(Discover AND deliver) OR else

The future of the academic library as a data services hub

© KaCey97007

Is there a future for libraries, or more specifically: is there a future for academic libraries? This has been the topic of lots of articles, blog posts, books and conferences. See for instance Aaron Tay’s recent post about his favourite “future of libraries” articles. But the question needs to be addressed over and over again, because libraries, and particularly academic libraries, continue to persevere in their belief that they will stay relevant in the future. I’m not so sure.

I will focus here on academic libraries. I work for one, the Library of the University of Amsterdam. Academic libraries in my view are completely different from public libraries in audience, content, funding and mission. As far as I’m concerned, they only have the name in common. For a vision on the future of public libraries, see Ed Summer’s excellent post “The inside out library”. As for research and special libraries, some of what I am about to say will apply to these libraries as well.

So, is there a future for academic libraries? Personally I think in the near future we will see the end of the academic library as we know it. Let’s start with looking at what are perceived to be the core functions of libraries: discovery and delivery, of books and articles.
For a complete overview of the current library ecosystem you should read Lorcan Dempsey’s excellent article “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention”.

Discovery

“Discovery happens elsewhere”. Lorcan Dempsey said this already in 2007 . What this means is that the audience the library aims at, primarily searches for and finds information via other platforms than the library’s website and search interfaces. Several studies (for instance OCLC’s “Perceptions of libraries, 2010“) show that the most popular platforms are general search engines like Google and Wikipedia but also specific databases. And of course, if you’re looking for instant information, you don’t go to the library catalogue, because it only points you to items that you have to read in order to ascertain that they may or may not contain the information you need.

© bibliovox

And if you are indeed looking for publications (books, articles, etc.) you could of course search your library’s catalogue and discovery interface. But you can find exactly the same and probably even more results elsewhere: in other libraries’ search interfaces, or aggregators that collect bibliographic metadata from all over the world. Moreover, academic libraries are doing their best to get their local holdings metadata in WorldCat and their journal holdings in Google Scholar. As I said in my EMTACL12 talk: you can’t find all you need with one local discovery tool.
Also, the traditional way of discovery through browsing the shelves is disappearing rapidly. The physical copies at the University of Amsterdam Library for instance are all stored in a storage facility in a suburb. Apart from some reference works and latest journal issues there is nothing to find in the library buildings. There is no need for a university library building for discovery purposes anymore.

Utrecht University Library has taken the logical next step: they decided not to acquire a new discovery tool, discontinue their local homegrown article search index and focus on delivery. See the article “Thinking the unthinkable: a library without a catalogue” .

Delivery

So, if discovery is something that academic libraries should not invest in anymore, is delivery really the only core responsibility left? Let’s have a closer look.
Delivery in the traditional academic library sense means: giving the customer access to the publications he or she selected, both in print and digital form. In the case of subscription based e-journal articles, delivery consists of taking a subscription and leading the customer to the appropriate provider website to obtain the online article. Taking subscriptions is an administrative and financial activity. For historical reasons the university library has been taking care of this task. Because they handled the print subscriptions, they also started taking care of the digital versions. But actually it’s not the library that holds the subscription, it’s the university. And it really does not require librarian skills to handle subscriptions. This could very well be taken care of by the central university administration. For free and open access journals you don’t even need that.
The selection and procurement of journal packages from a large number of publishers and content providers is a different issue. Specific expertise is required for this. I will come to that later.
The task of leading the customer to the appropriate online copy is only a technical procedure, involving setting up link resolvers. Again, no librarian skills needed. This task could be done by some central university agency, maybe even using an external global linking registry.

Delivery

As for the delivery of physical print copies, this is obviously nothing more than a logistics workflow, no different from delivery of furniture, tools, food, or any other physical business. The item is ordered, it is fetched from the shelf, sometimes by huge industrial robot installations, put in a van or cart, transported to the desired location and put in the customer’s locker or something similar. Again: no librarian skills whatsoever. Physical delivery only needs a separate internal or external logistics unit.

What else?

So, if discovery and delivery will cease to be core activities of the central university library organisation, what else is there?

Selection
Selection of print and digital material was already mentioned. It is evident that the selection of printed and digital books and journal subscriptions needs to be governed by expert knowledge and decisions in order to provide staff and students with the best possible material, because there is a lot of money involved. Typically this task is carried out by subject specialists (also called subject librarians), not by generalists. These ‘faculty liaisons’ usually have had an education in the disciplines they are responsible for, and they work closely together with their customers (academic staff and students). Many universities have semiautonomous discipline oriented sublibraries. The recent development of Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) also fits into this construction.
The actual comparison, selection and procurement of journal packages from a large number of publishers and content providers requires a certain generic specific expertise which is not discipline dependent. This is a task that could well continue to be the responsibility of some central organisational unit, which may or may not be called the university library.

Cataloguing
And what about cataloguing, a definite librarian skill? If discovery happens elsewhere, and libraries don’t need to maintain their own local catalogues, then it seems obvious that libraries don’t need to catalogue anything anymore. In fact, in the current situation most libraries don’t catalogue that much already. All the main bibliographical metadata for books (title, author, date, etc.) are already provided by publishers, by external central library service centres, or by other libraries in a shared cataloguing environment. And libraries have never catalogued journal articles anyway, only journals and issues. Article metadata are provided by the publishers or aggregators. Libraries pay for these services.
It is usual for libraries to add their own subject headings and classification terms to the already existing ones. But as Karen Coyle said at EMTACL12: “Library classification is a knowledge prevention system“, because it offers only one specific object oriented view on the information world. So maybe libraries should stop doing this, which would be in line with the “discovery happens elsewhere” argument anyway.
What remains of cataloguing is adding local holdings, items and subscription information. This is very useful information for library customers, but again this doesn’t seem to require very detailed librarian skills. As a matter of fact most of these metadata are already provided in the selection and acquisition process by acquisition staff and vendors.
The recent Library of Congress BIBFRAME initiative developments in theory make it possible to replace all local cataloguing efforts by linking local holdings information to global metadata.
There is still one area that may require the full local cataloguing range: the university’s own scientific output, as long as it is not published in journals or as books. The fulltext material is made available through institutional repositories, which obviously requires metadata to make the publications findable. However, the majority of the institutional publications are made available through other channels as well, as mentioned, so the need for local cataloguing in these cases is absent.

Reading rooms
More and more students are coming to the library buildings every day, that’s what you hear all the time. Large amounts of money are spent on creating new study centres and meeting places in existing library buildings, even on new buildings. But that’s exactly the point: students don’t come to the library for discovery anymore, because the building no longer provides that. They come for places to study, use network pc’s or the university wifi, meet with fellow students, pick up their print items on loan, or view not-for-loan material. The physical locations are nothing more or less than study centres. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, they are very important, but they do not have to be associated with the university library, but can be provided by the university, on any location.

Reference desk

© Ohio University Libraries

The reference desk, or its online counterpart, is a weird phenomenon. It seems to emphasise the fact that if you want instant information, books are of no use. On the other hand, it suggests that you should come to the library if you need specific information right now. In my view, although the reference desk partly embodies the actual original objective of a library, namely giving access to information, this could function very well outside the library context.
The reference desk service is also somewhat ambiguous. In some cases subject specialist expertise is needed, other cases require a more general knowledge of how to search and find information.

Usage statistics
Statistics of the use of library holdings, both print and electronic, are an important source of information for making decisions on acquisitions and subscriptions. These statistics are provided by local and remote delivery systems and vendors. Usage statistics can also be used for other purposes, like identifying certain trends in scholarly processes, mapping of information sources to specific user groups, etc. Administering and providing statistics once again is not a librarian task, but can be done by internal or external service providers.

Special collections
Special Collections are a Special Case. Most university libraries have a Special Collections division, for historical reasons. But of course Special Collections divisions are nothing less than a Museum and Archive division with specific skills, expertise and procedures. Most of the time they are autonomous units within the university anyway.

New services?

Now, if the traditional library tasks of selection, cataloguing, discovery and delivery will increasingly be carried out by non-librarian staff and units inside and outside the university, is there still a valid reason for maintaining an autonomous central university library organisation? Should academic libraries shift focus? There are a number of possible new services and responsibilities for the library that are being discussed or already being implemented.

© Joshua Kaufman

Content curation
Content curation can be seen as the task of bringing together information on a specific subject, of all kinds, from different sources on the web to be consumed by people in an easy way. This is something that can be done and is already done by all kinds of organisations and people. Libraries, academic, public and other types, can and should play a bigger role in this area. This involves looking at other units and sources of information than just the traditional library ones: books and journals. This new service type evidently is closely related to the traditional reference desk service.
Obviously this can best be taken care of by subject specialists. To do this, they need tools and infrastructure. These tools and infrastructure are of a generic nature and can be provided by technical specialists inside or outside the libraries or universities.
Techniques are often referred to as “mashups” or “linked data”, depending on the background of the people involved.

Linked data
Linked data deserves its own section here, because it has been an ever widening movement since a number of years. It finally reached the library world the last couple of years with developments like the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, the Library of Congress BIBFRAME initiative and the IFLA Semantic Web Special Interest Group. Linked data is a special type of data source mashup infrastructure. It requires the use of URIs for all separately usable data entities, and triples as the format for the actual linking (subject-predicate-object), mostly using the RDF structure.
There are two sides to linked data: the publishing of data in RDF and consequently the consumption of data elsewhere. A special case is the linked data based infrastructure, combining both publication and consumption in a specific way, as is the objective of the above mentioned BIBFRAME project.
Again, we need both subject specialists and generic technology experts to make this work in libraries, both academic and public ones.

Research support
University libraries are more and more expected to increase the level of support for researchers. It’s not only about providing access to scholarly publications anymore, but also about maintaining research information systems, virtual research environments, and long term preservation, availability and reusability of research data sets.
Again, here we see the need for discipline specific support because the needs of researchers for communication, collaboration and data varies greatly per discipline. And again, for the technical and organisational infrastructure we need internal or external generic technology experts and services. Apart from metadata expertise there are no traditional librarian skills required.

Publishing
The Final Frontier: the library turning 180 degrees and switching from consumption to production of publications. According to some people university libraries are very suitable and qualified to become scholarly publishers (see for instance Björn Brembs‘ “Libraries Are Better Than Corporate Publishers Because…”). I am not sure that this is actually the case. Publishing as it currently exists requires a number of specific skills that have nothing to do with librarian expertise. A number of universities already have dedicated university press publishing agencies. But of course the publishing process can and probably will change. There is the open access movement, there is the rebellion against large scientific publishers, and last but not least, there is the slow rise of nanopublications, which could revolutionise the form that scholarly publishing will take. In the future publishing can originate at the source, making use of all kinds of new technologies of linking different types of data into new forms of non-static publications. Universities or university libraries could play a role here. Again we see here the need for both subject specialists and generic technology.

Special and general

So what is the overall picture? Of the current academic library tasks, only a few may still be around in the university in the future: selection, acquisition, cataloguing (if any), reference desk, usage statistics, and only a small part actually requires traditional librarian skills. Together with the new service areas of content curation, linked data, research support and publishing, this is rather an odd collection of very different fields of expertise. There does not seem to be a nice matching set of tasks for one central university division, let alone a library.

But what all these areas have in common is that they depend on linking and coordination of data from different sources.

And another interesting conclusion is that virtually all of these areas have two distinct components:

• Discipline or subject specific expertise
• Generic technical and organisational data infrastructure

I see a new duality in the realm of information management in universities. Selection, content curation, reference desk, linking data, cataloguing and research support will all be the domain of subject specialists directly connected to departments responsible for teaching and research in specific disciplines. These discipline related services will depend on generic technological and organisational infrastructures, available inside and outside the university, maintained by generic technical specialists.
These generic infrastructures could function completely separately, or they could somehow be interlinked and coordinated by some central university organisational unit. This would make sense, because there is a lot of overlap in information between these areas. Some kind of central data coordination unit would make it possible to provide a lot more useful data services than can be imagined now. Also, usage statistics, acquisition and the potential new publishing framework, yes even the special collections, could benefit from a central data services unit.

© HawkinsThiel

Such a unit would be different from the existing university ICT department. The latter mainly provides generic hardware, network, storage and security, and is focused on the internal infrastructure, trying to keep out as much external traffic as possible.
The new unit would be targeted at providing data services, possibly built on top of the internal technical infrastructure, but mainly using existing external ones. And it is obvious that there is added value in cooperation with similar bodies outside the university.

“Data services” then stands for providing storage, use, reuse, creation and linking of internal and external metadata and datasets by means of system administration, tools selection and implementation, and explicitly also programming when needed.
Such a unit would up to a point resemble current library service providers like the German regional library consortia and service centres such as hbz, KOBV or GBV, or high level organisations like the Dutch National Library Catalogue project.

Paraphrasing the conclusion of my own SWIB12 talk: it is time to stop thinking publications and start thinking data. This way the academic library could transform itself into a new central data services hub.

(Subject expertise AND data infrastructure) OR else!

Local library data in the new global framework

FRBR outside the box

© TheArtGuy

Library catalogues have traditionally been used to describe and register books and journals and other physical objects that together constitute the holdings of a library. In an integrated library system (ILS), the public catalogue is combined with acquisition and circulation modules to administer the purchases of book copies and journal subscriptions on one side, and the loans to customers on the other side. The “I” for “Integrated” in ILS stands for an internal integration of traditional library workflows. Integration from a back end view, not from a customer perspective.

Because of the very nature of such a catalogue, namely the description of physical objects and the administration of processing them, there are no explicit relations between the different editions and translations of the same book, nor are there descriptions of individual journal articles. If you do a search on a specific person’s name, you may end up with a large number of result records, written by that person or someone with a similar name, or about that person, even with identical titles, without knowing if there is a relationship between them, and what that relationship might be. What’s certain is that you will not find journal articles written by or about that person. The same applies to a search on title. There is no way of telling if there is any relation between identical titles. A library catalogue user would have to look at specific metadata in the records (like MARC 76X-78X – Linking Entries, 534 – Original Version Note or 580 – Linking Entry Complexity Note), if available, to reach their own conclusions.

Most libraries nowadays also purchase electronic versions of books and journals (ebooks and ejournals) and have free or paid subscriptions to online databases. Sometimes these digital items (ebooks, ejournals and databases) are also entered into the traditional library catalogues, but they are sometimes also made available through other library systems, like federated search tools, integrated discovery tools, A-Z lists, etc. All kinds of combinations occur.

In traditional library catalogues digital items are treated exactly the same as their physical counterparts. They are all isolated individual items without relations. As Karen Coyle put it November 2010 at the SWIB10 conference: “The main goal of cataloguing today is to keep things apart” .
Basically, integrated library systems and traditional catalogues are nothing more than inventory and logistics systems for physical objects, mainly focused on internal workflows. Unfortunately in newer end user interfaces like federated search and integrated discovery tools the user experience in this respect has in general been similar to that of traditional public catalogues.

At some point in time during the rise of electronic online catalogues, apparently the lack of relations between different versions of the same original work became a problem. I’m not sure if it was library customers or librarians who started feeling the need to see these implicit connections made explicit. The fact is that IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) started developing FRBR in 1998.

FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) is an attempt to provide a model for describing the relations between physical publications, editions, copies and their common denominator, the Work.

FRBR Model © Library of Congress/Barbara Tillett

FRBR Group 1 describes publications in terms of the entities Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item (WEMI).
FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data – ‘authors’) and FRSAD (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data – ‘subjects’) have been developed later on as alternatives for the FRBR Group 2 and 3 entities.

Anne Frank's Diary

As an example let’s have a look at The Diary of Anne Frank. The original handwritten diary may be regarded as the Work. There are numerous adaptations and translations (Expressions) of the original unfinished and unedited Work. Each of these Expressions can be published in the form of one or more prints, editions, etc. These are the Manifestations, especially if they have different ISBN’s. Finally a library can have one or more physical copies of a Manifestation, the Items.

Some might even say the actual physical diary is the only existing Item embodying one specific (the first) Expression of the Work (Anne’s thoughts) and/or the only Manifestation of that Expression.

Of course, this model, if implemented, would be an enormous improvement to the old public  catalogue situation. It makes it possible for library customers to have an automatic overview of all editions, translations, adaptations of one specific original work through the mechanism of Expressions and Manifestations. RDA (Resource Description and Access) is exactly doing this.
However there are some significant drawbacks, because the FRBR model is an old model, based on the traditional way of library cataloguing of physical items (books, journals, and cd’s, dvd’s), etc. (Karen Coyle at SWIB10).

• In the first place the FRBR model only shows the Works and related Manifestations and Expressions of physical copies (Items) that the library in question owns. Editions not in the possession of the library are ignored. This would be a bit different in a union catalogue of course, but then the model still only describes the holdings of the participating libraries.
• Secondly, the focus on physical copies is also the reason that the original FRBR model does not have a place for journal titles as such, only for journal issues. So there will be as many entries for one journal as the library has issues of it.
• Thirdly, it’s a hierarchical model, which incorporates only relations from the Work top down. There is no room for relations like: ‘similar works’, ‘other material on the same subject’, ‘influenced by’, etc.
• In the fourth place, FRBR still does not look at content. It is document centric, instead of information centric. It does however have the option for describing parts of a Work, if they are considered separate entities/works, like journal articles or volumes of a trilogy.
• Finally, the FRBR Item entity is only interesting in a storage and logistics environment for physical copies, such as the Circulation function in libraries, or the Sales function in bookstores. It has no relation to content whatsoever.

FRBR definitely is a positive and necessary development, but it is just not good enough. Basically it still focuses on information carriers instead of information (it’s a set of rules for managing Bibliographic Records, not for describing Information). It is an introverted view of the world. This was OK as long as it was dictated by the prevailing technological, economical and social conditions.
In a new networked digital information world libraries should shift their focus back to their original objective: being gateways to information as such. This entails replacing an introverted hierarchical model with an extroverted networked one, and moving away from describing static information aggregates in favour of units of content as primary objects.

The linked data concept provides the framework of such a networked model. In this model anything can be related to anything, with explicit declarations of the nature of the relationship. In the example of the Diary of Anne Frank one could identify relations with movies and theater plays that are based on the diary, with people connected to the diary or with the background of World War 2, antisemitism, Amsterdam, etc.

Unlinked data

In traditional library catalogues defining relations with movies or theater plays is not possible from the description of the book. They could however be entered as a textual reference in the description of a movie, if for instance a DVD of that movie is catalogued. Relations to people, World War 2, antisemitism and Amsterdam would be described as textual or coded references to a short concept description, which in turn could provide lists of other catalogue items indexed with these subjects.
In a networked linked data model these links could connect to information entities in their own right outside the local catalogue, containing descriptions and other material about the subject, and providing links to other related information entities.

FRBR would still be a valuable part of such a universal networked model, as a subset for a specific purpose. In the context of physical information carriers it is a useful model, although with some missing features, as described above. It could be used in isolation, as originally designed, but if it’s an open model, it would also provide the missing links and options to describe and find related information.

Also, the FRBR model is essential as a minimal condition for enabling links from library catalogue items to other entity types through the Work common denominator.

In a completely digital information environment, the model could be simplified by getting rid of the Item entity. Nobody needs to keep track of available copies of online digital information, unless publishers want to enforce the old business models they have been using in order to keep making a profit. Ebooks for instance are essentially Expressions or Manifestations, depending on their nature, as I stated in my post ’Is an e-book a book?’.

The FRBR model can be used and is used also in other subject areas, like music, theater performances, etc. The Work – Expression – Manifestation – Item hierarchy is applicable to a number of creative professions.

The networked model provides the option of describing all traditional library objects, but also other and new ones and even objects that currently don’t exist, because it is an open and adaptable model.
In the traditional library models it is for instance impossible, or at least very hard, to describe a story that continues through all volumes of a trilogy as a central thread, apart from and related to the descriptions of the three separate physical books and their own stories. In the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson, Lisbeth Salander’s life story is the central thread, but it can’t be described as a separate “Work” in MARC/FRBR/RDA because it is not the main subject of one physical content carrier (unless we are dealing with an edition in one physical multi part volume). The three volumes will be described with the subjects ‘Missing girl mystery‘, ‘Sex trafficking‘ and ‘Illegal secret service unit‘ respectively.

In an open networked information model on the contrary it would be entirely possible to describe such a ‘roaming story’.

Millennium trilogy and FRBR

New forms of information objects could appear in the form of new types of aggregates, other than books or journal articles, for instance consisting of text, images, statistics and video, optionally of a flexible nature (dynamic instead of static information objects).

Existing library systems (ILS’s and Integrated Discovery tools  alike), using bibliographic metadata formats and frameworks like MARC, FRBR and RDA, can’t easily deal with new developments without some sort of workaround. Obviously this means that if libraries want to continue playing a role in the information gateway world, they need completely different systems and technology. Library system vendors should take note of this.

Finally, instead of only describing information objects, libraries could take up a new role in creating new objects, in the form of subject based virtual information aggregates, like for instance the Anne Frank Timeline, or Qwiki.This would put libraries back in the center of the information access business.

See also
http://dynamicorange.com/2009/11/11/bringing-frbr-down-to-earth/
http://www.slideshare.net/SarahBartlett/what-place-for-libraries-in-a-linked-data-world
http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2011/08/models-of-bibliographic-data.html

Missing links

The challenges of generating linked data from legacy databases

© extranoise

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about the linked data proof of concept project I am involved in, connecting bibliographic metadata from the OPAC of the Library of the University of Amsterdam with the theatre performances database maintained by the Theatre Institute of The Netherlands.
I ended that post with a list of next steps to take:

• select/adapt/create a vocabulary for the Production/Performance subject area
• select/adapt/create vocabularies for Persons (FOAF?) and Subjects (SKOS?)
• add internal relationships with the other entities (Play, Production, etc.) in the JSON structure (implement RDF in JSON)
• Add RDF/XML as output option, besides JSON
• add external relationships (to other linked data sources like DBPedia, etc.)
• extend the number of possible URI formats (for Play, Production, etc.)
• add content negotiation to serve both human and machine readable redirects
• extend the options on the OPAC side
• publish UBA bibliographic data as linked open data (probably an entirely new project)

So, what have we achieved so far? I can be brief about all the ‘real’ linked data stuff (RDF, vocabularies, external links, content negotiation): we are not there yet. This will be dealt with in the next phase.
Instead, we have focused on getting the simple JSON implementation right, both on the data publishing side and on the data using side. We have added more URIs and internal relationships, and we are using these in the OPAC user interface.
But we have also encountered a number of crucial problems that are in my view inherent to the type of legacy data models used in libraries and cultural heritage institutions.

Theatre Production data in the Library Catalogue

Progress

First let me describe the improvements we have added so far.

The URI for ‘person’ <baseurl>/person/<personname> now also returns a link to all the ‘titles’ that person is connected to (not only with the ‘author’ role, but for all roles, like director, performer, etc.): <baseurl>/gettitles/<personname>. This link will return a set of URIs of the form <baseurl>/title/<personname>/<title>. The /<personname>/<title> bit is at the moment the only way that a more or less unique identifier can be constructed from the OPAC metadata for the ‘play’ in the TIN database. There are a number of really important problems related to this that I will discuss below.

The URI:

<baseurl>/person/Beckett, Samuel

returns among others:

/title/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot
/title/Beckett, Samuel/En attendant Godot
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Endgame
etc.

The URI for a ‘play’ <baseurl>/title/<personname>/<title> now returns a set of ‘production’ URIs of the form <baseurl>/production/<personname>/<title>/<openingdate>/<idnr>.
The ‘production’ URI returns information about ‘theatre company’, ‘venue‘ and all persons connected to that production, including their URIs, and when available also a link to an image of a poster, and a video.

The URI

<baseurl>/title/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot

returns:

/production/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot/1988-07-28/5777
/production/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot/1988-11-22/6750
/production/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot/1992-04-16/10728
/production/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot/1981-02-18/43032

The last ‘production’ URI returns:

“name”:”Beckett, Samuel”,
“title”:”Waiting For Godot”,
“opening”:”1981-02-18″,
“people”:
“description”:”Beckett, Samuel (auteur: toneelspel van)”,
“uri”:”/person/Beckett, Samuel”

“description”:”Hartnett, John (regie)”,
“uri”:”/person/Hartnett, John”

“description”:”Muller, Frans (decor: ontwerp)”,
“uri”:”/person/Muller, Frans”

“description”:”Newell, Kym (licht: ontwerp)”,
“uri”:”/person/Newell, Kym”

“description”:”Zaal, Kees (geluid)”,
“uri”:”/person/Zaal, Kees”

“description”:”Tolstoj, Alexander (uitvoerende: Lucky)”,
“uri”:”/person/Tolstoj, Alexander”

“description”:”Weeks, David (uitvoerende: Estragon)”,
“uri”:”/person/Weeks, David”

“description”:”Coburn, Grant (uitvoerende: Vladimir)”,
“uri”:”/person/Coburn, Grant”

“description”:”Evans, Rhys (uitvoerende: Pozzo)”,
“uri”:”/person/Evans, Rhys”

“description”:”Geiringer, Karl (uitvoerende: A Boy)”,
“uri”:”/person/Geiringer, Karl”

“description”:”Guidi, Peter (uitvoering muziek)”,
“uri”:”/person/Guidi, Peter”

“description”:”Kimmorley, Roxanne (uitvoering muziek)”,
“uri”:”/person/Kimmorley, Roxanne”

“description”:”Vries, Hessel de (uitvoering muziek)”,
“uri”:”/person/Vries, Hessel de”

“description”:”Phillips, Margot (uitvoering muziek)”,
“uri”:”/person/Phillips, Margot”

Challenges/problems

Now, the problems (or challenges) that we are facing here are essential to the core concept of linked data:

• we don’t have actual matching unique identifiers (URIs)
• we don’t have explicit internal relations with a common entity in both sources
• part of the data consists of literal strings in a specific language

These three problems are interrelated, they are linked problems, so to speak.

Missing identifiers

To start with the identifiers. Of course we have internal system identifiers in our local Aleph catalogue database. Because we contribute to the Dutch Union Catalogue (originally a PICA system, now OCLC), our bibliographic records also have national Dutch PICA identifiers. And because the Dutch Union Catalogue records are copied to WorldCat, these records in WorldCat also have OCLC numbers.
Also the Theatre Institute has internal system identifiers in their Adlib database. But at the moment we do not have a match between these separate internal identifier schemes. The Theatre Production database records are not in WorldCat because they’re not bibliographic records.
We are more or less forced to use the string values of the title and author fields to construct a usable URI, on both sides. Clearly this is the basis of lots of errors, because of the great number of possible variations in author and title descriptions.
But even if the Theatre Institute’s records were in the Union Catalogue or WorldCat as well, then we still would not have an automatic match without some kind of broker mechanism ascertaining that the library catalogue record describes the same thing as the theatre production database record. The same applies to the author, which of course should be a relation of the type “written by” between the play and a person record instead of string values. Both systems do have internal author or person authority files, but there is no direct matching. For authors this could theoretically be achieved by linking to an online person authority file like VIAF. But in the current situation this is not available.

Missing relations

This brings me to the second problem. The fact that we are using the string values of title instead of unique identifiers, means that we connect plays and productions with a specific title variety or language. In our current implementation this means that we are not able to link to all versions of one specific play.
For instance, from our OPAC the following URIs are constructed (two in English, one in French, one in Dutch):

/title/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot : a tragicomedy in two acts
/title/Beckett, Samuel/En attendant Godot : pièce en deux actes
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Wachten op Godot

In the Theatre Production database (two in English, four in Dutch, one in French, one in German):

/title/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting for Godot
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Waiting For Godot
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Wachten op Godot
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Wachtend op Godot
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Wachten op Godot (De favorieten)
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Wachten op Godot (eerste bedrijf)
/title/Beckett, Samuel/En attendant Godot
/title/Beckett, Samuel/Warten auf Godot

Only the first and fourth URI from the OPAC will find corresponding titles in the Theatre Production database. The second and third one, using a subtitle within the main title, don’t even have equivalents. And only two of the eight entries from the Theatre Production database have a match in the catalogue.
In a library catalogue environment we are used to this problem, because catalogues are used for describing physical objects in the form of editions and copies. Unfortunately, also the Theatre Production database just contains records describing productions of a specific ‘edition’ or translation of a play, with only the opening performance information attached.

This is where I need to talk about FRBR. Basically in a library catalogue environment this means that we should describe the relations between the ‘work’ (original text), the ‘expression’ (the version or translation), the ‘manifestation’ (edition, format, etc.) and the ‘items’ (the physical copies). Via the relations with higher level expression and work, the physical copy could be linked to the unifying work level, and then ideally through some universally valid unique identifier to, in our case, the theatre plays.
Although FRBR is a publication centered schema used only in libraries, the same concepts can be applied to theatre performances: the original work (which is the same as the work in a bibliographical sense) has expressions (adaptations, translations, etc.), which have manifestations (productions), and in the end the individual items (actual performances on a specific date, time and location).

Linking library and theatre in theory through FRBR

If both the library catalogue and the theatre production database were FRBRised, we could in theory link on the Work level and cover all individual versions. But we would still need a matching mechanism on that Work level of course.

In reality however we can only try to link on the Manifestation level in an imperfect way.

Linking library and theatre in reality

At the moment, in our project, on the catalogue side we extract the title and author from the generated OPAC HTML. It could be an option to get available linking information form the internal MARC records (like the 240, 246, 765, 767, 775 tags), but that is not easy because of a number of reasons. Something similar could be done in the theatre production database, making implicit links explicit. But all this makes the effort to get something sensible out there much bigger.

Literal strings

The third problem, the literal strings in Dutch both in the library catalogue and in the theatre production database, prevents the effective use of the data in multilingual environments, equally in the traditional native interfaces and as linked data. Obviously for English speaking end users the Dutch terms mean nothing. And in a linked data environment the Dutch strings can’t easily be linked to other data, in Dutch, English, or any language, without unique identifiers.

Implicit to explicit

People calling on institutions to publish their data as linked open data tend to say it’s easy once you know how to do it . And of course it must be done. But if the published datasets have a flat internal structure designed to fulfill a specific local business objective, then they just don’t provide sufficient added value for third party use. In order to make your published open data useful for others, you have to make implicit relations explicit. And this requires something more than just making the data available in RDF ‘as is’, it requires a lot of processing.

Do we need mobile library services? Not really

Mobile services have to fulfill information needs here and now

Any time anywhere © Simona K

Like many other libraries, the Library of the University of Amsterdam released a mobile web app this year. For background information about why and how we did it, have a look at the slideshow my colleague Roxana Popistasu and I gave at the IGeLU 2010 conference.
For now I want to have a closer look at the actual reception and use of our mobile library services and draw some conclusions for the future. I have expressed some expectations earlier about mobile library services in my post “Mobile library services”. In summary, I expected that the most valued mobile library services would be of a practical nature, directly tied to the circumstances of internet access ‘any time, anywhere’, and would not include reading and processing of electronic texts.

Let me emphasise that I define mobile devices as smart phones and similar small devices that can be carried around literally any time anywhere, and that need dedicated apps to be used on a small touchscreen. So I am not talking about tablets like the iPad, which are large enough to be used with standard applications and websites, just like netbooks.

As you can see, most, if not all of the services in the Library of the University of Amsterdam mobile app are of a practical nature: opening hours, locations, contact information, news. And of course there is a mobile catalogue. This is the general situation in mobile library land, as has been described by Aaron Tay in his blog post “What are mobile friendly library sites offering? A survey”.

In my view these practical services are not really library services. They are learning or study centre services at best. There is no difference with practical services offered by other organisations like municipal authorities or supermarkets. Nothing wrong with that of course, they are very useful, but I don’t consider these services to be core library services, which would involve enabling access to content.
Real mobile devices are simply to small to be used for reading and processing large bodies of scholarly text. This might be different for public libraries.Their customers may appreciate being able to read fiction on their smart phones, provided that publishers allow them to read ebooks via libraries at all.

Even a mobile library catalogue can be considered a practical service intended to fulfill practical needs of a physical nature, like finding and requesting print books and journals to be delivered to a specific location and renewing loans to avoid paying fines. Let’s face it: an Integrated Library System is basically nothing more than an inventory and logistics management system for physical objects.

Usage statistics of the Library of the University of Amsterdam mobile web app show that between the launch in April and November 2010 the number of unique visits evolves around 30 per day on average, with a couple of peaks (350) on two specific days in October. The full website shows around 6000 visits per day on normal weekdays.
For the mobile catalogue this is between 30 and 50 visits per day. The full OPAC shows around 3000 visits on normal weekdays.

In November we see a huge increase in usage. Our killer mobile app was introduced: an overview of currently available workstations per location. The number of unique visits rises to between 300 and 400 a day. The number of pageviews rises from under 100 per day to around 1000 on weekdays in November. The ‘available workstations’ service accounts for 80% of these. In December 2010, an exam period, these figures rise to around 2000 pageviews per day, with 90% for the ‘available workstations’ service.

We can safely conclude that our students are mainly using our mobile library app on their smart phones to locate the nearest available desktop PC.

Mobile users expect services that are useful to them here and now.

What does this mean for core library services, aimed at giving access to content, on small mobile devices? I think that there is no future for providing mobile access on smart phones  to traditional library content in digital form: electronic articles and ebooks. I agree with Aaron Tay when he says “I don’t believe there is any reason to think that it will necessarily lead to high demand for library mobile services” in his post “A few heretical thoughts about library tech trends“.

Rather, mobile services should provide information about specific subjects useful to people here and now.

Anne Frank House AR example

In the near future anybody interested in a specific physical object or location will have access via their location aware smart phones and augmented reality to information of all kinds (text, images, sound, video, maps, statistics, etc.) from a number of sources: museums, archives, government agencies, maybe even libraries. To make this possible it is essential that all these organisations publish their information as linked open data. This means: under an open license using a generic linked data protocol like RDF.

I expect that consumers of this new type of mobile location based augmented linked information would appreciate some guidance in the possibly overwhelming information landscape, in the form of specific views, with preselection of information sources and their context taken into account.
There may be an opportunity here for libraries, especially public libraries, taking on a new coordinating role as information brokers on the intersection of a large number of different information providers. Of course if libraires want to achieve that, they need to look beyond their traditional scope and invest more in new information technologies, services and expertise.

The future of mobile information services lies in the combination of location awareness, augmented reality and linked open data. Maybe libraries can help.

Dutch Culture Link

Linking library and cultural heritage data

Culture links © Scott Beale/Laughing Squid (http://laughingsquid.com/)

“Interested to publishing a test collection as linked open data to help @StichtingDEN with practical guide for heritage institutions?” That’s what my former colleague at the Library of the University of Amsterdam, now project manager at DEN (Digital Heritage Foundation The Netherlands), Marco Streefkerk asked me in April 2010.

Was I interested? Of course I was. I had written a blog post “Linked data for libraries” almost a year before, and I had been very interested in the subject since then. Unfortunately in my day job at the Library of the University of Amsterdam (UBA) until very recently there was no opportunity to put my theoretical knowledge to practice. However, in the Library’s “Action plans 2010-2011” (January 2010), the Semantic Web is mentioned in the Innovation chapter as one of the areas with room for a small pilot involving linked data and RDF. I like to think it was me who managed to get it in there

To come back to Marco’s question, I was at the time actually trying to think of a linked data/RDF test, and it so happened that I had talked to Ad Aerts of the Theater Institute of The Netherlands (TIN) about organising such a test the day before! So that’s what I told Marco. And things started from there.

The first idea was to publish a small test set of records from one of the University Library’s own heritage collections. The goal from the point of view of DEN was to publish a short practical guide how to publish heritage collection as linked data, targeted at heritage institutions.
But after some email discussions and meetings we decided to incorporate TIN in this test and apply both sides of the linked data concept: publish linked data and use linked data.
Apart from a library catalogue, TIN also has a large database containing metadata on theater performances and a large collection of audiovisual material related to these performances. The plan was to publish the performance metadata and related digital material as linked data.
The UBA would then use this TIN linked data in their traditional MARC based OPAC to enrich the plain bibliographic metadata if the OPAC search results related to theater plays.

We decided to name our little proof of concept project “Dutch Culture Link”. The people involved for DEN are Marco Streefkerk, Annelies van Nispen and Monika Lechner. For TIN it’s Ad Aerts. For UBA: Roxana Popistasu and myself. Of these five people I knew four already face to face and one (Monika) on Twitter. I think this helps.

To start with, we described the data model of the TIN Productions and Performances database (in terms of relationships or triples) as follows:

• a Play is written by one or more Persons (as author)
  

  DCL data model

• a Play can be ‘effectuated’ in one or more Productions
• a Production can be ‘staged’ in one or more Performances
• a Performance takes place in one Venue on a specific date and time
• a Person can be producer of a Production
• a Person can be director of a Production
• a Person can play a character in a Production, or even in an individual Performance

Besides the metadata TIN also has links from the database to digital collections (sound and video recordings, photographs, reviews). The model is strikingly similar to the bibliographic FRBR model. The Play is a FRBR Work, the Production is a FRBR Expression and/or Manifestation, the Performance is a FRBR Item.

Now we knew who and what, but not yet how. We needed to know how to actually apply the theoretical concepts of linked data to our subject area. Questions we had were:

• which ontology/vocabulary (‘data model’) do we need for publishing the production data?
• how to format URIs (the linked data unique identifiers)
• how do we implement RDF?
• which publication techniques and platforms do we use?
• which scripting languages can we use?
• how do we find and get the published linked data?
• how do we process and present the retrieved linked data?

We definitely needed some practical hands-on tutorials or training. We could not find an institution organising practical linked data training courses in The Netherlands at short notice. Via Twitter Ian Davis referred us to their TALIS training options. Unfortunately, because we are only an informal proof of concept pilot project without any project funding, we were unable to proceed on this track.
However, through a contact at The European Library we managed to enter two members of our project team as participants in the free Linked Data Workshop at DANS in The Hague, with Herbert Van De Sompel, Ivan Herman and Antoine Isaac as trainers. This workshop proved to be very useful. Unfortunately I could not attend myself.

After the workshop we decided to adopt an “agile” aproach: just start and proceed with small steps. For the short term this meant on the TIN side: implementing a script that accesses the XML gateway of the Adlib system underlying the Theater Production Database and produces result in JSON format. The script accepts as input URIs of the form <baseurl>/person/<name>, <baseurl>/play/<person>/<title>, etc. For now only the <baseurl>/person/<name> works, but there are more to come.

An example: the request <baseurl>/person/joost van den vondel gives the JSON result:

jsonTIN({
“key”:”vondel, joost van den”,
“name”:”Vondel, Joost van den”,
“birth.country”:”Duitsland”,
“birth.date”:”17 november 1587*”,
“birth.place”:”Keulen”,
“death.date”:”5 februari 1679*”,
“death.place”:”Amsterdam”
})

On the UBA side, if there is an author and/or title field in an individual OPAC result, a JavaScript addon to the Aleph OPAC HTML templates directs a query at the TIN linked data URL using one or both fields as input. The resulting JSON data from TIN is then processed and displayed. At the moment only the author field is used in the <baseurl>/person/<name> query. But here is more to come.

UBA test OPAC with TIN data

Next steps in this project:

• select/adapt/create a vocabulary for the Production/Performance subject area
• select/adapt/create vocabularies for Persons (FOAF?) and Subjects (SKOS?)
• add internal relationships with the other entities (Play, Production, etc.) in the JSON structure (implement RDF in JSON)
• Add RDF/XML as output option, besides JSON
  
• add external relationships (to other linked data sources like DBPedia, etc.)
• extend the number of possible URI formats (for Play, Production, etc.)
  
• add content negotiation to serve both human and machine readable redirects
  
• extend the options on the  OPAC side
• publish UBA bibliographic data as linked open data (probably an entirely new project)
  

The team will be blogging about project developments (in Dutch) on the DEN blog (addition July 7 2011: new DEN blog location).

To be continued…

New users – new libraries – new librarians

Meeting new user expectations at ELAG 2010

In the near future libraries and librarians will be very different from what they are now. That’s the overall impression I took away from the ELAG 2010 conference in Helsinki, June 8-11, 2010.  ELAG stands for “European Library Automation Group”, which is an indication of its age (34 years): “automation” was then what is now “ICT”. The meetings are characterised by a combination of plenary presentations and parallel workshops.

This year’s theme was “Meeting new users’ expectations”, where the term “users” refers to “end users”, “customers” or “patrons”, as library customers are also called. When you hear the phrase “end user expectations” in relation to library technology you first of all think of front end functionality (user interfaces and services) and the changing experiences there. A number of presentations and workshops were indeed focused on user experience and user studies.
Keywords: discovery, guidance, knowing/engaging users, relevance ranking, context.

But a considerable number of sessions, maybe even the majority, were dedicated to backend technology and systems development.
Keywords: webservices, API, REST, JSON, XML, Xpath, SOLR, data wells, aggregation, identifiers, FRBR,  linked data, RDF.

It is becoming ever more obvious that improving libraries’ digital user experience cannot be accomplished without proper data infrastructures and information systems and services. This is directly related to the shift of existing library traditions to the new web experience, which was the leading topic of the presentation given by Rosemie Callewaert and myself: “Discovering the library collections”. We are experiencing a move from closed local physical collections to open networked digital information.

First of all, library collections will be digital. If you don’t believe that, look at the music industry. The recording of stories started 5000 years ago already. The first music recordings only date from the 19th century.

Next, collections will be networked, interlinked and virtual. Data, metadata, and digital objects will be fetched from all kinds of databases on the web, not only traditional bibliographic metadata from library catalogues, and mixed into new result sets, using mashup or linked data techniques.

In this open digital environment, existing and new library systems and discovery tools simply cannot incorporate all possible data services available now and in the future. That is why libraries (or maybe we should start saying ‘information brokers’) MUST have ‘developer skills’ in one form or another. This can range from building your own data wells and discovery tools on one end to using existing online service builders for enriching third party frontends on the other, and everything in between, with different levels of skills required.

Another inevitable development in this open information environment is “cooperation” in all kinds of areas with all kinds of partners in all kinds of forms. Cooperation in development, procurement, hosting and sharing of software (systems, services) and aggregation of data, with libraries, museums, archives, educational institutions, commercial partners, etc.

Last but not least there is the question of the value of the physical library building in the digital age. A number of people stress the importance of libraries as places where students like to come to study. But being a learning center in my view is not part of the core business of a library, which is providing access to information. In pre-digital times it was obviously a natural and necessary thing to study information at the location of the physical collection. But this direct physical link between access to and processing of information does not exist anymore in an open digital information environment.

Back to the ELAG 2010 theme “Meeting new users’ expectations”. In the last slide of our presentation we asked the question “Can LIBRARIES meet new user expectations?” Because we did not have time to discuss it then and there, I will answer it here: “No, not libraries as they are now!”.

New users don’t expect libraries, they expect information services. Libraries were once the best way of providing access to information. Instead of taking the defensive position of trying to secure their survival as organisation (as is the natural aspiration of organisations) libraries should focus on finding new ways of achieving their original mission. This may even lead to the disappearance of libraries, or rather the replacement of the library organisation by other organisational structures. This may of course vary between types of libraries (public, academic, special, etc.).

We may need to redefine the concept of library from “the location of a physical collection” to “a set of information services administered by a group of specialists”.

To summarise: the new digital and networked nature of collections of information leads to a focus on new information services, supported by library staff with information and technology skills, in new organisational structures and in cooperation with other organisations.

Mobile library services

Location aware services in a digital library world

This is the third post in a series of three

[1. Mainframe to mobile - 2. Mobile app or mobile web? - 3. Mobile library services]

© Christchurch City Libraries

While library systems technology and mobile apps architecture make up the technical and functional infrastructure of mobile web access, mobile library services are what it’s all about. What type of mobile services should libraries offer to their customers?

As stated before, the two main features that distinguish mobile, handheld devices from other devices are:

• web access any time anywhere
• location awareness

It seems obvious that libraries should take these two conditions into account when providing mobile services, not in the least the first one. I don’t think that mobile devices will completely replace other devices like pc’s and netbooks, like Google seems to think, but they will definitely be an important tool for lots of people, simply because they always carry a mobile phone with them. So in order to offer something extra, mobile applications should be focused on the situational circumstance of potential access to information any time anywhere, and make use of the location awareness of the device as much a possible. But does this also apply to services for library customers? That partly depends on the type of library (public, academic, special) and the physical and geographical structure of the library (one central location, branch locations).

As a starting point we can say that mobile library services should cover the total range of online library services already offered through traditional web interfaces. However, mobile users may not want to use certain library services on their mobile devices. For instance, from an analysis of usage statistics of EBSCO Mobile at the Library of Texas A&M University, generously provided by Bennett Ponsford, it appears that although the number of searches in EBSCO mobile is increasing, only 1% of mobile searches leads to a fulltext download, against 77% of regular EBSCO searches. These findings suggest that library customers, at least academic ones, are willing to search for books and articles on their mobile devices, but will postpone actually using them until they are in a more convenient environment. Apparently small screens and/or mobile PDF readers are not very reader friendly in academic settings. This may be different for public library customers and e-books.

So, libraries should concentrate on offering those mobile services that are wanted and will actually be used. In the beginning this may involve analysis of usage statistics and customer feedback to be able to determine the perfect mobile services suite for your library. Libraries should be prepared for “perpetual beta” and “agile development”.

There are two main areas of information in which libraries can offer mobile services:

Curtin library mobile

• practical information
• bibliographical information

This is no different from other library information channels, like normal websites and printed guides and catalogues.

Practical information may consist of contact address, email and telephone information, opening hours, staff information, rules and regulations of any kind, etc. In most cases this is information that does not change very often, so static information pages will be sufficient. However, especially with mobile devices who’s owners are on the move, providing dynamic up to date information will give an advantage. For instance: today’s and tomorrow’s opening hours, number of currently available public workstations per location, etc.

The information provided will be even more precisely aimed at the user’s personal situation, if the “location awareness” feature is added to the “any time anywhere” feature, and up to date static and dynamic information for the locations in the immediate vicinity of the customer is shown first, using the device’s automatic geolocation properties. And all this gets better still if the library’s own information is mashed up with available online tools, like showing a location on Google Maps when selecting an address, and with the device’s tools, like making a phone call when clicking on a phone number.

Bibliographical information should be handled somewhat differently. Searching library catalogues or online databases is in essence not location dependent. Online digital bibliographical metadata is available “in the cloud” any time anywhere. It’s not the discovery but the delivery that makes the difference. We have already seen that mobile academic library customers do not download fulltext articles to their mobile devices. But mobile customers will definitely be interested in the possibility of requesting a print item to be delivered to them in the nearest location. WorldCat Mobile, like “normal” WorldCat, for instance offers the option to select a library manually from a list in order to find the nearest location to obtain an item from. It would of course be nice if the delivery location would be automatically determined by the mobile request service, using the device’s location awareness and the current opening hours of the library branches.

The funny thing here is that we have the paradoxical situation of state-of-the-art technology in a world of global online digital information being used to obtain “old fashioned” physical carriers of information (books) from the nearest physical location.

Augmented reality, as a link between the physical and virtual world, may be a valuable extension of mobile services. A frequently mentioned example is scanning a book cover or a barcode with the camera of a mobile phone and locating the item on Amazon. It would be helpful if your phone could automatically find and request the item in the nearest library branch. Personally I am not convinced that this is very valuable. Typing in ISBN or book title will do the job just as fast. Moreover, bookshop staff may not appreciate this behaviour.

A more common use of augmented reality would be to point the camera of your mobile device to a library building, after which a variety of information about the building is shown. The best known augmented reality app at the moment is Layar. This tool allows you to add a number of “layers”, with which you can for instance find the nearest ATM’s or museums, or Wikipedia information about physical objects or locations around you.

Layar - LibraryThing Local

There is also a LibraryThing Local layer for Layar, with which you can find

information about all libraries, bookshops and book related events in the neighbourhood. It may even be possible to find a specific book in an open stack using this technology.

All these extended mobile applications suggest that users of apps may not just be a specific group of people (like library customers), but that mobile users will be interested in all kinds of useful information about their current location. Library information may be only a part of that. Maybe mobile apps should be targeted at a more general audience and include related information from other sources, making use of the linked data concept.

A search in a library catalog in this case may result in a list of books with links to related objects in a museum nearby or a historic location related to the subject of the book. Alternatively, an item in a museum website might have links to related literature in catalogs of nearby libraries. Anything is possible.

The question that remains is: should libraries take care of providing these generic location based services, or will others do that?

Linked Data for Libraries

Linked Data and bibliographic metadata models

© PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

Some time after I wrote “UMR – Unified Metadata Resources“, I came across Chris Keene’s post “Linked data & RDF : draft notes for comment“, “just a list of links and notes” about Linked Data, RDF and the Semantic Web, put together to start collecting information about “a topic that will greatly impact on the Library / Information management world“.

While reading this post and working my way through the links on that page, I started realising that Linked Data is exactly what I tried to describe as One single web page as the single identifier of every book, author or subject. I did mention Semantic Web, URI’s and RDF, but the term “Linked Data” as a separate protocol had escaped me.

The concept of Linked Data was described by Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Whereas the World Wide Web links documents (pages, files, images), which are basically resources about things, (“Information Resources” in Semantic Web terms), Linked Data (or the Semantic Web) links raw data and real life things (“Non-Information Resources”).

There are several definitions of Linked Data on the web, but here is my attempt to give a simple definition of it (loosely based on the definition in Structured Dynamics’ Linked Data FAQ):

Linked Data is a methodology for providing relationships between things (data, concepts and documents) anywhere on the web, using URI’s for identifying, RDF for describing and HTTP for publishing these things and relationships, in a way that they can be interpreted and used by humans and software.

I will try to illustrate the different aspects using some examples from the library world. The article is rather long, because of the nature of the subject, then again the individual sections are a bit short. But I do supply a lot of links for further reading.

Data is relationships
The important thing is that “data is relationships“, as Tim Berners Lee says in his recent presentation for TED.
Before going into relationships between things, I have to point out the important distinction between abstract concepts and real life things, which are “manifestations” of the concepts. In Object modeling these are called “classes” (abstract concepts, types of things) and “objects” (real life things, or “instances” of “classes“).

Examples:

• the class book can have the instances/objects “Cloud Atlas“, “Moby Dick“, etc.
• the class person can have the instances/objects “David Mitchell“, “Herman Melville“, etc.

In the Semantic Web/RDF model the concept of triples is used to describe a relationship between two things: subject – predicate – object, meaning: a thing has a relation to another thing, in the broadest sense:

• a book (subject) is written by (predicate) a person (object)

You can also reverse this relationship:

• a person (subject) is the author of (predicate) a book (object)

Triple

The person in question is only an author because of his or her relationship to the book. The same person can also be a mother of three children, an employee of a library, and a speaker at a conference.
Moreover, and this is important: there can be more than one relationship between the same two classes or types of things. A book (subject) can also be about (predicate) a person (object). In this case the person is a “subject” of the book, that can be described by a “keyword”, “subject heading”, or whatever term is used. A special case would be a book, written by someone about himself (an autobiography).

The problem with most legacy systems, and library catalogues as an example of these, is that a record for let’s say a book contains one or more fields for the author (or at best a link to an entry in an authority file or thesaurus), and separately one or more fields for subjects. This way it is not possible to see books written by an author and books about the same author in one view, without using all kinds of workarounds, link resolvers or mash-ups.
Using two different relationships that link to the same thing would provide for an actual view or representation of the real world situation.

Another important option of Linked Data/RDF: a certain thing can have as a property a link to a concept (or “class”) , describing the nature of the thing: “object Cloud Atlas” has type “book“; “object David Mitchell” has type “person“; “object Cloud Atlas” is written by “object David Mitchell“.

And of course, the property/relationship/predicate can also link to a concept describing the nature of the link.

Anywhere on the web

ERD

So far so good. But you may argue that this relationship theory is not very new. Absolutely right, but up until now this data-relationship concept has mainly been used with a view to the inside, focused on the area of the specific information system in question, because of the nature and the limitations of the available technology and infrastructure.

The “triple” model is of course exactly the same as the long standing methodology of Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD), with which relationships between entities (=”classes“) are described. An ERD is typically used to generate a database that contains data in a specific information system. But ERD’s could just as well be used to describe Linked Data on the web.

Information systems, such as library catalogs, have been, and still are, for the greatest part closed containers of data, or “silos” without connections between them, as Tim Berners Lee also mentions in his TED presentation.

Lots of these silo systems are accessible with web interfaces, but this does not mean that items in these closed systems with dedicated web front ends can be linked to items in other databases or web pages. Of course these systems can have API‘s that allow system developers to create scripts to get related information from other systems and incorporate that external information in the search results of the calling system. This is what is being done in web 2.0 with so-called mash-ups.
But in this situation you need developers who know how to make scripts using specific scripting languages for all the different proprietary API’s that are being supported for all the individual systems.
If Linked Data was a global standard and all open and closed systems and websites supported RDF, then all these links would be available automatically to RDF enabled browser and client software, using SPARQL, the RDF Query Language.

• Linked Data/RDF can be regarded as a universal API.

The good thing about Linked Data is, that it is possible to use Linked Data mechanisms to link to legacy data in silo databases. You just need to provide an RDF wrapper for the legacy system, like has been done with the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Some examples of available tools for exposing legacy data as RDF:

• Triplify – a web applications plugin that converts relational database structures into RDF triples
• D2R Server – a tool for publishing relational databases on the Semantic Web
• wp-RDFa – a wordpress plugin that adds some RDF information about Author and Title to WordPress blog posts

Of course, RDF that is generated like this will very probably only expose objects to link TO, not links to RDF objects external to the system.

Also, Linked Data can be used within legacy systems, for mixing legacy and RDF data, open and closed access data, etc. In this case we have RDF triples that have a subject URI from one data source and an object URI from another data source. In a situation with interlinked systems it would for instance be possible to see that the author of a specific book (data from a library catalog) is also speaking at a specific conference (data from a conference website). Objects linked together on the web using RDF triples are also known as an “RDF graph”. With RDF-aware client software it is possible to navigate through all the links to retrieve additional information about an object.

Linked Data

URI’s
URI’s (“Uniform Resource Identifiers”) are necessary for uniquely identifying and linking to resources on the web. A URI is basically a string that identifies a thing or resource on the web. All “Information Resources”, or WWW pages, documents, etc. have a URI, which is commonly known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

With Linked Data we are looking at identifying “Non-information Resources” or “real world objects” (people, concepts, things, even imaginary things), not web pages that contain information about these real world objects. But it is a little more complicated than that. In order to honour the requirement that a thing and its relations can be interpreted and used by humans and software, we need at least 3 different representations of one resource (see: How to publish Linked Data on the web):

• Resource identifier URI (identifies the real world object, the concept, as such)
• RDF document URI (a document readable for semantic web applications, containing the real world object’s RDF data and relationships with other objects)
• HTML document URI (a document readable for humans, with information about the real world object)

Redirection

For instance, there could be a Resource Identifier URI for a book called “Cloud Atlas“. The web resource at that URI can redirect an RDF enabled browser to the RDF document URI, which contains RDF data describing the book and its properties and relationships. A normal HTML web browser would be redirected to the HTML document URI, for instance a web page about the book at the publisher’s website.

There are several methods of redirecting browsers and application to the required representation of the resource. See Cool URIs for the Semantic Web for technical details.

There are also RDF enabled browsers that transform RDF into web pages readable by humans, like the FireFox addon “Tabulator“, or the web based Disco and Marbles browsers, both hosted at the Free University Berlin.

RDF, vocabularies, ontologies
RDF or Resource Description Framework, is, like the name suggests, just a framework. It uses XML (or a simpler non-XML method N3) to describe resources by means of relationships. RDF can be implemented in vocabularies or ontologies, which are sets of RDF classes describing objects and relationships for a given field.
Basically, anybody can create an RDF vocabulary by publishing an RDF document defining the classes and properties of the vocabulary, at a URI on the web. The vocabulary can then be used in a resource by referring to the namespace (the URI) and the classes in that RDF document.

A nice and useful feature of RDF is that more than one vocabularies can be mixed and used in one resource.
Also, a vocabulary itself can reference other vocabularies and thereby inherit well established classes and properties from other RDF documents.
Another very useful feature of RDF is that objects can be linked to similar object resources describing the same real world thing. This way confusion about which object we are talking about, can be avoided.

A couple of existing and well used RDF vocabularies/ontologies:

• RDF – the base RDF vocabulary
• RDFS (for RDF Schema)
• DC (for Dublin Core)
• FOAF (for FOAF- Friend of a Friend) – online identities and social networks
• SKOS (for SKOS – Simple Knowledge Organisation System) – thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies
• OWL (for OWL -Ontology Web Language)

(By the way,  the links in the first column (to the RDF files themselves) may act as an illustration of the redirection mechanism described before. Some of them may link to either the RDF file with the vocabulary definition itself, or to a page about the vocabulary, depending on the type of browser you use: rdf-aware or not.)

A special case is:

• RDFa – a sort of microformat without a vocabulary of its own, which relies on other vocabularies for turning XHTML page attributes into RDF

Example
A shortened example for “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell from the RDF BookMashup at the Free University Berlin, which uses a number of different vocabularies:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”
…
xmlns:skos=”http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#”>

<rdf:Description rdf:about=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/books/0375507256″>
<rev:hasReview rdf:resource=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/reviews/0375507256_EditorialReview1″/>
<dc:creator rdf:resource=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/David+Mitchell”/>
<dc:format>Paperback</dc:format>
<dc:identifier rdf:resource=”urn:ISBN:0375507256″/>
<dc:publisher>Random House Trade Paperbacks</dc:publisher>
<dc:title>Cloud Atlas: A Novel</dc:title>
</rdf:Description>

<scom:Book rdf:about=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/books/0375507256″>
<rdfs:label>Cloud Atlas: A Novel</rdfs:label>
<skos:subject rdf:resource=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/subject/Fantasy+fiction”/>
<skos:subject rdf:resource=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/subject/Fate+and+fatalism”/>
…
<foaf:depiction rdf:resource=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MIVHgJP%2BL.jpg”/>
<foaf:thumbnail rdf:resource=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MIVHgJP%2BL._SL75_.jpg”/>
</scom:Book>

<rdf:Description rdf:about=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/doc/books/0375507256″>
<dc:license rdf:resource=”http://www.amazon.com/AWS-License-home-page-Money/b/ref=sc_fe_c_0_12738641_12/102-8791790-9885755?ie=UTF8&amp;node=3440661&amp;no=12738641&amp;me=A36L942TSJ2AJA”/>
<dc:license rdf:resource=”http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html”/>
</rdf:Description>

<foaf:Document rdf:about=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/doc/books/0375507256″>
<rdfs:label>RDF document about the book: Cloud Atlas: A Novel</rdfs:label>
<foaf:maker rdf:resource=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/is-group/resource/projects/Project10″/>
<foaf:primaryTopic rdf:resource=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/books/0375507256″/>
</foaf:Document>

<rdf:Description rdf:about=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/David+Mitchell”>
<rdfs:label>David Mitchell</rdfs:label>
</rdf:Description>

<rdf:Description rdf:about=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/reviews/0375507256_EditorialReview1″>
<rdfs:label>Review number 1 about: Cloud Atlas: A Novel</rdfs:label>
</rdf:Description>

<rdf:Description rdf:about=”http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/is-group/resource/projects/Project10″>
<rdfs:label>RDF Book Mashup</rdfs:label>
</rdf:Description>

</rdf:RDF>

A partial view on this RDF file with the Marbles browser:

RDF browser view

See also the same example in the Disco RDF browser.

Library implementations
It seems obvious that Linked Data can be very useful in providing a generic infrastructure for linking data, metadata and objects, available in numerous types of data stores, in the online library world. With such a networked online data structure, it would be fairly easy to create all kinds of discovery interfaces for bibliographic data and objects. Moreover, it would also be possible to link to non-bibliographic data that might interest the users of these interfaces.

A brief and incomplete list of some library related Linked Data projects, some of which already mentioned above:

• RDF BookMashup – Integration of Web 2.0 data sources like Amazon, Google or Yahoo into the Semantic Web.
• Library of Congress Authorities – Exposing LoC Autorities and Vocabularies to the web using URI’s
• DBPedia – Exposing structured data from WikiPedia to the web
• LIBRIS – Linked Data interface to Swedish LIBRIS Union catalog
• Scriblio+Wordpress+Triplify – “A social, semantic OPAC Union Catalogue”

And what about MARC, AACR2 and RDA? Is there a role for them in the Linked Data environment? RDA is supposed to be the successor of AACR2 as a content standard that can be used with MARC, but also with other encoding standards like MODS or Dublin Core.
The RDA Entity Relationship Diagram, that incorporates FRBR as well, can of course easily be implemented as an RDF vocabulary, that could be used to create a universal Linked Data library network. It really does not matter what kind of internal data format the connected systems use.