Getaneh Alemu, Brett Stevens, Penny Ross and Jane Chandler

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UKWorld Library and Information Congress 78th IFLA General Conference and Assembly11-17 August 2012, Helsinki, Finland Getaneh.Alemu@port.ac.uk

Library of Ashurbanipal Library of Alexandria(Blair, 2010; Denton, 2007; Dunsire, 2009; IFLA, 2009; Lubetzky, 1953; Morville , 2005; Svenonius, 2000; Wright, 2007)

(IFLA, 2009; Svenonius, 2000)

Record centric, more attuned to human consumption rather than machine processing

Metadata duplication

Data inconsistency

Lack of granularity

Identification, naming, terminological issues

Lack of scalability to the web(Coyle, 2010; Coyle & Hillmann, 2007; Lagoze, 2010; Mathes, 2004; Shirky, 2005; Veltman, 2001; W3C, 2011; Weinberger, 2005, 2007)

MARC MARC must die! (Tennant, 2002)

MARC is deeply embedded in library systems and functions;

Making any changes too difficult and expensive;

Alternative formats, including XML fail to deliver the additional functionality required to merit and justify the changeover;

MARC persisted but it is considered to be inadequate and anachronistic.

(Coyle, 2010; Coyle & Hillmann, 2007; LC, 2011; Wallis, 2011a, 2011b)

http://docs.sitka.bclibraries.ca/Sitka/current/html/ch17s02.html

Deriving lighter schema from a complex one

(Chan & Zeng, 2006)http://www.futerra.co.uk/blog/336

Incorporating diversity/multiple view points“Cultural diversity is as vital as biodiversity” (Veltman,

2001)

Open-world assumption “Anyone can say anything about any topic” resulting

in “variations and disagreements” (Allemnag & Hendler, 2008)

Distributed web of data

The network effect

Linked Data principles (Berners-Lee, 2009)

Global unique identificationUse of scalable data modelUse of consistent technical formats Scalable in-bound and out-bound linking

RDF

RDFS

OWL

SPARQL

URI

(Allemnag & Hendler, 2008; Berners-Lee, 1997; W3C, 2004a, 2004b)

http://talis-systems.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/British-Library-Data-Model-v1.01.pdf

Silos: library-domain-specific languages and terminologies

Conflation between metadata content and metadata presentation/display

Technical complexity of Linked Data technologies such as RDF/XML, RDFS, OWL and SPARQL

Generation, maintenance, resolution and preservation of URIs and namespaces

Linked Data is about metadata and libraries have always been creating and managing metadata

Libraries are interested in Linked Data The Europeana Data Model British Library Data Model Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) Open Metadata Registry Lexvo (URI referenced controlled list of characters, words, terms) GeoNames (geographical database) MARC country and language codes Dewey.info (top level classes of Dewey Decimal Classification) RDF book mash-up (information about books and their authors)

(The British Library, 2011; Wallis, 2011)

Metadata openness and sharing

Facilitate serendipitous discovery of information resources

Identification of resource usage patterns, zeitgeist and emergent metadata

Facet-based navigation

Metadata enriched with links

Source: O'Reilly (2005) Reusable, re-mixable/mashable metadata

Application profiles

Linking to non-library information sources

(Anhalt & Stewart, 2011; Coyle & Hillmann, 2007; Dunsire, 2009; W3C, 2004)

OntologiesCentralised vs decentralised

Complete vs good enough

Focus on describing entities

Develop vocabularies

Properties

The richer an object is described with metadata, the more likely that it conforms to the multitude of perspectives and interpretations of users.

(Alemu, Stevens, & Ross, 2012) Otlet’s “The social space of documents”

“Réseau: a tool to create semantic links between documents and keep track of the annotations made by readers, eventually forming new trails of documents, which he calls “the book about the book” (Wright, 2007)