Image courtesy of Grant MacDonald under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license. Introduction I feel that this series is becoming a little long in the tooth. As such, this will be my last post in the series. This series will be aggregated under the following tag: linked data journey. After spending a good amount of time playing with RDF technologies, reading authoritative literature, and engaging with other linked data professionals and enthusiasts, I have come to the conclusion that linked data, as with any other technology, isn’t perfect. The honeymoon phase is over! In this post I hope to present a high-level, pragmatic assessment of linked data. I will begin by detailing the main strengths of RDF technologies. Next I will note some of the primary challenges that come with RDF. Finally, I will give my thoughts on how the Library/Archives/Museum (LAM) community should move forward to make Linked Open Data a…
Author: Jacob Shelby
Article Discussion on Schema.org
Article Discussion A month ago I came across an interesting article titled “Schema.org: Evolution of Structured Data on the Web”. In the article, R. V. Guha (Google), Ban Brickley (Google), and Steve MacBeth (Microsoft) talked about Schema.org, the history of Schema.org and other structured data on the Web, design decisions, extending the core Schema.org vocabulary, and related efforts to Schema.org. Much of the article revolved around the design decisions and implementation of Schema.org by “The Big Search Engines” (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc). Schema.org, first and foremost, is a set of vocabularies, or, a data model, just like Dublin Core and Bibframe. So, in that regard, we as information publishers can use the Schema.org vocabularies in whatever way we like. However, from what I can gather from the article, The Big Search Engines’ implementation of Schema.org has implications on how we publish our data on the Web . For instance, given this quote:…
A Linked Data Journey: Survey of Publishing Strategies
Image Courtesy of Shelly under a CC BY 2.0 license. Introduction Happy Friday everyone! This is part five of my Linked Data Series. You can find the previous posts by going to my author page. Last week I was fortunate enough to attend Mashcat 2016 in Boston. It was a wonderful one-day conference. We had some very interesting conversations aimed at breaking down communication barriers in libraries (archives and museums), and I was able to meet some fantastic professionals (and students). In addition to attending, I also presented a talk titled Finding Aid-LD: Implementing Linked Data in a Finding Aid Environment (slides). During the presentation I identified various Linked Data publishing strategies that are currently being implemented. I thought this would be a neat topic to post here as well, so today I’m going to give you the deets on Linked Data publishing strategies. Survey of Publishing Strategies Note that these strategies…
A Linked Data Journey: Interview with Julie Hardesty
Image Courtesy of Marcin Wichary under a CC BY 2.0 license. Introduction This is part four of my Linked Data Series. You can find the previous posts in my author feed. I hope everyone had a great holiday season. Are you ready for some more Linked Data goodness? Last semester I had the pleasure of interviewing Julie Hardesty, metadata extraordinaire (and analyst) at Indiana University, about Hydra, the Hydra Metadata Interest Group, and Linked Data. Below is a bio and a transcript of the interview. Bio: Julie Hardesty is the Metadata Analyst at Indiana University Libraries. She manages metadata creation and use for digital library services and projects. She is reachable at jlhardes@iu.edu. The Interview Can you tell us a little about the Hydra platform? Sure and thanks for inviting me to answer questions for the LITA Blog about Hydra and Linked Data! Hydra is a technology stack that involves several pieces of software…
A Linked Data Journey: Interview with Allison Jai O’Dell
Image Courtesy of AJC under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. Introduction This is part three of my Linked Data Series. You can find the previous posts in my author feed. I’ve decided to spice things up a bit and let you hear from some library professionals who are actually implementing and discussing Linked Data in their libraries. These interviews were conducted via email and are transcripts of the actual interviews, with very minor editorial revisions. This first interview is with Allison Jai O’Dell. Bio: Allison Jai O’Dell is Metadata Librarian and Associate University Librarian at the University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries. She is on the editorial teams of the RBMS Controlled Vocabularies and the ARLIS/NA Artists’ Books Thesaurus – and is working to publish both as enriched, five-star linked datasets. Learn more about her from her website. The Interview Can you give a brief description of TemaTres? TemaTres is a…
A Linked Data Journey: Proof of Concept
Courtesy of Alex Berger under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license Introduction This is part two of my Linked Data Series. You can find the first post here. Linked Data is still a very abstract concept to many. My goal in this series is to demystify the notion. To that end I thought “wouldn’t it be cool to put Linked Data to practice, to build a proof-of-concept record”, so I did. I decided to create a Linked Data catalog record, because I wanted to write something relatively quickly, though I later found out that even writing a simple catalog record in Linked Data was going to be more effort than I anticipated. About the Record Link to display record: link Link to visual graph of record: link Link to code: link First, here’s a link to the display record. It might take a second to load, as it is pulling in…
A Linked Data Journey: Introduction
retrieved from Wikipedia, created by Anja Jentzsch and Richard Cyganiak Introduction Linked data. It’s one of the hottest topics in the library community. But what is it really? What does it look like? How will it help? In this series I will seek to demystify the concept and present practical examples and use-cases. Some of the topics I will touch on are: The basics Tools for implementing linked data Interviews with linked data practitioners What can you do to prepare? In this part one of the series I will give a brief explanation of linked data; then I will attempt to capture your interest by highlighting how linked data can enhance a variety of library services, including cataloging, digital libraries, scholarly data, and reference. What is Linked Data? I’m not going to go into the technical detail of linked data, as that isn’t the purpose of this post. If you’re…
Taming the Beast: A Case for Task-Driven Projects
Have you ever been assigned to a project? If so, you know that they can be daunting, sometimes overwhelming creatures that seem challenging to overcome. Where do you begin? What next? Before you know it you’re lost in the jungle with no clear way out. So, how do you tame the beast? How do you get through a project without getting lost along the way? In this post I’ll be making a case for tasks. Paving the way through the jungle Tasks are the real, tangible steps taken to accomplish a goal, in this case, a project. Together, they build the roadmap that helps you get from point A to point Z. So, how do you come up with tasks for a large, sometimes abstract project? First, you need to understand what the end goal is. Second, you need to understand where you are currently at. Then you start plotting…