Category: resources

LOD-LAM Zotero group sponsored by DLF

I’d like to call your attention to the LOD-LAM Zotero Group, sponsored by the Digital Library Federation, and invite you to check it out, bookmark it and/or get the RSS feed, and most importantly, contribute to it!

https://www.zotero.org/groups/lod-lam (click on “Group Library” to see everything)

This is an online bibliography/webliography of linked data resources (articles, blog posts, tutorials and books, videos and podcasts, events, standards, sites for vocabularies, projects, data sources, software and web-based tools, and more…) of interest to the library, archive and museum community.

Chelcie Rowell of the DLF is overseeing the progress of this site, and a group from the ALA Linked Library Data Interest Group (Laura Akerman, Nicole Colovos, Kevin Clair, Corey Harper and Karen Coyle) have been working to seed it with some useful material (just a taste – we know there’s more out there!), and figure out some basic organization to start.

Is your linked-data-related article, project, tutorial, vocabulary, or the software you’re using or wrote in there?  If not, please add it!

Particularly valuable would be information about tools (web-based and software), including your own notes about your experience if you’re using something.    Keeping up with the “good stuff” is more than one individual or even a small group could manage, but we hope that this can become a “go to” site for  information of particular interest and usefulness to us, and it will be, if we can all share.

Much like a wiki, anybody can see, but to contribute, you do have to have to create a login (and join the Group).  Use of the Zotero client or plugin isn’t required, but recommended.  When you find something useful on the web, it’s easy to grab it and add it.  Nicole and the group prepared a guide for Zotero Group newbies:  http://connect.ala.org/node/177340

If you have thoughts or experience problems, we want to hear from you and have set up an email address to contact:

lodlamzotgrp@yahoo.com.

Spread the word and the information.

Laura Akerman

Linked Open Data at Museums and the Web

I’m excited to say that this year’s Museums and the Web features four published papers on Linked Open Data as well as a workshop for getting your hands dirty with data.

My paper, Radically Open Cultural Heritage Data on the Web is kind of a wrap-up of the year’s work promoting LODLAM, examining our goals (which included making Linked Open Data a topic of conversation at global conferences–win!) and methodologies, as well as the road ahead.

Sharing cultural heritage the linked open data way – everyone’s invited
Johan Oomen, Marieke van Erp, Lotte Belice Baltussen, The Netherlands

Using an RDF Data Pipeline to Implement Cross Collection Search
David Henry, USA

Linking European Television Heritage
Nikolaos Simou, Vassilis Tzouvaras, Nasos Drosopoulos, Jean-Pierre EVAIN, Johan Oomen, Marco Rendina, Italy

Carlos Arroyo, Australia (with hat tip to Seth van Hooland and www.freeyourmetadata.org)

GLAM Rocks! – Libraries, Media & The Semantic Web hosted by the BBC

Lotico BusA few weeks ago, myself and Jon Voss had the pleasure of speaking at the ‘Libraries, Media & The Semantic Web’ event hosted by the BBC Academy, along with folks from the New York Times, the BBC, Google in the guise of Schema.org, and KONA. The event was organised by the Lotico London Semantic Web Group. I’ve written a fairly comprehensive post about the event over on the Linking Lives blog, including videos of all the talks, for those who want to read/hear more.

Recently Published Reports

I’ve just seen two recently published reports that will certainly be of interest and thought I’d share here:

The Stanford Linked Data Workshop Technology Plan. “If instantiated at several institutions, will demonstrate to end users the value of the Linked Data approach to recording machine operable facts about the products of teaching, learning, and research. The most noteworthy advantage of the Linked Open Data approach is that it allows the recorded facts , in turn, to become the basis for new discovery environments.” Personally, I love their push for CC0 and I also really liked the push to publish early and often and not wait until things are perfect, with recommended workflows. [Thanks to Jerry Persons for feeding input from the LODLAM Summit into the Stanford working group and to this technology plan. Thanks Rachel Frick for flagging this with #LODLAM on Twitter]

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives, Berlin, Sept.29, 2011. Fantastic collection of papers from this workshop, and a really good preface that summarizes the meeting, each of the papers, and the growing presence of Linked Data in libraries, archives and museums. [thanks Johan Oomen for flagging this with #LODLAM on Twitter]

LODLAM Videos & Presentations

There have been a few requests lately for LODLAM presentations, so I wanted to consolidate some of the resources people have pointed out over on the listserv. This is by no means exhaustive, so please feel free to add more in the comments!

Recent Video:

I gave this presentation at the Smithsonian Institution as part of LODLAM-DC. It’s a general intro to the concepts, and we did it specifically to add to our forthcoming Summit proceedings toolbox. The slides are available there too, feel free to use.

The FreeYourMetadata.org crew just released a video as well as a series of screencasts which is targeted at librarians and metadata managers to provide some easy ways to start exploring publishing metadata as Linked Data.

Presentations:

Here’s one hot off the press, Dublin Core 2011 Keynote Presentation: Towards Linked Data for Libraries, Archives & Museums.

Of course, a lot of people are using Slideshare to host their presentations, and if you’re doing so, please use the lodlam tag to describe your presentation, just like the #lodlam hashtag for Twitter. Just by doing a quick search for lodlam, you’ll see a good number show up. You’ll pick up a few more if you search for lod-lam (I so regret ever using that hyphen!).

Finally, Jodi Schneider pointed out this fantastic resource of presentations spanning several years, from the W3C LLD incubator.

Thanks to everyone for sharing your presentations and pointing out the ones you’re seeing out in the wild!

Free Your Metadata/Google Refine

I just found out about the fabulous Free Your Metadata project this week, and am very excited to see these kinds of actionable workshops popping up around the world–and big ups to these guys for developing screencasts that show how people can use free and open source tools to create Linked Data from library, archive and museum metadata now!

Seb Chan posted an interview with Seth van Hooland with the catchy title: Things clever people do with your data #65535: Introducing ‘Free Your Metadata’ which is well worth a read.

Intro to LODLAM talk: Live from the Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Institution hosted a day of LODLAM on September 16, 2011, including the presentation, An Introduction to Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums. The talk was webcast live and archived thanks to the generous support of the Smithsonian CTO Series. I’d also like to thank Effie Kapsalis for her amazing organizing efforts around the events, the many staff at the Smithsonian who helped make this a reality, and a great group of participants.

Below are the slides. Both the video presentation and the slides are available as CC BY for you to use as you see fit.

Intro to Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives & Museums.

View more presentations from Jon Voss

Linked data workshop at Stanford

Early releases of information about the Workshop in late June include:

Of note is the recent Linked Data and Libraries 2011 at the British Library.  Among the day’s other presentations were:

LODLAM Reading Lists

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.