The Talis Directory of Library Collections, which already underpins many open services has added opening hours to the set of attributes you can enter about a location.

Not a massive leap forward you may say, in fact the facility appeared a few days ago without many people noticing. What it demonstrates though is the simple flexibility of using RDF in the underlying semantic data store for the directory. A traditional relational database powered application would have required re-engineering to add extra columns to its tables. In an RDF world opening hours are now just associated with a location. In fact the major piece of work is around updating the user interface to manage them.

There are many other attributes that the Directory could store about Library Collections and Locations, and introducing them will be a much simpler process because of the choice of RDF as the architecture for the Directory. If you have thoughts on what information should be stored in a directory, join the discussion on the TDN Talis Platform Forum.

As with everything in the Directory these attributes are available to be retrieved and queried via the SPARQL query API. So using the Platform APIs, it is not only possible to discover which libraries hold a particular item, but also to refine that selection to only show the ones that are open on a Sunday.

Maybe wishful thinking but, with 3 days left to run for the Mashing up the Library Competition, I wonder if we will see Library Opening hours being used in any competition entries?

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