Semantic Library

I’ve mentioned a few initiatives and projects related to the development of Web 3.0/Semantic Web on this blog where librarians are, or could be, involved. But the big question is, how? Finding out how to get a seat at the table can sometimes be difficult. Here’s a few ways to get involved no matter your level of expertise or location:

Data Portability: Get Involved

From mailing lists to action groups, the Data Portability Project has a number of ways that you can keep up to date with news, share advice and ideas, and participate in high-level technical discussions about the project.

FOAF Developer Center

Participate on the wiki, mailing list or the busy IRC channels for the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) specification project.

Open Knowledge Foundation: Participate

Sign up to the announcements email list, or give your time to volunteering to one of OKF’s many interesting projects.

Linking Open Data Community Project

Mailing lists, meetings, projects, and lists of people interested in Open Data.

Upgrade your sites

Help spread the use of microformats, OpenID, RDF and other new standards and formats by including them in your plans to upgrade your website. The websites mentioned all have guides to getting started. For example, Microformats outlines a five-minute guide to adding your first microformat on your site. Keep an eye on DiSo (Distributed Social Networking applications), which is building plugins using these tools and others for Wordpress, Drupal, and other widely used platforms. There’s some work for me to do in adding to this website!

Several blogs have posted about Web 3.0 recently, most trying to come up with a central set of ideas about what it might be. For some, Web 3.0 = Semantic Web, for others, Semantic Web is just a part of it. My take on it that I wrote in October last year, if there is such a thing as Web 3.0, can be found on the About page of this blog:

• Semantic web: True write once, publish many: hamstrung until now by proprietary software, proliferation of XML schemas, and a lack of end-user tools.
• Metadata: Meaning and context within and between objects, new languages.
• Rich open data: Geotagging, eScience data for everyone
• Content anywhere, especially mobile
• Make your own software: bringing software and tool creation to the masses
• Two opposing ends: on demand anywhere (video, TV, radio, text), lightweight flexible architecture

Politics and governance issues will continue to evolve to bring;

• Ubiquitous Open Access
• Access to Knowledge (A2K) in the developing world

I think it is important to keep in mind the political and governance issues surrounding the web. The technical part of Web 3.0 is not possible without supportive research, funding, and policies. Additionally, if Web 3.0 impacts people’s lives by making communication and managing information easier, it has to include all kinds of knowledge (social, government, entertainment, scholarly) and be accessible by people all over the world regardless of language, socioeconomic and geographical barriers.

While I enjoyed all the good things the supposed Web 2.0 movement offered - community, interaction, etc - I am hoping that Web 3.0 will pay attention to the difficult issues around data, scholarly communication, and dissemination of research. Linked data is an area of research on this topic, but I hope to see more standards, policies and funding in this area.

A study of all the different ideas people have about Web 3.0 was posted by Jonas Bolinder, and fell into four categories -

• Semantic Web
• APIs and Web Services
• Mobile Web and other devices
• Implicit Web (personalisation and recommendation)

There’s a little bit of each of these in my view of Web 3.0

A post on Read/Write Web, Web 3.0 Through the Ages, sums up some of the current thinking around the term, valid or not and concludes -

“…the discussions we have about defining the next web help to solidify our vision of where we’re going — and you can’t get there until you decide where you want to go. “

I agree, and I’m interested to see where the discussions lead next.

Other recent posts on Web 3.0:

• It’s all still alpha in my eyes, Liako.biz
• After Web 2.0: WOW (Wide Open Web) - enough of version numbers for the web!!, Trends in the Living Networks

Over on the wiki, we’ve started putting together a very basic outline of what an online course to learn about the Semantic Web and Libraries might look like. My aim is to provide something for the middle-ground of early adopters - those who are enthusiastic about these new technologies and are keen to learn more, but who might not have gotten around to sitting down with a book on RDF yet. I hope it will be a gentle introduction, not overly code-heavy, and with plenty of examples and discussion of practical applications in libraries and research.

Watch us try to build a course from the ground up or get involved and have your say about what your want to learn, or what you might teach!

More details available on the learning program page on the Semantic Library wiki.

Linked Data is one of the most interesting and important aspects of the Semantic Web. For me, the possibilities of Linked Data is what initially interested me in learning more about the Semantic Web and how it is relevant to libraries. A couple of years ago I attended a conference focused on eResearch. Scientists have increasingly large, open datasets that they are creating, sharing and manipulating to create more indepth analysis and connections than ever before. But managing that data, linking it to other types of data and identifying sources is a major challenge. Linked Data has a major role to play here, and in other contexts, to assist this.

If you’ve had to try and set up cross-tabulated searches in some databases, such as Census data to find out how many residents in a town own bicycles and have a mortgage, Linked Data may be a way to make that easier by drawing on richer data sources and connecting them together.

So, what is Linked Data exactly? Tim Berners-Lee says,

The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.

Linked Data works using URIs and RDF. Daniel Chudnov has some interesting thoughts and questions about it over at One Big Library.

Find out more about Linked Data at the ESW Wiki or take a look at the tutorial on how to publish Linked Data on the web.

Before we can work out what the Semantic Library might be all about, we need to look at the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web (or at least, the idea of it) has been around for several years now. The Semantic Web is about data and meaning. This is great for librarians because much of this is achieved with metadata. Scientific publishing, which libraries are also increasingly involved with through Repositories and Open Access also stands to benefit.

Like Web 2.0, which consists of a range of attitudes and applications, some new some old, the Semantic Web is a collection of standards, metadata, and technologies - eg Dublin Core, OWL and RDF.