Linked Open Data. LODE Recommendations for Bibliographic Data
For the last 10 years, the main goal of the AIMS team has been to enhance information sharing and interoperability in the area of agricultural and rural development.This goal is based on the AGRIS experience, which FAO and its member countries started in the mid-70s. AGRIS was thought of as a one-stop access point for publications in agricultural research, innovation and extension. At the beginning of the 80s a special thesaurus, AGROVOC, was developed to connect publications that were about identical or similar topics. With the advent of the Internet and its rapid development in the 90s, AGRIS partners became capable of publishing their own metadata. AIMS team developed the AGRIS application profile timely to give the AGRIS network the possibility to share data without being tied to any internal data standard.
With the paradigm of Linked Open Data (LOD) and the emerging technologies in the 21st Century, it has become a general strategy to liberate data from their silos that are framed by proprietary database schemas. However, simply transforming database schemas into RDF does not create linked data. There is a chance that we could get stuck at the 4th star in the 5 star classification that promoted by Tim Berners-Lee.[1] We need the possibility to be able to create automatic links between RDF triple stores on the web, otherwise we are running the risk of creating RDF silos. The easiest way to facilitate the establishing of automatic linking between datasets is the use of standard vocabularies, including standard vocabularies for describing data/metadata elements and standard vocabularies for indicating values.
TheLODE-BD(LOD-Enabled Bibliographic Data) Recommendations are our attempt to offer guidance in the use of vocabularies for the production of bibliographical data (metadata on document-like objects and beyond). Our goal is to produce recommendations that are so flexible that some partners, who have no access to controlled vocabularies or LOD datasets, still can describe their data in a machine processable way, and join other partners who have access to a wide range of vocabularies and have huge capacities to provide quality metadata to the LOD universe.
We are now publishing the LODE-BDversion 1.1 (http://aims.fao.org/lode/bd) which includes properties from namespaces of dc, dcterms, bibo, agls, ags, eprint and marcrel. This is based on the context of the VOA3R community.
However, LODE-BDaims to be useable beyond the agriculture and VOA3R and to include more widely-adopted properties from other namespaces, after finishing a study of the usage of the properties in related bibliographic datasets. The next version, LODE-BD1.2 is under development and will be released within 2011. Meanwhile, any comments and suggestions are welcome. Please send comments and questions to the AIMS Team <[email protected]>.
