LINKED DATA: OCLC

OFFERINGS AND

EXPERIMENTS

OCLC Informationstag 2012 – Frankfurt

Titia van der WerfSenior Program OfficerOCLC Research

OCLC Research

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CONTENT

�Digital library innovation in Europe

�Role of OCLC Research

�OCLC Research Linked Data Activity

�Discussion

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DIGITAL LIBRARY INNOVATION IN

EUROPE

Innovation at the European level: EC ICT-FP

research projects for digital libraries

� High investment in innovation

� Building an EU-wide network of experts

� Gap between academic research and practical

implementation of research outcomes

� High project management overhead

� Driven by EU-policy and politics

� Mutual competition and temporary alliances – no long-

term/self-sustainable cooperation in innovation. 3

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DIGITAL LIBRARY INNOVATION IN

EUROPE

Innovation at the national level:

� Funds managed by national agencies like JISC, DFG,

SURF, etc.

� Funding of institutions with national tasks and

responsibilities

� Driven by national policy and politics

� Mutual competition and temporary alliances – no long-

term/self-sustainable cooperation in innovation.

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DIGITAL LIBRARY INNOVATION IN

EUROPE

Innovation at the institutional level:

� Complex ecosystem to manage

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ECOSYSTEM OF A SINGLE LIBRARY

TODAY

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Users

Print

Vendors

LibraryOPAC

ILS

Circulation

Cataloging

Self

Service

Acquisitions

Cataloging

Utility

National/

Global

System

Consortial

System

Electronic

Vendor

A to Z

List

Resolver

ERM

Institutional

Repository

Meta-

search

DIGITAL LIBRARY INNOVATION IN

EUROPE

Innovation at the institutional level:

� Complex ecosystem to manage (previous slide)

� Wide range of staff expertise/skills required to keep

this ecosystem up and running – local capacities are

overstretched

� Fragmention of innovation effort

� Budget constraints aggravated by economic crisis

� Need to evolve towards a model of shared innovation

� Need to redefine boundaries of local/shared/external

ecosystem

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BOUNDARIES: THINGS ONLY WE CAN

DO, THINGS WE CAN DO TOGETHER,

THINGS WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO

ANYMORE

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Engagement Innovation

Infrastructure

Develop new services

Take-up new technologies

Speed/flexibility important

Attract and build

relationships with

end-user,

“service-oriented”,

customization, etc.

Back office capacities that

support day-to-day operations

“Routinized” workflows

Economies of scale important

SHARED OCLC PLATFORM

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Platform

Management

Platform

Management

Infrastructure

Data

Web Services

App GalleryApp Gallery

OCLC-built

Applications

OCLC-built

ApplicationsLibrary-built

Applications

Library-built

ApplicationsPartner-built

Applications

Partner-built

ApplicationsFlexible, open

platform for the

community to

share

applications and

innovation

OCLC Research Website

MEET THE OCLC RESEARCH TEAM

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OCLC Research

and many more…

Dublin – San Mateo - Leiden

OBJECTIVE AND ROLES OF OCLC

RESEARCH

� Objective

To expand knowledge that advances the OCLC’s public

purposes of furthering access to the world’s information

and reducing library costs.

� Roles

1. Act as a community resource for shared R&D

2. Advance ideas for service improvement, new

services and technology adoption within OCLC

product groups

3. Engage the library and archive community through

research focused working groups and collaborations.

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OCLC – 3 CONSTITUENCIES

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OCLC

Services

OCLC Research

Library Partnership

OCLC Membership

COMPOSITION OF THE

PARTNERSHIP

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THE OCLC RESEARCH PROCES

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BUILD

COMMUNITY

CREATE

CONSENSUS

IDENTIFY BEST

PRACTICE

PERFORM RESEARCH &

BUSINESS

INTELLIGENCE

PRODUCE

OUTCOMES

TRANSFER

TECHNOLOGY

DEVELOP &

DEPLOY

BUILD

PROTOTYPES

CONVENE

EXPERTS

DEVELOP

ARCHITECTURE & STANDARDS

Shared uncertainties Community solutions

OCLC RESEARCH STRANDS

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OCLC RESEARCH STRANDS

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FROM BIBL. RECORDS TO LINKED

DATAOCLC Research

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LINKED DATA

� Global nodes for referencing:

� information about entities (persons, organisations,

books, events, geographical locations, plants and

crops, etc.)

� identified on the web with an HTTP URI;

� The same entity can be described by different

URIs:

� http://viaf.org/viaf/102333412 identifies the same

person as http://dbpedia.org/resource/Jane_Austen,

without claiming that the information about this

person is the same.19

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LINKED DATA

� Linked data are published as a dataset using the

web standards for browsing (human readable) and for

re-use across applications (machine readable: RDF,

SPARQL).

� Linked data usually include links to other URIs

that are relevant (eg. descriptions of the same entity

in other languages).

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LINKED DATA

� Library Linked Data Incubator Group http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld-usecase/

� Use cases for semantic web technology

implementation in libraries.

� To demonstrate the benefit of linked data for library

resources and the value of sharing these descriptions

among libraries and beyond. 21

Make your stuff available on the web.

Make it available as structured data…

…in a non-proprietary format.

Use HTTP URIs to identify things.

Link your data to other people’s data. Sourc

e:

W3C

LINKED DATA INITIATIVES

� Dbpedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbpedia

A community effort to extract structured information

from Wikipedia and to make this information

available as linked data. Dbpedia dataset describes

more than 3.64 million things.

� Linking Open Government Data http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/home

Instance Hub Project: demos of linked data across

diverse categories derived from US Government

data (US agencies, crops, toxic chemicals, etc.).

� BBC Sport: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/04/sports_dyn

amic_semantic.html

Linked data of sports (players, teams, matches,

leagues and divisions, events and competitions)

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OCLC LINKED DATA ACTIVITY

� Which entities in bibliographic descriptions are

useful to publish as linked data?

Authorities

VIAF: combines multiple name authority records into a

single name cluster and identifies it with one URI.

VIAF initiative started in 2003 with LoC, DNB, BnF,

OCLC Research.

2012: 9M name clusters; cooperation with 22 agencies

from 19 countries; transitioned to production.23

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OCLC LINKED DATA ACTIVITY

� Which entities in bibliographic descriptions are

useful to publish as linked data?

Subject headings

FAST: simplified and faceted version of the LCSH.

FAST as Linked Data is available at

http://id.worldcat.org/fast/), and is made available

under the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence.

It is also available for download under this license at

http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/fast/download.

htm. 25

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MOVING BEYOND MARC: THE QUALITY CHALLENGE

� OCLC Data Architecture Group

Bibliographic records contain an enormous amount of

information that needs to be prepared for a linked-data

representation.

Need to manage entities and relationships across

the data in individual datastores; synthesize and extract

assertions about entities.

� Karen Coyle argues that we need to start a program to

make our data linkable. Regardless of what happens to

the linked-data ambition, we need to do this work

anyway to make our data more machine-processable.

2012. Taking library data from here to there.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-

thes/2012Feb/0001.html 26

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FUTURE EXPERIMENTS

� Expose (parts of) WorldCat as linked data

� Which model? BL-model; Europeana model;

Schema.org model; etc.

� Populating discovery services with OCLC linked

data

� Europeana

� DPLA

� Other interested parties

� What will be the use of OCLC linked data by the

community? what will be the take-up? how will

they make use of the data? 28

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DATA LICENSING ISSUES

WorldCat record use policy

New policy created by members, reviewed by the

community, and implemented 1 August 2010:

http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/recorduse/default.htm

� Scope = copies of WorldCat records – not the WorldCat

database itself

� A code of good practice for members of a cooperative

based on shared values, trust and reciprocity in

understanding rights and responsibilities –instead of

data ownership, detailed provisions or restrictions

� Outlines rights to transfer data to individuals,

consortia and public agencies, other libraries and

scholarly institutions, (members or non-members ), and

third parties 29

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OCLC: OWNED AND GOVERNED BY

MEMBER LIBRARIES

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25,900+

institutions

Members

3

councils

Regional Councils Global Council

48

members16

trustees

Board of Trustees

16

trustees

DATA LICENSING ISSUES

Recommendation for adopting ODC-BY

Open data commons attribution license.

� Experimenting with Cambridge (http://cul-

comet.blogspot.com/)

� Best practice: give attribution to OCLC (somewhere on

your site) and show awareness of the OCLC cooperative

community norms and provide a link to these norms:

http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/recorduse/policy/odcbynorm

s.htm.

� Recommendation discussed with the Global

Council (April 2012);

� Appointment of Richard Wallis to help solve

remaining issues and shape OCLC’s approach to data

sharing. 31

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DISCUSSION

� Continue to involve the library community in

further research:

� the future of cataloguing: using linked data from the

start

� citations: using linked data from the start

� help build a higher quality data service

� Uses that might be made of OCLC datasets that

will be released

� Deduplication/disambiguation (metadata

aggregations; IRs)

� Mapping scholarly debate32

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