Not including cancelled talks, 100%ofall #swib11 speakers are male with ~1/3 female participants Congrats to #gender #fail via @nichtich
@nopiedra on a conference in Germany on semantic web in libraries.

I don’t want to overly criticize this conference, as I don’t have more information about it than this tweet. I am not the kind of woman to go around counting the number of women presenting at conferences. However, strategies to be inclusive of gender, new professionals and newbies (to new concepts) are a good thing in my book. Diversity is important, especially when it comes to emerging concepts and practices in the profession. I see this in my day job, working with library communities around the world to communicate better and to be more inclusive.

This blog has really fallen off the semantic web/linked data track, mostly because my interests have changed but also because keeping up was becoming a challenge. My strongest interest lies in working to communicate ideas, technology and practices in a way that is engaging to non-techies, and new professionals. I enjoyed the pieces I wrote for FUMSI, Library Journal, and Internet Librarian International on these topics a couple of years ago, and of course this blog.

Reader, perhaps this is just the kind of motivation I needed to get back into the topics that started this blog in the first place.

A clear indication that concept of semantic web and libraries is moving into the mainstream – ALA’s Library Technology Reports is publishing Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata by Karen Coyle:

The change that libraries will need to make in response must include the transformation of the library’s public catalog from a stand-alone database of bibliographic records to a highly hyperlinked data set that can interact with information resources on the World Wide Web. The library data can then be integrated into the virtual working spaces of the users served by the library.

LTR is a great series, looking forward to seeing reviews of this title and a spike in interest in semantic web in 2010.

We’re well into 2009 now, but there’s always time for trends!

Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter recently compiled a few of the trends that have been making the rounds on library blogs last month.

Cloud, Semantic Web, and Linked Data abound in predictions and in posts emerging through the first two months of the year. It’s looking to be a big year for the Semantic Web in libraries. Add this to the growth in data curation, digital preservation, and eResearch in libraries and there are interesting times ahead. Most of these issues and trends are also mentioned by other contributors to LITA’s 2009 Top Tech Trends.

So what are my predictions for the rest of the year? I’m going to be conservative and just name four. What are yours?

1. The cloud goes desktop

People are getting increasingly worried about losing what they have created. Whether it’s Facebook changing Terms of Service so that even stuff you delete is still owned by them, or Ma.gnolia taking a catastrophic dive and losing most of its data, slowly but surely I think we will start to see people want to be able to synchronise the data they keep online either with other services or with their desktop. This is of course, but one possible use of Data Portability. People are still not aware of the need to back up their desktops, but i think they’re going to want a button to push to back up their cloud.

2. The rise and rise of metadata

Metadata is cool again. Whether you are working in research services, preservation, or reference, metadata helps you find and get stuff and that’s pretty essential to sift through all the crud out there. I’m not talking MARC – I’m talking EAD, PREMIS, SEPIA and much much more. I will be interested to see those that continue to move beyond metadata and start to expose collections beyond their institutions using methods other than OAI-PMH, like linked data.

3. The death of mobile sites

If you are building a specific mobile site or looking at buying a mobile module for your OPAC, stop. The number of sites built specifically for mobile devices has plummeted, not only due to the popularity of the iPhone and other smartphones with browsers, but because it’s a pain to have to build and maintain these sites. The .mobi domain seems to be slipping but m. is gaining hold (eg m.facebook.com). Smart sites are using content negotiation and web standards to display sites on mobile devices, without having to build separate sites to display less information. The mobile web isn’t second-best any more.

4. Librarians get personal

Many of us are now so familiar with blogs and wikis it hardly seems worth mentioning them as shiny new things any more. So what’s next? The library blogosphere has been in a bit of a lull of late, with few major shifts or emerging technologies for everyone to band around. But for me, this is the year more libraries have to get personal. – Not only designing websites that can be personalised, allowing you to save favourite resources, pages and references, but also in building tools for you – LibX for you, not just the institutional level, more subject guides that feature the human librarian that you are talking to behind the email, and even allowing you to personalise the physical space. And this is something I think we can all band around.

A while ago now, Jodi Schneider floated the idea of setting up a Planet for Semantic Web and Libraries. I had some trouble with various flavours of the Planet and Venus software, so instead I put something I’m calling a ‘Planet Lite’ together in Yahoo Pipes. Let me know if you like it! And feel free to suggest additional blogs, I have only listed a few to start.

Semantic Web & Libraries ‘Planet Lite’: JSON and RSS also available.

Last week, I attended Mash Oop North, an one-day unconference about mashups in Huddersfield, UK. It was a great event, which I wrote up in much more detail over at Libraries Interact. One of the best parts of the day was being able to spend some more time with Yahoo! Pipes, and the Planet Lite is the result after much tinkering and experimenting after I got home. Hooray for action-based outcomes!

Allan Cho over at Allan’s Library links to the announcement that semantic search engine site Hakia is seeking submissions of credible websites and sees it both as an opportunity and a cause for concern. Hakia is asking -

Librarians and information professionals can suggest URLs leading to the most credible Websites on a given topic. hakia will process the sites with its proprietary QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction) technology and make them available to Web searchers in credibility-stamped search results.

The press release has been written up over at Mashable and ReadWrite Web. Quite rightly, there are concerns that a company expects us to volunteer for this type of project (though the press release notes, “Each month hakia will give away thank-you prizes, ranging from a book donation to two conference grants, to participants”). Of greater concern, which ReadWrite Web hints at, is the critieria of what constitutes a credible website -

Hakia asks submitters for their professional credentials, but it is not clear if the company will actually check these.

Hakia uses a very strict definition for what makes a site credible. To be included in the index, a site should have gone through a peer review process, not have any commercial bias, and the information should be current. The fact that Hakia insists on only adding peer reviewed sites should greatly enhances the signal-to-noise ratio of the search results.

The Hakia blog outlines in greater detail what they consider a credible website.  If the Semantic Web is going to be a trustworthy web (ie – that meaningful data, links and information can be trusted) the criteria we use to create that trust must be robust. Web credibility is an area I’ve begun researching very recently. As I posted in my query to AIR-L, there is a need to be able to inform people about criteria that goes beyond the surface of ownership, date last updated, presence of peer review. We need criteria that will help individuals to be able to critically evaluate reputation, depth, and quality of peer review.

One of the criterions Hakia is using is -

Source authenticity. The publisher (preferably) should be the owner/producer of the content

What becomes of repositories, data archives, statistical websites etc? The material I archive at DLIST isn’t owned by them, but I implicitly give them a license to host and reproduce it. Another criterion is currency, not everything old is irrelevant, especially when considering research, statements, archives, and government informaation.

Credibility means different things to different groups, interests, and people. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work towards providing tools and metrics for people to evaluate websites for themselves. I remember a plugin project of a few years ago where you could install a toolbar in your browser and when you visited a site that you thought was credible, you clicked a button. That project is no longer, not only because it was time consuming, but because everyone approaches information in different ways. We can agree that there are certain sites that are obviously not credible (eg, the oft-used teaching example, DHMO.org, but the challenge begins when sites are less obviously biased.

This is an area I will be continuing to research. There is a great deal of information available already on approaches to web credibility, here’s a tiny sample of the work being done -

Cooke, A. (2001). A guide to finding quality information on the Internet: selection and evaluation strategies. London: Library Association.

Eastin, M. S. (2007). Toward a Cognitive Developmental Approach to Youth Perceptions of Credibility. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, 29-47.

IFLA/FAIFE. (2008). Internet Manifesto Workshop Manual

Lankes, R. D. (2007). Trusting the Internet: New Approaches to Credibility Tools. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, 101-121.

Credibility projects:

Stanford University Web Credibility research

Credibility and Digital Media @UCSB

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead, gave a presentation on the State of the Semantic Web at this week’s Semantic Web Technologies conference (via: Kingsley Idehen’s Blog Data Space). It’s a great overview of what technologies we have now, what people are working on, how to get involved. But I was pleased to see a slide describing those that are on board with deploying the Semantic Web:

Major communities pick the technology up: digital libraries

Further slides have a few examples of what libraries are doing and uses in academic research. Awesome.

So who’s writing about the semantic web in LIS, and what are they writing? I plan to take a look at that through a series of Reading Notes posts. I hope to try out the Blogging on Peer Review Research (BPR3) way of blogging about scholarly articles.

So what’s out there to draw from?  Taking a look at articles in the open access repositories in LIS containing the keywords semantic web -

19 articles in D-LIST
101 articles in E-LIS

The most interesting thing besides the large difference in the number of results? How many articles in E-LIS on the topic are not in English, but rather in European languages, reflecting that development of the Semantic Web has been quite strongly supported in Europe until now.

Stay tuned for Reading Notes, soon!

If you are finding your way to the blog via the Talking with Talis podcast, hello! I wanted to expand on why I am interested in the Semantic Web as I only briefly touched on this in the podcast.

eResearch and Data

A couple of years ago, I attended a conference where the theme was eResearch. Librarians described how they have responded to the challenges of managing datasets, ever-increasing amounts of raw information and data, as well as grey literature, preprints, and other publications. Several scientists also gave perspectives on how they thought libraries could assist with their research. The scientists discussed the issues with being able to collect so much data, increased complexity in manipulating it, and how so much of their work has shifted online and in some fields, to Open Access. This led me to think about how librarians can work with researchers to assist them better, beyond what we do now. How can we assist with the way data is structured and shared, and perhaps even become part of research teams, assisting with the gigabytes upon gigabytes of data that teams create, use and share.

At the same time, there was a growing focus on research metrics, quality and impact in several countries. We know how limited ISI is, so what else can we build to do this better? How can we trace data through a published presentation back to where it was created? How can we connect ideas, people and projects online to find collaborators and like-minds in a field?

The conference didn’t mention the Semantic Web as a way to assist with these issues, but to me, as I read more about the concepts behind it, it seems a logical fit for Open Data, Open Access and issues of managing gigabytes of data.

Looking to the future

Other ideas, like Next Generation Catalogues are also really interesting. What is important is a focus on the structure and quality of the data we have in the catalog. There is no point to bells and whistles presentation like tag clouds and facets without having good data to work with. There’s a growing number of librarians who are focusing on this and taking a strong interest in RDA and other projects.

Beyond these issues, I’m interested in what’s next. I think libraries are a natural fit for the Semantic Web because of its emphasis on RDF, and data and metadata. In some ways it’s a return to what we do best – organising information, provenance, databases.

I do think that it should not be just from technical staff and cataloguers and research librarians – there really does need to be involvement from all types of librarians to ensure that we are really participating in projects that meet user needs, not just in libraries but on the Internet as a whole.

Read/Write Web has a great post on the Semantic Web which gives a brief primer on theory, technology, and applications. “Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies” is a great introduction to what it’s all about with plenty of links to explore. The article also discusses the different meanings of the Semantic Web and how different technologies support different interests -

The Semantic Web means many things to different people, because there are a lot of pieces to it. To some, the Semantic Web is the web of data, where information is represented in RDF and OWL. Some people replace RDF with Microformats. Others think that the Semantic Web is about web services, while for many it is about artificial intelligence – computer programs solving complex optimization problems that are out of our reach. And business people always redefine the problem in terms of end user value, saying that whatever it is, it needs to have simple and tangible applications for consumers and enterprises.

A must read, but do also read the critique of this article over at Nodalities which debates some of Alex Iskold’s claims. I find this comment about Semantic search particularly interesting,

Success for the Semantic Web wouldn’t be improving search, but marginalizing it.

Read and enjoy them both! What both of these articles make clear is that what the Semantic Web “is” is far from clear, and given how much hyperbole there is around what is “2.0″ I wonder how far we are from that.

The BBC Internet Blog has a post about the accessibility of their new homepage, and the challenges in designing it. One of the things they did was use Semantic Web markup -

Using the results of our user-testing we made semantic mark-up of the page a priority, ensuring that each panel of the homepage design could be treated and navigated consistently. For example, the H3 heading always applies to the title of the content panel whether the content is in a table, a list or paragraph, and a logical structure of headings follow underneath.

A great example of a practical use for the Semantic Web. Presumably, with the consistency on the homepage that also lends the site to multichannel and transform content to different devices more easily.