Libraries – an important and vibrant Linked Data application domain
In late 2009 I was contacted by Tom Baker, Emmanuelle Bermes and Antoine Isaac to help fund the Library Linked Data Incubator Group (XG) at W3C and although I personally didn’t actively contribute (more a hurler-on-the-ditch like commenting, really) I am really, really happy with the outcome. To be fair, DERI was very active after all and provided great input – thanks to Jodi Schneider.
After the regular year the XG was extended for three months to complete the multitude of deliverables. A very ambitious, and as it looks like successful endeavor – bravo to the chairs and group members for this achievement. I gather that a transition to a W3C Community Group is discussed, something I applaud and support.
Why do I mention this now? Well, first of all (digital) libraries are an important and vibrant Linked Data application domain. I predict that after the attention the eGovernment domain has witnessed something like this could happen soon in the DL domain as well … hm, on a second thought, actually it is already happening
In this context I stumbled upon two interesting new publications I’d like to share with you:
- ‘Facilitating Access to the Web of Data: A guide for librarians‘ contains an introduction to the Web of data and explores how you can harness the power of the technologies from a professional point of view.
- ‘Metadata for Digital Collections‘ is a how-to-do-it manual covering metadata topics, mapping between different schemes, metadata interoperability, OAI harvesting, as well as Linked Data stuff.
It’s an exciting time to work in the Linked Data area, activities in many application domains and on the systems level (NoSQL, SEO, etc.) are popping up like wild.
What do you think? Is the time ripe for a large-scale deployment of Linked Data in the DL domain? What other good resources do you know of?
Filed under: FYI, Linked Data, W3C