LODLAM Summit 2013

The Second International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit (LODLAM Summit) convened leaders in their respective areas of expertise from the humanities and sciences to catalyze practical, actionable approaches to publishing and consuming Linked Open Data, specifically:

• Identify the tools and techniques for publishing and working with Linked Open Data.
• Share, consider and publicize precedents and policy for licensing and copyright considerations regarding the publishing of library, archive, and museum metadata.
• Share and promote use cases that can give LAM staff the tools they need to begin implementing Linked Open Data in their institutions.

The LODLAM Summit used the Open Space Technology meeting format, designed to give the group of expert innovators the time and space to freely identify and address as a group the most pressing issues related to forwarding Linked Open Data in libraries, archives, and museums.  This format involved an initial session in which the participants collaboratively created the agenda for breakout sessions for the first and the second day. The meeting was based on the two primary principles of passion and responsibility: passion to jump in and play an active role; and responsibility to lead, and follow through with action.  No papers were submitted or read, no plenaries given, and everyone could participate.

OpenAGRIS was funded by Europeana

OpenAGRIS was presented at the LODLAM Summit 2013. OpenAGRIS is a mashup-Web application based on the RDF-ization of the AGRIS database. Using Agrovoc URIs as backbone, it can interlink to other datasets published on the Web (World Bank, Geopolitical Ontology, Europeana, Nature, etc.), dynamically showing as much information as possible about a specific topic or research area. OpenAGRIS ran in LODLAM’s international challenge and was funded by Europeana to join the LODLAM summit. OpenAGRIS is available at http://agris.fao.org/openagris/.

Interesting outcomes

The summit proposed a lot of very good presentations and demonstrations. Then, there were also talks about user requirements: users explained their needs and helped us to better understand how to use Linked Open Data technologies to publish and consume library, archive, and museum metadata.



Some interesting topics were:

• Tools and LOD: Karma is a tool that helps people to map their data to ontologies without programming or without writing scripts in languages such as XPath and XSLT
• Clean up data and link
• User interfaces
• Wikidata: a knowledge base that should be supported for a long time, ideally forever. It is going to substitute DBPedia, currently no more maintained. OpenAGRIS should look at Wikidata to replace the DBPedia module and to exploit other interesting features
• Google and Schema.org: 80% of users come from Google. According to someone, libraries should use Schema.org to describe and link resources on the Web in order to be indexed by search engines. If the aim is to be indexed by Google, I disagree with this approach, since there is no need to have duplicated triples or to change the architecture of a system to implement Schema.org, when Google can index data applying the Sitemap technology together with metatags. In fact, Google is now indexing in the main index the content of Google Scholar.
• Preserving Linked Data: keeping different levels of truth, different parts of the provenance. Allowing decentralized data access and use, preservation beyond basic requirement of persistent URIs. Data/links can change! Talis datasets were not preserved!
• Hierarchy alignment: it was agreed that, for search, lack of precision was a comparatively minor flaw, and that it’s important to distinguish matches by a degree of quality. Path traversals with a cost at each step are a known solution to this problem; but there is the need also to convey to the users that some results are more or less certainly relevant.

LODLAM also created a community: all members are now in contact and they can continue sharing their ideas, tools and methodologies to reach the final goal of publishing and consuming Linked Open Data!