ORCID would like to improve their LOD implementation and at the same time move to a technology that is easier for their core tech team to maintain. We would like to propose a session that will examine the pros and cons of using a schema.org and JSON-LD based approach to representing researchers and their activities in the ORCID registry . A set of straw man representations will form the basis of a discussion on the various ways this could be achieved. We’re hoping that this session will help iron out the issues and result in something that is more useful to the community.
The existing ORCID RDF implementation was generously donated to our open source stack by Stian Soiland-Reyes and contains biographic information. However, it does not reference other entities and as the technologies used are not within our core competencies they are difficult for us to maintain and extend. We are hoping it’s possible to produce an enhanced schema.org representation that can be embedded within the registry pages and utilised by a more diverse set of users across multiple use cases. Examples include being consumed by simple web applications and search engines etc as well as being navigated by automated LOD agents.
The recent schema.org implementation from the Datacite DOI registrar will form a point of reference and examined to ensure that crosswalking between the two systems is as simple as possible. Outcomes from other LODLAM sessions discussing schema.org will also be included to ensure we’re on the same page.
This discussion will be fed back to the ORCID tech team for consideration.