Framing my talk

Linked data-based discovery interfaces

Linked data-based special collection user interfaces

Some observations

The essential questions around how records (or entities) will be shared if we dispense with MARC are unanswered.

• BIBFRAME (or is that BIBFRAME Core?), schema.org, RDA?, Europeana data model?
• Peer to peer?
  
• What will be the role of OCLC (and other vendors)?
• Records or triples?
• Will we be building discovery UIs on top of triple stores using SPARQL?

Linked data research appears to be segregated from user-centered design trend in libraries.

Our linked data in libraries literature is filled with repetitive, elementary what is linked data? what is a triple? articles that do little to move the profession forward.

“The evaluation consisted of a survey and a focus group, with 10 participants including PhD students and MA students studying history, politics and social sciences.”

Who is the audience?

“The participants generally felt that something like Linking Lives would be more appropriate for undergraduates, or useful for teaching, but it would not enable the more sophisticated searching that PhD students might want to carry out.”

People yes, but what about concepts?

“I’d be a little bit sceptical if you were to extend it to concepts…it might tend to homogenise and evacuate some of the complexities and subtle nuances of particular theories.” (Focus group participant)

Integrity

“This is a very fundamental and broad issue around the integrity, accuracy and trustworthiness of resources, and the Linked Data approach does require us to think more carefully about the issues here, because of the intention to bring sources together.”

“Participants wanted to know about the choices underlying Linking Lives: why is the data chosen? what gets left out?”

“If Linking Lives includes a list of works by a person, can the researcher trust that the list is complete? If not then its utility is significantly diminished.”

Open World Model

It is important to mention the traditional database model is closed-world. What this means is that model assumes that all available data is included in the database and that the data has to fit a particular structure. In contrast, the Linked Data model is open-world and assumes that there is always more data available externally and that the graph may extend in ways that you didn’t expect. - Karen Coombs, OCLC

http://www.oclc.org/developer/news/2014/worldcat-discovery-api-and-linked-data.en.html

Does the business case make sense?

“Maybe we’ve reached the point in the Linked Data story where we need to focus more strongly on how it will answer the requirements of researchers.”

Discussion

Adam Chandler
@alc28

slides: http://rpubs.com/acct4rpubs/60756

Europeana SPARQL endpoint
http://europeana.ontotext.com/sparql

VIVO
http://vivo.library.cornell.edu
http://vivoweb.org

Colonial architecture & town planning
http://colonialarchitecture.eu

National Library of Spain
http://datos.bne.es

snac: social networks and archival context
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/search

Stanford annotations experiment
http://www.slideshare.net/azaroth42/annotations-as-linked-data-with-fedora4-and-triannon

Linkedjazz
http://linkedjazz.org

Linking Lives Evaluation Report
http://linkinglives.archiveshub.ac.uk/2012/11/15/linking-lives-evaluation-report/

Open World Model
http://www.oclc.org/developer/news/2014/worldcat-discovery-api-and-linked-data.en.html