We’ve got a wide variety of participants coming to the LOD-LAM Summit, so suggesting a reading list is kind of tough. Keep in mind that participants range from technology staff, policy makers, developers, librarians, digital humanists, hackers and everywhere in between. I’m going to throw out some of my favorite books and articles, but please add more in the comments as this is by no means exhaustive. And if a lot of these names look familiar, it’s because you’ve seen them on the participant list for the Summit.
LODLAM Guides
Open Bibliographic Data Guide. This guide from JISC focuses more on open rather than linked data, but it’s a critical first step toward Linked Open Data.
Linked Data primers (books)
Programming the Semantic Web, Toby Segaran, Colin Evans, & Jamie Taylor. 2009. Great primer on graphs and plenty of example code.
Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space, Tom Heath and Christian Bizer. 2011. This is a great book, recently released, that provides a concise and in depth exploration into Linked Data, from conceptual overview to recipes for publishing data.
Licensing and Copyright
Rights and Licensing from JISC Open Bibliographic Data Guide. Recommendations for publishing Open Data for Libraries.
Digital Cultural Collections in an Age of Reuse and Remixing, Kristin R. Eschenfelder and Michelle Caswell. Nov. 2010. This study examines the various views and considerations of cultural institutions in allowing reuse of digital cultural works. It’s based on a 2008 survey that is, in my opinion, just at the turning point of a rather radical cultural shift in opening metadata for reuse and sharing.
Recommendations for independent scholarly publication of data sets, Jonathan Rees. March 2010. These recommendations come from the perspective of the sciences but can equally be applied to the humanities, and embodies the shift toward sharing data for future use and portability.
I’m sure there are more articles to add to this list and please feel free to do so in the comments.
Not “essential” reading perhaps, but for participants interested in the long-term persistence and preservation of the RDF vocabularies used in Linked Data, I would like to recommend a five-page workshop paper that Harry Halpin and I wrote about how, among other things, memory institutions could play an important role in providing for RDF vocabularies redundant caching arrangements (in the present) and long-term ownership and preservation (in the future). See http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS10/paper/download/1140/1450
I’ve gotten a lot out of these two books:
Semantic web for the working ontologist by Dean Allemang, 2008, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier
If you are comfortable with general metadata concepts and perhaps some database management technologies, then this is a good first book on Semantic Web metadata concepts. It’s not really for beginners, but I can’t find anything that is truly for beginners. So expect to struggle a bit, but the information here is solid.
Semantic Web Programming, by John Hebeler, et al. Indianapolis, Ind., Wiley, 2009. ISBN:9780470418017
Although this is in the end a book for programmers, the first half talks about Semantic Web concepts and standards without requiring any programming expertise. So you can learn about RDF, OWL, and see examples of uses. If you program, then the book also gets you started with some of the current Semantic Web tools: Protege, Jena and Pellet.
For all the newbs out like me (if there are any!) here is a link to my Zotero library https://www.zotero.org/asaletourneau/items containing links to resources I have found really useful on Data Interoperability, the Semantic Web etc
Might be worth checking out the AusGOAL (formerly GILF) licencing framework being used in Australia which incorporates CC. ANDS (the Australian National Data Service) has developed guides to explain how AusGOAL or CC can be used to licence data. The copyright law in Australia differs slightly to the law in the USA.
http://ands.org.au/publishing/licensing.html
http://ands.org.au/guides/ausgoal.html
http://ands.org.au/guides/cc-and-data.html
http://www.gilf.gov.au/
The GILF (Government Information Licensing Framework) – which I helped developed – is fundamentally based on Creative Commons Licences, as is its successor AusGOAL (although there is no information yet published on the latter). Our team which manages the Creative Commons licences in Australia has published a guide, fact sheets and checklists, which can be found under the Government tab on the CC Australia site at http://creativecommons.org.au/sectors/government
Oh, one more… a 55 minute documentary called Copyright Criminals, which is about music and sampling, but if you’re like me, you may see some similarities…
http://www.hulu.com/watch/201358/copyright-criminals
And really, just one more, from a 3 hour bootcamp I did at Great Lakes THATCamp April 29. Though I don’t know how helpful it is without my commentary… I’ll work on that.
http://www.slideshare.net/jonvoss/intro-to-linked-open-data-in-libraries-archives-museums
The Heath and Bizer book is available free in HTML form here: http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/