My guests for this Talking with Talis podcast demonstrate a great example of how openly sharing data will stimulate innovation.

Last month, Huddersfield University’s Dave Pattern announced that he was sharing usage data derived from circulation transactions held in their Library Management System

I’m very proud to announce that Library Services at the University of Huddersfield has just done something that would have perhaps been unthinkable a few years ago: we’ve just released a major portion of our book circulation and recommendation data under an Open Data Commons/CC0 licence. In total, there’s data for over 80,000 titles derived from a pool of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a 13 year period.

Within a matter of days Patrick Murray-John from Mary Washington University had taken a copy of that data, transformed the data to RDF and published it in a Semantic Web form.

In this conversation we explore the motivations behind Dave’s work and the benefits to the sharing process of the Open Data Commons license he chose to release the data under.   Patrick then takes us through how he worked with the data and demonstrated how simple it was to produce and RDF version.

We then explore how the principles demonstrated by their work could be expanded upon to add wide value to the library scene from recommender systems to a sales aid for Universities trying to attract students.