For the uninitiated, NGC4LIB is a library focused mailing list which has a reputation for often engaging in massive discussions and disagreements around the minutiae of future cataloguing and library focused metadata practices.  They have recently been involved in one of these great debates stimulated by the comments of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in a recent interview.    As is often is the case on this list, the debate wandered well off topic in to the realms of FRBR and it’s alternatives before being brought back on topic by Jim Weinheimer, who started the conversation in the first place.

A statement in Jim’s contribution caught my eye:

Implementing linked data, although it would be great, is years and years away from any kind of practical implementation

Implementing linked data is already well underway with many groups across the Globe.  For instance there are couple that we at Talis are closely involved with.  Following on from Sir Tim’s interview comments, the British Government are currently running a, soon to be opened, closed beta of data.gov.uk.  Through this site they are not only opening up data in many forms such as CSV, like their American cousins at data.gov, but they are also starting to encode in RDF and publishing it via the Talis Platform which provides a SPARQL (the query language of the Linked Data web) end point.  This approach not only lets anyone download the raw data, but also enables them to query it for whatever they have in mind. If you want a sneak preview of how such data is queried, take a look at some of theses examples.   In a similar vein, metadata from BBC programmes and music is being harvested in to Talis Platform stores.  Again these are open to anyone to innovate with – check out these screencasts  to see some of the early possibilities.

Ah but that is not bibliographic data, I hear someone cry – It’ll never catch on in libraries.  I get the impression from some comments on the NGC4LIB list, that it will not be possible for ‘our’ data to participate in this Link Data web until ‘we’ have predicted all possible uses for it, analysed them, and developed a metadata standard to cope with every eventuality.   There are already a few examples of the library world engaging with RDF and Linked data, one obvious one being the Library of  Congress with LCSH another the National Library of Sweden.  Neither of these examples are encoding the kind of detail you would expect in a Marc record, they are using ontology to describe associated concepts such as subjects.

There has been some ontology development towards this larger goal with Bibo (Bibliographic Ontology Specification).  Although not there yet, Bibo is good enough to be used in live applications whishing to encode bibliographic data.  Such an example is Talis Aspire.  Underpinned by the same Platform as the UK Government and BBC Linked Data services, it uses the Bibo ontology to describe resources an an academic context. 

Alongside data.gov.uk there is a Google Group conversation taking place. The refreshing part of this conversation is that it is between the producers of the data sets, those developing the way it should be encoded in to RDF, and those who want to consume it.  Several times you will see a difference of opinion between those that want to describe the data to it’s fullest, and those that wish to extract the most value from it. “I agree that is a cleaner way of encoding, but can you imagine how complex the query will be to extract what I want!”.  This approach is not unusual in the Linked Data world, where producers and consumers get together, pragmatically evolving a way forward.  Dataincubator.org is an open place where such pragmatic development and evolution is taking place.  Check out examples of a subset of Open Library data. (note this is an example of data, not a user interface).

Another, bibliographic focused, experiment can be found at semanticlibrary.org. From some of the example links on the home page, you can see that building in this way enables very different ways of exploring metadata.  People, subjects, publishers, works, editions, series, all being equally valid starting points to explore from.

Doth the bell toll for Marc and RDA?
Not for a long old time – Ontology like Bibo, and the results of work at Dataincubator.org and semanticlibrary.org, may well lead to more open useful, and most importantly linked, access to data previously limited to library search interfaces.  That data has to come from somewhere though, and the massive global network of libraries encoding their data using Marc ,and maybe soon RDA, are ideally placed to continue producing rich bibliographic metadata.  Metadata to be fed in to Linked Data web in the most appropriate form for that purpose.  There will continue to be a place for current cataloguing practices and processes for a significant period -supporting and enabling the bibliographic part of the Linked Data web, not being replaced by it.

No doubt the NGC4LIB conversation on this topic will continue. Regardless of how it progresses, there is a current need and desire for bibliographic data in the linked data web.  The people behind that desire, and the innovation to satisfy it, may well have come up with a satisfactory solution, for them, whilst we are still talking.