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28 September 2007
Semantic Library - a change of direction?
Posted by Richard Wallis at September 28, 2007 12:10 PM
For some reason someone seems to have pressed the semantic web button in library land this week. The semantic web has been buzzing around the edges of our world, as something that 'should' be relevant, for a while now. Discussions have rumbled around the library mailing lists about the use and relevance of RDF (the metadata model component in the W3C's Semantic Web), could it/would it/should it replace MARC and if so, so what?
Regular readers of Panlibus and its sister blog Nodalities will know that the Semantic Web (SW) and the technologies behind it have been on the radar here at Talis for a long time, so much so that we are a participating organization, with three representatives, on the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) group.
The Talis Platform has SW technologies and RDF at its core, so for instance when you post a MARC record in to Platform Store we not only store and index the record we also shred a copy of that data in to RDF triples (the unit of data storage in RDF) and store & index those too.
A couple of things that attracted my attention this week were firstly the darcusblog posting showing how you could transform the output from OCLC's WorldCat Identities to provide an RDF descriptions which could then be used to provide a semantic relationship between, for instance, Tim Berners-Lee and his published works. This was based upon Ed Summers' postings.
Secondly, in the Libraries and the Semantic Web posting by Allan Cho, he picks up on the list of similarities between the library and the semantic web from Jane Greenberg:
(1) Each has developed as a response to an abundance of information
(2) Both have mission statements grounded in service, information access, and knowledge discovery
(3) Both have advanced as a result of international and national standards
(4) Both have grown due to a collaborative spirit
(5) Both have become a part of society's fabric (although not so much yet for the Semantic Web)
So does the library world pack up its knowledge and collaborative spirit and jump on the SW bandwagon, leaving the good, but old creaking and inflexible library standards such as Z39.50 and MARC, behind? - In the very long term probably yes, but over the next while what libraries are doing today, in the way they are doing it (with the exception of the format of the odd MARC tag), is still very valuable.
I would contend that, from a cataloguing point of view, libraries are providing more value than current software packages and their user interfaces can make full use of. Some of this value is being shown by the work around faceted browsing, FRBR and the like, but this is just scratching the surface. Transferring/transforming the data in to RDF, opens up opportunities to walk or browse through the semantic relationships expressed between records and external resources to deliver a more holistic view of a resource and its place in the world.
The discussions I have watched go past can be characterized as a binary choice between RDF and MARC. That is wrong. As we, and others, have shown MARC is a rich source of data that can drive the expansion of the semantic web.
So back to the title of this post - is the semantic web a change of direction for libraries? No I do not think so. It is movement in a obvious direction, taking the best of what we have now to seed the next wave of knowledge description and discovery. Standing still is not an option as this wave is a coming and we should be riding it rather than pulling in different directions and letting it wash over and past us.
Today's appropriate image from The Associated Press was published by via ap.google.com
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