Data. The final frontier.
This post is the English translation of my original article in Dutch, published in META (2016-3), the Flemish journal for information professionals. Ten years after the term “linked data” was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee it appears to be time to take stock of the impact of linked data for libraries and other heritage institutions in the past and in the future. I will do this from a personal historical perspective, as a library technology professional, […]
Interoperability in heterogeneous library data landscapes Libraries have to deal with a highly opaque landscape of heterogeneous data sources, data types, data formats, data flows, data transformations and data redundancies, which I have earlier characterized as a “data maze”. The level and magnitude of this opacity and heterogeneity varies with the amount of content types and the number of services that the library is responsible for. Academic and national libraries are possibly dealing with more […]
On August 14 the IFLA 2014 Satellite Meeting ‘Linked Data in Libraries: Let’s make it happen!’ took place at the National Library of France in Paris. Rurik Greenall (who also wrote a very readable conference report) and I had the opportunity to present our paper ‘An unbroken chain: approaches to implementing Linked Open Data in libraries; comparing local, open-source, collaborative and commercial systems’. In this paper we do not go into reasons for libraries to […]
Struggling towards usable linked data services at SWIB13 Paraphrasing some of the challenges proposed by keynote speaker Dorothea Salo, the unofficial theme of the SWIB13 conference in Hamburg might be described as “No more ontologies, we want out of the box linked data tools!”. This sounds like we are dealing with some serious confrontations in the linked open data world. Judging by Martin Malmsten’s LIBRIS battle cry “Linked data or die!” you might even think […]
Using discovery tools for presenting integrated information There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about library discovery tools. Basically, a library discovery tool provides a centrally maintained shared scholarly material metadata index, a system for searching and an option for adding a local metadata index. Academic libraries use it for providing a unified access platform to subscribed and open access databases and ejournals as well as their own local print and digital […]