We were protected from the bitterly cold wind whipping across the state of Rhode Island for day one of  the excellent Code4lib Conference 2009.  Cocooned in the warm expansive basement ballroom of the former Masonic temple that is the Renaissance hotel, the day kicked off with a thought provoking keynote from Stefano Mazzocchi of Metaweb, the folks behind Freebase.

His talk was based around the way we humans have been evolving communication over the centuries – from speech (instant, portable but transient) through cave paintings (needs tools, permanent, but not very portable) and on through writing on clay tablets, and fibre materials, to books.  with all these there is a cost – paint the cave, print the books, etc.  With the current online world the cost of a communication is virtually zero, which lead to questions such as “if it is zero cost, why do we need to keep it in a library?” – Libraries may start to evolve towards being museums of rare physical items.  If all goes on line, what happens to things like serendipitous discovery – do we loose the shelf-browse experience?

Stefano, despite some severe network difficulties, proceeded to demonstrate various aspects of Freebase, the data it holds and the way it provides answers to difficult questions.  He also demonstrated how humans interacting with Freebase are making the data better by saying if a person in an image is male or female, placing a place on a map, etc.

This great start was followed by a series of excellent speakers delivering 20 minute sessions.  Too many to mention all here but here are some of my highlights:

Anders Söderbäck, unfortunately without his colleague Martin Malmsten (previous Talking with Talis interviewee) from the National Library of Sweden described the value they gained by exposing their catalogue as Open Linked Data “Linked Open Data turns web into an API”

Anders was followed by our own Ross Singer describing how the open source project Jangle had matured to a version 1.0 state with connectors being produced, including one for Talis Alto.  He explained that Jangle followed the principles of the AtomPub standard as used by Google,Microsoft, IBM, etc. for transferring and updating data.  Ross explained how the architecture of a Jangle implementation looked.  His talk laid a great foundation for a breakout session later in the day.

Glen Newton of , CISTI, National Research Council talked about LuSql – a performant way to get large amounts of data indexed and in to Lucene.

We had an entertaining session from the National Library of Australia’s Terence Ingram who took us through their experiences in delivering REST based services – the pitfalls and the unexpected benefits of being able to link things together easily.

Ed Summers & Mike Giarlo, Library of Congress, with the help of a Light Sabre iPhone  App, spoke about SWORD – light-weight protocol for depositing repository objects.

Godmar Back, of Virginia Tech took us through the 2.0 developments of the LibX browser plug-in which will enable libraries to embed their services into other websites.  He also mentioned the building of an environment where these can be shared between libraries.

The day was brought to a close with a series of 5 minute lightning talks – agreed by many to be the best bit of Code4lib. 

Looking forward to another great day tomorrow.

Flickr photo of hotel by jdn