LODBib

Linked Data and Bibliographic References
Some notes on the subject of using linked data to share bibliographic information.

Background reading from Wikipedia on linked data if you are not already familiar with the concept. Linked Data is also known as Linked Open Data. Hence you will come across the abbreviation LOD.

Currently Rod isn't that impressed with linking data for some sound reasons, the underlying cause of which is a lack of standards. The resulting inconsistencies are problematic but can be overcome, though arguably they shouldn't need to be overcome at all. Unfortunately though, the inconsistencies are there.

JISC initiative
Last year JISC ran a programme, Exposing digital content for reuse to encourage 'UK Higher Education Universities to apply linked data to a variety of University specific issues'. The programme included an OU project on sharing educational material. More immediately relevant to our work in ViBRANT were these two projects:

• Open Bibliography run by Cambridge and which aimed to deliver 'substantial corpus of bibliographic metadata as Linked Open Data'; and

• Open Citations run by Oxford and which aimed 'to make bibliographic citation links as easy to use as Web links'.

The Open Bibliography project tied in with Open Biblio software as used in Bibliographica. Alas, the software is not stable and at the time of writing, November 2011, the SPARQL interface has been withdrawn owing to bugs. However, it could provide an interesting platform for us to use longer term.

There are, however, standards for linking metadata, specifically XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) from Adobe utilising W3C standards including Dublin Core.

British Library Metadata Service
The British Library is developing a service to make the British National Bibliography available as Linked Data. The initial coverage is of books only, but it is planned to extend the coverage.

TDWG RDF Challenge
Rod set a challenge asking what is RDF good for.

The next day Rod posted some reflections and the day after his final thoughts.

The TDWG RDF/OWL task group has captured the output from the challenge. (Check out the prizes!)