semantic search might help save time in the initial stages of a query by giving more meaning to the terms we use to query with, but search is still, at its heart, a human construct and will always be open to interpretation and error. The article makes the important point that -

These are computationally challenging problems that really have nothing to do with understanding semantics. The misconception has been perpetuated since early days of the Semantic Web that somehow, because we will annotate the web, we will be able to solve these super complex problems. This is simply not true. There are fundamental limits to what we can compute, and a class of problems that have an exponential number of possible solutions is not going to be magically solved because we represent data as RDF.

Right now we search based on word occurance (ignoring for the moment Google’s fancy rankings, inbound link rankings, and other fancy search criteria and patterns in high-end databases). In the future we will search using semantics for words+concepts+inferred trust. We will probably never be able to search purely by opinion or emotion. And that’s fine - because we can make that judgement for ourselves. We’re human after all.

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.