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

Share This

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.

Share This

Program Services Librarian at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia Canada, Allan Cho, has a theme of the Semantic Web running through many of his post on his blog Allan’s Library.

In this Talking with Talis conversation we discuss the newly created role of Program Services Librarian, Allan’s thoughts on the Semantic Web and what it means for libraries and librarians.

During the conversation we reference the following:

• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
• Knitting the Semantic Web - Jane Greenberg
• Yahoo Search Monkey
• Twine
• Haystack
• Free! - Chris Anderson

This conversation was conducted as a SkypeOut call on Thursday 22nd May 2008, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

 

 Allan Cho Talks with Talis [00:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Share This

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.

Share This

It’s a little disconcerting when your own words from months ago are quoted back at you from a distance.  That’s the trouble with the blogosphere, it is so easy for connections to what you have said to be linked in to the conversation in ways you never expected.  Trouble? - No it is one of its major benefits - disconcerting or not!

Recently Mark Dahl quoted something I said a while back.  I was discussing how we must stop developing destination applications and start delivering the information and functionality that users want, to where they are working - for instance inside the Learning Management System/eLearning System/VLE (or whatever you call them down your way) - apparently I boasted that the new Reading List (Course Reserves) application Talis are working on "doesn’t even have a user interface".  The reason I gave, at the time, was that students don’t need yet another destination to go to to find the information they need - so why build one. 

Providing the functionality to link resources to courses in a way that adds value well beyond the simple attempts to be found in ILS/LMS systems, and their course management system counterparts, is an obvious development.  What is less obvious, at first, is that you don’t need to build a user interface for it - the student is already in a library system, or a learning management system, or a portal, or FaceBook, or whatever - why can we not deliver the functionality directly in to that environment?  Well today the answer to that question is that those applications are not very good at embedding Web Services directly in to their interfaces.

This is why Talis development team member Julian Higman (featured in the February issue of the Library Platform News) was very quick to comment on Mark’s post "I’m working on the reading list application at Talis that you mention, and it certainly does have a user interface!"  - Having calmed Julian down (I jest), we both agreed that the fact it was necessary to build a user interface for this product is symptomatic of the inability of most applications, in the University domain, to consume web services and usefully integrate their functionality in to a user’s work flow.

As I commented previously, the online university today is a collection of many silos that the user [student, professor, researcher] is expected to know how to navigate, let alone be able to identify the connections between data in those silos.  I expect that this comes as a bit of a shock to the average new student. -  I thought I had come to this university to learn about my chosen subject, not to spend a significant amount of time and effort becoming an expert in the use of a multiplicity of different applications and services that are supposedly here to help me.

Peter Brantley was on the money for Mark in his post, about building a Flickr-like system for academia, when he said "However, what will make the application ultimately successful is the availability of open services that permit re-use: mashups that encourage integration with other services and content."

I heartily agree, but only as an interim step.  Most of today’s systems are not integrated in any way, so mashing their outputs, exposed via APIs, together in a Web 2.0 way will be a major step forward.  Doing this still misses the underlying links that are usually only apparent as connections in the eye of the user, if they happen to appear on the screen together.  When we can follow those links between data across silos we will remove the false barriers, imposed by technology thus far, and expose our users to the world of linked data.  

Below is a diagram I am working on to hopefully help people visualise what I mean.  Utilising Web 2.0 technologies we bring together [mashup] the output from various application silos in to one interface.  A great improvement over Web 1.0 where each application would present its data on it’s own independent, and different, screen.  Utilising Web 3.0 [Semantic Web] technologies, links between data in separate silos can be identified and presented as connections and relationships in a single Web of Data - much closer to a representation of the real world.

I would be interested in feedback on this diagram.  Does it help, or does it make things more confusing?

Megaphone picture published by Paul Keleher in Flickr.

Share This

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.

Share This

I spent yesterday in Birmingham’s excellent ICC convention centre at the JISC Conference 2008.

As with all multi-track conferences, apart from the keynote sessions, it is always difficult to get an overall view of the mood, and themes of concern, for the large group of people that congregate at such an event.

Looking back over the day, the word that came to the surface, appearing in most presentations and conversations accompanying refreshments, was silos.  

Describing the way academic libraries have to deliver services to their users, the phrase "providing seamless access to the silos of data" showed up a few times.  In the same way the silos of information held in the VLEs, VREs, Archives, Repositories, and the Library, need to be made easily available to the students/academic staff/researchers that use them.

Academia has a problem, well at least in it’s online presence.   The many excellent efforts to draw together sets of data and resources utilising pre-Web 2.0 technologies have inevitably resulted in the creation of many silos of data that users have to interact with on a silo-by-silo basis. 

Take for instance the average library web site with its many and varied sources of data on offer for you to search - and often that is without taking in to consideration repositories, archives, and the like held outside of the library’s direct influence.  Why on earth should a consumer of university information and learning services have to know which virtual box data is hidden in, before they are able to search for it?  OK perhaps I’m being a little disingenuous with that last remark, as I know the answers to my own question.  Firstly, until very recently, systems were never designed on the assumption that they would would sit alongside other [peer] systems and users would want or need to search them in parallel with those peer systems.  Secondly, the data, and metadata, standards used for holding information in these systems often differ greatly from each other.

There have been many projects over the years, producing a federated search across either disparate data sets inside an institution, or similar data sets across disparate institutions - these have had varying degrees of success , but none really solving the problem.  Another approach has been to just solve the single-sign-on problem so that at least users can get to the individual resources without having to negotiate various login hurdles, so at least it feels like the university owns all the resources.

In a couple of yesterday’s sessions Web 2.0 was presented as the solution to these problems.  [Subject to solving the identity and single-sign-on access problems which are generic in any integration project] Mashup access to our resources so that all the data-sets can appear as one on a single [portal] interface.  Yes, that will be better from the end user point of view - single access point, single user interface, single style, integration with other social tools like blogs, wikis, Facebook, etc. - Web 2.0 can offer much to make the user’s life and interaction simpler and more pleasurable.

But, is Web 2.0 solving the basic problem?  I contend that it is not.  No matter how you provide access to silos of data, delineated by technical, data standard, financial, and political practices - they are still silos.   The real value of providing access to more than one set of data is the links and associations between the individual elements of that data.  

Two  scenarios….

It is useful to know, by searching a course management system, that Prof Joe Bloggs takes lectures on a particular course.  It is useful to know, by searching an electronic resource management system, that Prof Joe Bloggs has published several papers on the subject.  It is useful to know, by searching the library catalogue,  that Prof Joe Bloggs has written a book on the subject which is in the library.  It is useful to know, by searching Technorati, that Prof Joe Blogs has blogged about the subject.

Whereas….

It would be really valuable that, the University System [knowing what course you were on] would provide a link to your lecturers, one of those being Prof Joe Bloggs.  By following links provided by the system you would be able to see the blog posts he had made on the subject of your course; the books in the library that he has authored on the subject; the lectures he has/is giving on your and possibly other courses; the papers he had published on the subject; the co-authors of those papers; the courses those co-authors are associated with; and on across the graph of relationships between people and things inside and outside of the university.

The former is what most seem to be working towards today.  It would be of great benefit to achieve it, and Web 2.0 principles and technologies will be a great help in achieving it.   The latter scenario should be what we should be striving for - not only delivering the data and information held, or licensed, by the university, but also extracting the massive value in the links and references between that data. 

The emergence of Semantic Web technologies holds out the possibility of being able to deliver on the ambitions implicit in that second scenario.  Whilst getting to grips with Web 2.0 we should look beyond it to Semantic Web (often labelled Web 3.0) techniques and technologies and release the value locked up in the links between the data we create and hold.

I the bags of those that attended JISC 2008 there was a card inviting those that are interested in sharing their thoughts, experience, and ideas about how we step beyond the current confines of the VLE, portal, repository, and library, to register their interest in being invited to attend a Talis Research Day on the subject.  If you have a keen interest in learning, teaching and research and are excited by emerging technologies and would like to attend - register your interest.

Silo photo published by Zesmerelda in Flickr.

Share This

“I read the Panlibus blog - I note Talis has another house blog called Nodalities - why is this and why/who should be reading it??”

One of the major recurring themes from myself and others in Panlibus postings is Library 2.0 and its more general cousin Web 2.0. If you followed the links I provided to their descriptions in Wikipedia you will have discovered that they are both labels for a collection of attributes as against specifications.

I have yet to read a complete concise definition of what Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 ‘is’ [and probably never will], nevertheless it is far simper to look at an application or service and pronounce to the world that it is very Web 2.0 and be fairly confident that people will understand what you mean.

Web 2.0 is virtually all about technology, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture, Social Networking tools, etc. etc., whereas it’s Library relative mixes all of that with a heavy dose of using those Web 2.0 tools and the customer handling & social skills of the library community to provide a better service to library users. - Debates about the use of mobile phones, and the provision of coffee, in a Library environment are often found in the Library 2.0 world.

We at Talis are the ‘Technology Guys’ in the Library equation, and although interested in all that is debated, our motivations are all about how new and emerging technologies [currently labelled Web 2.0] can be beneficially applied in the Library world. To this end you will find me and my colleagues evangelising on the subject both here and at conferences around the world such as these: Access2006, Internet Librarian International, Stellenbosch Symposium, Internet Librarian 2006, and the Charleston Conference.

The Talis Platform is an excellent example of applying Web 2.0, Semantic Web [to mention another ‘label’], SOA, and other technologies to provide innovative solutions to the liberating of library data, functionality, and services for the benefit of all.

In the process of proposing and delivering those [currently library specific] solutions, we are pushing both the theoretical and practical boundaries of web technologies and the theories and standards that are behind them - especially in the World Wide Web Consortium where you find Talis involved with several comittees. In doing this we are very active members, with much to contribute and say, of the world community driving forward these technologies.

This is where Nodalities comes in. You will note [today] that there is a posting from me picking up points from the blogs of Ian Davis and Sam Tunnicliffe, from our Platform Team, who are currently at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. If you are interested, like I am, in the way that all things Web are [and are being predicted to be] moving, you will find what they are reporting most engrossing.

Reading between the lines of what is being presented it is clear that the advances already being demonstrated by the Talis Platform are only the first step in a massive change in the way large sets of data and metadata (often only linked by semantics), can be marshalled, related together, and combined to change the way information is used in the future.

Dependant on the context, you will find Talis people attending and/or speaking at both Library and more general conferences across the world. Our knowledge, and understanding, of the issues surrounding the library and information industries is very valuable input into the wider technology world. As we have demonstrated this is a two way street. It is absolutely certain that our knowledge and understanding of the Web 2.0 world is already adding unique value to the world of libraries.

So to answer the question at the start of this posting…..

If you are in the library community and want to keep abreast of technology advancements - read Panlibus. If you are in the wider web community and are interested in what we are doing, and have to say about, applying these technologies as a Platform in real world situations - read Nodalities. I suspect most people, although with concentration on one, will find postings of interest in both Panlibus and Nodalities.

Technorati Tags: Talis, Talis Platform, Library, Library 2.0, Web 2.0, SOA, web2summit

Share This

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

Share This