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!

Data seems to be the hot topic right now. It’s all about how we store it, share it, and make it play nice with other data. There is an enthusiasm for openness and a move towards standardisation of data and the ways we share it, but there’s a also a worrying trend - competing standards and protocols.

Ross Singer at Panlibus discusses a draft recommendation from the Digital Library Federation ILS and Discovery System Task Force and notes that while it’s certainly a welcome move, that -

The problem here is that they generally give multiple options for achieving the goal of any given method. So this means that any ILS vendor can choose from a variety of protocols for implementing the spec and that a different vendor can choose alternate standards for the exact same functionality.

Singer goes on to describe scenarios in which this causes all sorts of problems - for example, vendors choose differing open standards and systems still can’t communicate.

Something similar looks to be happening in data exchange, with Google, Facebook and MySpace all announcing last week that they have their own ways of sharing profile data. There are two key concepts in play - data portability, and data availability. In the first, instance, the goal of data portability is user control and options over how you use your data. In the second, companies are entering agreements with eachother and I don’t see this giving the user the level of control many really want. It’s not a huge leap further than allowing, say, Facebook to access your Gmail contacts. You still have no way to export that data for yourself - it is handled company-to-company. Data portability is definitely my preference.

As we look to the future of the ILS, which may include data sharing and embedding on other services (with formats like RDF) and other semantic developments, it’s interesting to see how we face many similar issues in different domains at the same time. On the reason why Data Portability has taken off this year, Daniela Barbosa who has been involved with the project from inception says -

Call it timing, call it good marketing, call it luck- call it what you wish- i like to say it has to do with a need…a need by users, vendors and technologists to have one forum to discuss and act on the various issues and opportunities around user data and the usage of that data (the ‘Graph’).

I will be interested to see if the wider social networking world and libraries will turn to other forms of networking and identity down the line. Laura J. Smart wrote about Thompson’s ResearchID platform, which for want of a better term you could describe as an identity service for researchers. You can post a profile of yourself, link to your papers, and in theory meet other people working in the same field as you. Other companies have similar services, like CSA’s Scholar Universe. It would be really great if these services, like Facebook and mySpace, were a part of the data/identity portability movement.

So it seems that we’re all moving in the same direction at the moment, and though there may never be just one protocol or standard to rule all of our identities, hopefully they will at least talk to eachother.

Web sites and applications burst on the scene out of nowhere, attract massive usage and undergo continual improvements to make them better. We wonder how we ever got along without them, until they get bought out, put up access or paywalls, or just disappear.

Libraries have long been concerned with preserving information for the future, and increasingly that includes digital information and websites (for example, Pandora at the National Library of Australia which archives everything from blogs to the 2000 Games site).

So where do they intersect? And how can we take a more proactive approach to design for sustainability rather than saving retrospectively? The Semantic Web is all about linking, openness, and relationships between data. In some ways the Semantic Web is, in my view, how we will move towards a more Sustainable Web.

What might the Sustainable Web be?

Adapting the Triple Bottom Line approach to sustainability, web developers and those who create data could take a lifecycle approach to how they create, manage and produce sites and information. When planning a new website, dataset or service, in addition to deciding on purpose, standards and features, you could also include a statement about how you would -

• Distribute the data if you were no longer maintaining the site (using a LOCKSS principle, perhaps?)
• Migrate to future standards
• Ensure that your site is indexed in the Internet Archive (all pages and data, not just the index)
• Give people ownership of their data (if you’re running an online service where people store or save information) so they can get it out when they want, or own it if the site closes or the terms of service changes significantly (eg, in the instance of a buyout).

Depending on what type of site it is, there may be governance and political impacts now or in the future. If you’re running a scientific research portal, how might changes in government policy affect the site? What obligations might be imposed on sharing or accessing the data you provide?

Using open standards as the backbone

A starting point is to use open standards. In addition to W3C standards most of us already know (like HTML and CSS), we can extend this to Semantic Web standards like OWL and RDF. Adherance to standards allows information to be interpreted correctly, exchanged, and migrated to newer standards in the future. Standards may also make it easier to hand datsets over to someone else or distribute copies to keep it accessible. It’s a key part of understanding the potential of the Semantic Web according this summary of a talk by Nova Spivack at last week’s The Next Web -

“The semantic web is not so much about “semantics” as it is set of open standards defined at W3C. The semantic web approach builds on open standard meta data which is in line with previous presentations that supported the open data approach. The idea is that everyone profits from everyone’s metadata. The semantic web is a compromise in making the data smarter and the software smarter. It is the best of both worlds.”

Keeping data usable

Over the past two years, libraries, museums, companies and other organisations have set up pages in Facebook, mySpace and other social networking sites. In some libraries, this is the work of an emerging technologies specialist, in others it’s an added role for an individual that may or not be sustained if that person leaves or changes job focus.

Whatever the situation, it’s not the best use of time to have to create a new profile and create networks in every service. This is where a move towards data standards and portability is a plus. Being able to move data between and in/out of these services saves time and sustains online networks and communities. Data Portability is one of the major projects looking at these issues. According to Chris Saad from the project, “The new innovation platform is data” and this is certainly true if looking at things from a Semantic Web point of view.

Libraries and the sustainable web

A recent article in Interactions stresses the importance of designing for sustainability of content on the web - the authors note that libraries and other cultural insitutitions will be at the heart of these efforts,

“Digital technology makes it possible to extend the walls of the archive beyond a single space or person, as well as ensure preservation and acccess in locations around the world [...] Libraries, museums, and archives will need to collaborate with business interests to build lasting social structures that are sustainable over time.” (Churchill E, Ubois J, 2008)

Libraries have played a significant role in participating in a variety of digital and web preservation projects over the years, but what’s the next step? How do we get more involved in conversations that take place in business?

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Churchill, E, Ubois J. 2008. Designing for Digital Archives. Interactions. March/April 2008. Retrieved from: http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1089 (full text via ACM Portal)

Read/Write Web reports that Yahoo will begin indexing RDF and a range of Microformats. This is big news. It’s the first big sign that established, large players in search are including the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web has been under development for years, and now we are starting to get to the top of the mountain and see over it to where we can go with all these new standards and tools.

Yahoo has outlined what they will be supporting initially, and it’s a pretty big list -

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

Yahoo has had some support for this already (check the review of Operator below) , but perhaps this will be just the push many website developers need to include Microformats in their sites.

Microformats?

They are a structured way to make use of open content on the Internet. If you would like to see what Microformats have the potential to do, check out the Microformats site. A practical way to try this out is to install the Operator plugin for Firefox. When enabled, if you browse a site that makes use of, for example, hCard, you can right click and download the data or use the toolbar to perform lookups on other sites. Having used Operator, in some ways Yahoo’s announcement about their support for the Semantic Web and Microformats is not such a surprise, as many of the sites mentioned below are Yahoo or Yahoo-owned.

Using Operator

Here I am on Twitter - using Operator I can export and save my hCard contact information, bookmark, or, here’s the really nifty part, add it to my contacts (if I was using Yahoo! Contacts, that is).

If I’m in Upcoming and see something I want to go to, I can add it to my Google or Yahoo calendar. Here’s an event I’m actually going to -

With a click it’s in my Google Calendar -

So why is this cool? I didn’t have to type a thing, or run a search. With Microformats I can extract information out of webpages, find related stuff, save details for later, in a really easy and time saving way.

How might libraries make use of it? How about quick downloading of records and citations out of catalogues and databases into other sites, an article or even into your mobile phone without having to go through painful export options? One click to store? I’d like to see that.