News & Noteworthy

Linked Data Webinar Series Available

LITA is offering a series of webinars on Linked Data. The series begins with “Linked data primer” on December 5, 2013 11:00 AM – noon CST, continues with “Coding experiments to transform MARC to linked data” on January 14th, 2014 11:00 AM – noon CST and concludes with “SKOS, SPARQL, and vocabulary management” on February 11, 2014 11:00 AM – noon CST.

“Linked data primer” will help participants reformulate MARC bibliographic data that are parts of a record and enable the same data to live out on the open Web. For this transformation, currently, the most commonly used form that is being deployed is based on RDF triples (Resource Description Framework). RDF is a standard that bridges human and data for interchange on the Web. It supports evolution of schemas over time, and makes relationships meaningful through the triple structure.

“Coding experiments to transform MARC to linked data” will introduce the basic concepts behind BIBFRAME and demonstrate how MARC21 records could be ingested into a native BIBFRAME NoSQL bibliographic datastore that is part of the open-source Redis Library Services Platform. During the webinar, actual working code will be shown and how MARC record ingestion into the Redis Library Services Platform works along with a Discovery App that has the LinkedData JSON interfaces using BIBFRAME, RDA, and Schema.org vocabularies.

“SKOS, SPARQL, and vocabulary management” looks at SPARQL and SKOS; two W3C standards that build on RDF. The SPARQL query language lets you look for patterns in any RDF dataset; its ability to query across multiple different datasets at once with no concern for explicit structure is opening up new possibilities for working with distributed data. SKOS is an extensible RDF-based ontology designed for vocabulary management, and the Library of Congress, New York Times, and other organizations have made their subject heading and name authority files publicly available in SKOS. We’ll see how to use SPARQL and SKOS together to get more out of SKOS and other RDF-based data.

Participants may register for one or more webinars, with a bundled registration rate being offered for those who register for all three.

For registration and additional information, visit the course page.