Ed Summers has recently been active in exposing Library of Congress Subject Heading data as Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies and RDF, through his experimental service at lcsh.info.

In this conversation we find out how Ed’s career, not always on a traditional library path, has led him to his work in the Library of Congress, his pragmatic interest in things Semantic Web, and why he has needed to experiment outside of the LoC.

In this conversation we reference:

• code4lib 
• Library of Congress
• National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP)
• National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP)
• Chronicling America
• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
• The BagIt File Package Format
• Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD)
• Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
• LCSH, SKOS and Linked Data
• lcsh.info
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
• How to Publish Linked Data on the Web
• Ed Summers’ web site: Inkdroid

This conversation was conducted as a Skype call on Thurday 26th June 2008, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

 

 Ed Summers Talks with Talis [00:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Frédérick Giasson announces the release of BIBO:

After months of development and nearly 1000 messages on the mailing list exchanged between 83 participants, the first version of The Bibliographic Ontology has just been published.

All the background documentation and the specification can be found at bibliontology.com. 

From the abstract:

The Bibliographic Ontology Specification provides main concepts and properties for describing citations and bibliographic references (i.e. quotes, books, articles, etc) on the Semantic Web.

As Frédérick says in his post, this is a milestone.  A milestone, not just for the project but for those wishing to describe bibliographic things in the Semantic Web.  As he also says this is a beginning not an end - a really good beginning, a hat tip to all those that have put the hours in.

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A small number of folks, including our own Rob Styles, recently flagged up the work by Ed Summers  in producing:

an experimental service that makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary.

The results of this work can be found at lcsh.info. At first look a deceptively simple site, with a wealth of information and relationships lurking beneath the surface.  Viewing the site in your web browser, although interesting, is not the point.  It is designed to be used by other applications using the subject headings an the relationships between them.  Take up the offer on the site of browsing some of the subjects using a linked data browser - I found Zitgist easy to use, follow the narrower, broader, and related terms, it is amazing where you end up.

Ed has used SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems), a formal language built on RDF to describe the concepts in the LCSH.

Recently Alistair Miles from the University of Oxford, key developer of SKOS gave a presentation at the Library of Congress on SKOS in the context of Semantic Web Deployment.  From the slides it looks like one of those events that you wished you had been around to attend.

It is initiatives like this that are the early green shoots of the benefits of Semantic Web appearing in and around library data.   With a reliable unique URI for each of the concepts in LCSH which leads you to a SKOS encoded definition for that concept, which then includes URIs for both broader and narrower terms in the subject heading hierarchy, why would anyone bother encoding such information in to their own application? 

For the moment lcsh.info is an experimental site which hopes to inform developments inside the Library of Congress.  If LC do follow this lead and open up the LCSH as reliable Open Linked Data and applications start to use it, you will rapidly end up with a network of applications that are semantically linked together by the fact they share the same URIs to define the same concepts.

There is much more to the Semantic Web, but just extrapolate this little bit of interlinking across other authoritative data sets in the library world  such as authors, publishers, and the like, then on in to data sets in other domains that share things like geographical locations, movie databases, Wikipedia etc., and you will end up with something significantly more powerful than the Web we have produced so far.

Early days yet, but pioneers like Ed, Alistair, and a growing band of linked data enthusiasts many of whom were to be found at the Linked Data Workshop at WWW2008 co-chaired by our own Tom Heath, deserve a hat tip.

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Back in February Rob Styles presented at the excellent Code4lib Conference in Portland.  Rob’s presentation was on the subject of the research work that he, and a couple of colleagues, had been involved in to apply RDF and Semantic Web techniques to extract relationships from within MARC data.

This 20 minute presentation gave real insight in to how applying these techniques could usefully liberate great information value, that is currently trapped within MARC records and the way we use them.

The organising folks behind this year’s Code4lib (a massive hat tip in their direction for a great conference) have recently published videos of the sessions, which are attached to the individual session pages linked from the conference schedule. So here you can watch Rob’s presentation.

As Rob says in his presentation, this is a sub-set of work he has been involved with. More on the subject, including a more detailed description around disambiguation, can be found in the paper Semantic Marc, MARC21 and The Semantic Web, published by Rob, Nadeem Shabir, and Danny Ayers.

This paper has been prepared for presentation as part of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop at WWW2008 in Beijing next week.  Looking at the workshop program, it is one I would loved to have attended.  Seeing Rob and Nad describe how Semantic Web techniques can extract great value from MARC data, and how bibliographic data in that form can become a great resource in the world of linked data, would be a bonus in attending.  Hopefully there will be more videos from that event to watch.

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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?

Technorati Tags: Talis Platform, DRF, Web Services, Talis, Talis Developer Network, TDN, MUTL06, Platforms, Libraries, API, Mashup

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As Panlibus is a shared blog, I don’t often reference home life, but today seemed particularly relevant.

As it is school holidays, like many of my colleagues I am taking a few days holiday. Unlike them, who are most probably either taking the sun on a far flung beach or hiking across some mountain top, I have chosen this week to act as cement mixer, general laborer, and tea boy for my wife’s father and brother who are fitting patio doors and laying floor tiles in my kitchen. In between making mugs of tea I have been an interested spectator of tile laying. Simple really, mark-up the floor; spread the adhesive; lay a tile; then lay another one. As long as you use the right materials and follow the simple instructions, most anybody can create effective results. Obviously for special effects, or fiddly areas you need to employ experts; hence my role as tea boy - my kitchen is not the most regular of shapes.

So what has this got to do with the Library and Library 2.0 stuff that usually gracing Panlibus postings? Well whilst I am making the tea, Paul Miller is announcing on Panlibus and TDN the release of API Documentation and User Guides for the Talis Platform.

So what has this major event in the evolution of an open participative library Platform, got to do with laying tiles then? Surprising simplicity, thats what.

A couple of evenings back I was writing api user guides for Bibliographic Deep Linking and Library Holdings Lookup, and it occurred to me that the best way to demonstrate how easy it could be to use the Platform APIs, would be to embed some live examples in to the guide page its self - and thats what I did, check them out.

Get yourself a free API key, copy and paste a bit of html, look up or enter your library’s details; and you too can have the power of the Platform adding value to your web page, just like Paul did .

You too can provide a deep link to the OPACs of libraries that hold you favorite book:

Yes there is much more to the Platform than these simple, yet powerful, examples. If you have some programming skills, and/or an understanding of RDF there is much more that you can do - embedding Platform Services in to your applications.

But as the Platform, its APIs and Services, evolve you will always be able to interact with it at many levels. So just like tiling it is easy to produce impressive results with little or no skill, but if applied by those who have a smattering of programming skills it can be used to professionally add value to your applications.

Talking of professional skills, I have just heard the cry of a British builder It must be time for a brew!. Time to turn on the kettle……

Technorati Tags: Library 2.0, Talis Platform, RDF, Web Services

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