The AIMS Metadata Group of Interest is glad to announce the first Linked Open Data @ AIMS webinar entitled Understanding and Using Linked Data – Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LAM) as the contributors and consumers of Linked Data. The session will take place on 29th January 2013 - 02:00am Rome Time - and will be presented by Marcia Zeng, professor at the School of Library and Information Science, Kent State University (Kent, Ohio, USA).

This event is part of the series of webinars Linked Open Data @ AIMS that will take place from December 2012 to February 2013. A total of 6 specialists will talk about Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web to the agricultural information management community. The webinars will be in the 6 languages used on AIMS - English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

The objective of Linked Open Data @ AIMS webinars is to help individuals and organizations to understand better the initiatives related to the Semantic Web that are currently taking place within the AIMS Communities of Practice.

Linked Data, a term coined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in his design note regarding the Semantic Web architecture [1], refers to a set of best practices for publishing, sharing, and interlinking structured data on the Web. Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data formerly isolated in small or large repositories (often called “silos”) and not previously linked. Linked Data is also about using the Web to lower the barriers to link data that have previously only been brought together using other more cumbersome methods [2]. This talk gives a brief review of the Linked Data principles and provides an overview of the resources in the CKAN Data Hub.  It will explain the different levels of Linked Data resources according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘Five Star’ requirements using examples.

[1] Berners-Lee, Tim. 2007, Linked Data – Design Issues.   http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData

[2] Linking Open Data (LOD) Project Webpage. Retrieved from http://linkeddata.org/

Marcia Lei Zeng is Professor of Library and Information Science at Kent State University. She holds a Ph.D. from the School of Information Sciences at University of Pittsburgh and M.A. from Wuhan University in China. Her major research interests include knowledge organization systems (taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology, etc), Linked Data, metadata and markup languages, database quality control, multilingual and multi-culture information processing, and digital libraries for cultural objects. Her scholarly publications consist of more than 80 papers and five books, as well as many national and international conference presentations. She chaired IFLA Working Group on the Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR). She was an Invited Expert on the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, a member of the EU ISA Program’s Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) Working Group, and a member of the Working Group of ISO 25964 Thesauri and Interoperability with Other Vocabularies. She has been a member of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Advisory Board. She is also Director-at-large of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

The session is open to anyone but places are limited. If you are interested to attend the webinar, send an e-mail to [email protected], containg the following information:

• your name
• your affiliation
• your role
• your country

Once you have requested to attend the webinar, you will receive an e-mail confirming your place with an URL to access. Make sure that:

• you have good internet connection
• your computer has Java version 1.5 or higher (on many PC`s the Java engine is updated automatically). If in doubt, go to Checking system requirements
• you can use Internet Explorer, as Elluminate Live! - the web conferencing program used - runs best on it.

As part of the CIARD Movement, Linked Open Data @ AIMS is co-sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists (IAALD).