This morning the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the publication of the final report of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group. The abstract is reproduced below.

The mission of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, chartered from May 2010 through August 2011, has been “to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web, by bringing together people involved in Semantic Web activities — focusing on Linked Data — in the library community and beyond, building on existing initiatives, and identifying collaboration tracks for the future.” In Linked Data, data is expressed using standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), which specifies relationships between things, and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs, or “Web addresses”). This final report of the Incubator Group examines how Semantic Web standards and Linked Data principles can be used to make the valuable information assets that library create and curate — resources such as bibliographic data, authorities, and concept schemes — more visible and re-usable outside of their original library context on the wider Web.

The Incubator Group began by eliciting reports on relevant activities from parties ranging from small, independent projects to national library initiatives (see the separate report, Library Linked Data Incubator Group: Use Cases). These use cases provided the starting point for the work summarized in the report: an analysis of the benefits of library Linked Data, a discussion of current issues with regard to traditional library data, existing library Linked Data initiatives, and legal rights over library data; and recommendations for next steps. The report also summarizes the results of a survey of current Linked Data technologies and an inventory of library Linked Data resources available today (see also the more detailed report, Library Linked Data Incubator Group: Datasets, Value Vocabularies, and Metadata Element Sets).

Key recommendations of the report are:

• That library leaders identify sets of data as possible candidates for early exposure as Linked Data and foster a discussion about Open Data and rights;
• That library standards bodies increase library participation in Semantic Web standardization, develop library data standards that are compatible with Linked Data, and disseminate best-practice design patterns tailored to library Linked Data;
• That data and systems designers design enhanced user services based on Linked Data capabilities, create URIs for the items in library datasets, develop policies for managing RDF vocabularies and their URIs, and express library data by re-using or mapping to existing Linked Data vocabularies;
• That librarians and archivists preserve Linked Data element sets and value vocabularies and apply library experience in curation and long-term preservation to Linked Data datasets.

I’m so happy to have been a part of the creation of this report. I think it is an important stake in the ground that documents where we are now and where we could be going with connecting library data to a wider world. There was such a huge interest in linked data at the American Library Association meeting this past summer in New Orleans that it was hard to keep track of all of the programs.

The question now becomes, “what next?” The W3C has a new type of work effort called Community Groups where work could continue, and there was some discussion on the Library Linked Data Incubator Group discussion list about continuing work as a community group. (To date, I don’t think anyone has stepped up to lead it.) Or is this something that IFLA or JSC could take on?

In preparation for the last webinar of the three-part series “Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future“, I’m reading again Karen Coyle‘s “Library Data in a Modern Context” — the first chapter ofUnderstanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata. Right at the start she has a clear and useful definition of this thing we call “metadata.”

The most common definition of metadata is “data about data.” This short, catchy definition is worthy of a successful advertising campaign. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really help us understand metadata, and is actually somewhat incorrect. A more useful definition is decidedly less snappy, but can help us understand the helpful role that metadata can play in facilitating information access. In fact, a functional definition gives us a viable roadmap for our own studies of metadata utility and quality.

So here it goes—metadata is constructed, constructive, and actionable:

• Constructed: Metadata is not found in nature. It is entirely an invention; it is an artificiality.
• Constructive: Metadata is constructed for some purpose, some activity, to solve some problem. The proliferation of metadata formats that seem similar on the surface is often evidence of different definitions of needs or of different contexts. We may dream of a universal set of metadata for some set of things, like biological entities, printed books, or a calendar of events, but are likely to be disappointed in practice.
• Actionable: The point of metadata is to be useful in some way. This means that it is important that one can act on the metadata in a way that satisfies some needs.¹

A little further on Karen focuses on the actionablity of metadata. I have a heightened awareness of the need for other-than-visual access to information based on the last few months of activity with my previous employer, so I reread this section with “new eyes” (so to speak):

…today’s metadata must be in a form that can be processed by computers, and the sense that it is “actionable” really needs to be interpreted as being “actionable by electronic machines.” Even when the final goal is to display the data to humans in an understandable form, the data will undergo some machine processing on the way to its destination on a screen [or] in printed form or when read aloud by a screen reader.

I added that last part. The transformation of the meaning of the metadata into a visual form is but one possible sensory input across the human-computer divide. It is important to also design interfaces that bring meaning to data by supplying labels to values in alternate ways. For the MARC 300 field, it is the difference between “ix, 74 p. : ill. ; 23 cm” and “9 pages of introductory material followed by 74 numbered pages. Includes illustrations. 23 centimeters high.” If the only way to transmit this information was auditory, which one of these would you like spoken to you? Is it: “eye-ex, seventy four pee. ill. twenty three cem”?

Now let’s try to engineer that backwards. Is the auditory version easier to do with:

300    |aix, 74 p. :|bill. ;|c23 cm

or something like this made-up, MODS-like markup:

<physicaldescription>
  <extent>
    <pagination>
       <pages type="introductory">9</pages>
       <pages type="numbered">74</pages>
    </pagination>
    <illustration />
    <height unit="cm">23</height>
  </extent>
</physicaldescription>

With the second, we can produce something like the first — or even the abbreviated display version. But it is considerably more difficult to create the auditory version from the first, particularly with the wide variation of punctuation encoding ISBD offers. It just isn’t machine actionable, which makes it difficult to transform, reuse, and translate that data in another context.

I’m reminded too of this recent quote from Jonathan Rochkind: “Of course, our legacy environment is even worse, with the ‘data model’ being supplied by an unholy combination of ISBD … and MARC….” It would be good to stop doing our data entry in the language of the computer (e.g. MARC). Based on the chat from the first webinar in the series, we wouldn’t expect catalogers to type out the XML fragment above. There should be computer-assisted workflows to capture the data and store it with all the required semantics. That XML would be used for machine-to-machine communication and transformation into the output desired by the user — be it a short-hand visual display or an auditory reading of information.

Footnotes

1. Coyle, Karen. “Library Data in a Modern Context.” Library Technology Reports 46.1 (2010): 5-13.

This is definitely becoming a habit…welcome to the fourth edition of DLTJ‘s Thursday Threads. If you find these interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the left. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments, as always, are welcome.

Defining Linked Data By Analogy

RDF is the grammar for a language of data. URIs are the words of that language. As in natural language, these words (i.e., the URIs) belong to grammatical categories. RDF properties (such as “isReferencedBy”) function a bit like verbs, RDF classes like nouns.

As in natural languages, where utterances are meaningful only if they follow a sentence grammar, RDF statements follow a simple and consistent three-part grammar of subject, predicate, and object. Analogously to paragraphs, RDF statements are aggregated into RDF graphs.

This is a posting from Thomas Baker on the W3C Library Linked Data exploratory group mailing list. It compares RDF to natural languages using analogies of grammar, words, sentences, and paragraphs. I think this is a useful way to think about RDF and linked data, although as initial introduction to the topic, you might want to see the presentation below.

RDF For Librarians presentation recording

The RDF model underlying Semantic Web technologies is frequently described as the future of structured metadata. Its adoption in libraries has been slow, however. This is due in no small part to fundamental differences in the modeling approach that RDF takes, representing a “bottom up” architecture where a description is distributed and can be made up of any features deemed necessary, whereas the record-centric approach taken by libraries tends to be more “top down” relying on prespecified feature sets that all should strive to make the best use of. This presentation will delve deeply into the differences between these two approaches to explore why the RDF approach has proven difficult for libraries, look at some RDF-based initiatives that are happening in libraries and how they are allowing different uses of this metadata than was previously possible, and pose some questions about how libraries might best.

Jenn Riley gave this hour-long presentation to the Indiana University Digital Library Brown Bag earlier this month. The URL to the slides synchronized to the audio recording is http://breeze.iu.edu/p48776227/. The presentation slides and the handout from the session are available as well. I highly recommend spending an hour with this presentation to learn about how linked data compares and contrasts with MARC records. (via Diane Hillmann)

The Future of the Federal Depository Libraries

[ProPublica's Dafna] Linzer’s expose of government tampering with a court docket is an example of the problem on which the LOCKSS Program has been working for more than a decade, how to make the digital record resistant to tampering and other threats. The only reason this case was detected was because Linzer created and kept a copy of the information the government published, and this copy was not under their control. Maintaining copies under multiple independent administrations (i.e. not all under control of the original publisher) is a fundamental requirement for any scheme that can recover from tampering (and in practice from many other threats).

David Rosenthal summarizes a story about how a published document from the U.S. government was changed and why we need highly-distributed copies of government documents to detect and recover from tampering. There are big implications here for the future of government documents depository programs.

ProPublica’s Guide to Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk – or mTurk – is an online marketplace, set up by the online shopping site Amazon, where anyone can hire workers to complete short, simple tasks over the Internet. Amazon originally developed it as an in-house tool, and commercialized it in 2005. The mTurk workforce now numbers more than 100,000 workers in 200 countries, according to Amazon. At ProPublica, we use it for tasks like collecting, reformatting, and de-duplicating data. This is a guide to journalists looking to use Mechanical Turk in their data projects. It’s meant for users who are already familiar with mTurk and are looking for ways to improve their results.

Do you have repetitive digital conversion or analysis jobs that can be broken down into manageable-sized chunks? ProPublica published this guide on using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to outsource this activity.

At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is “Resource Description and Access” — the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you can look at it, too, during an open trial access period that runs through the end of August by signing up for it.) What really struck in me the demonstration, though, was that the site is as much a subscription to access the content of the RDA standard as it is a subscription to a delivery service with functions and features that go beyond the text of the standard itself. The text of the standard will be available in printed form, but one cannot get an electronic copy of the standard itself. This strikes me as sort of weird, so this blog post talks through that weirdness feeling.

I’m trying to think of another example of a standard that inseparable from a delivery system for the standard, and I can’t think of any. Now granted, that the RDA Toolkit website has some very nice features for interlinking between documents, for creating local “workflows” and “mappings” for local activities, and creating group subscription-specific links to local documents. But this decision to only allow electronic access to the standard through this subscription service that requires an annual fee feels uncomfortable. Like I don’t really have access to the standard. Like it was a decision to limit competition for other delivery mechanisms to make sure a rather lucrative ongoing income through the RDA Toolkit website.

Also weird is the answer to the question “How does the site calculate the number of concurrent users?“. The notion of “concurrent users” is pretty hard in the web space because in the normal mode of operation there isn’t an ongoing connection between a user’s browser and the content server. There is a connection to deliver the HTML, associated graphics and other page content when a user initially asks for the page. But while the user is reading the page there is no ongoing connection between browser and server. I would expect to see mention in this section of “a concurrent user is counted for five minutes from when the browser last accesses the server” but that isn’t there.

Has anyone else thought about this, or is it getting discussed elsewhere? I may write more here as I have a chance to think about it and talk with others about it.

Update: Monday, June 28th

CC:DA Meeting with Ron Murray's FRBR Paper Tool documents spread out on the floor

Some other interesting facts. There have been 2,200 requests for trial access. (I wish they wouldn’t call it “open access” because that phrase has other connotations, but what can you do…) About 2/3rds of the trial access requests were for institutional accounts. 53% came from the United States; 11% from Australia; 10% from Canada; 4% from the U.K. Creating these trial access accounts has been a manual process, and there is a backlog at the moment. (I signed up for trial access on Saturday and I haven’t heard back yet — probably because all the people who would act on that request are here at ALA.)

There was discussion about the update process for the standard. They are taking a very deliberate approach to start with — thinking that even minor typographical changes might have major conceptual impacts — so they won’t make any changes without JSC approval. On the service side, there are plans to enhance the site with multiple translations and more user configurable options. There is also the print version, but no date or pricing information has been set. (The cost of the print version will probably be in the $150 range.) They are also preparing help guides and mechanisms for deep linking into the RDA Toolkit site and for advanced searching.

Ron Murray and Barbara Tillett, both from the Library of Congress, are presenting their research in thinking about bibliographic information as networks of interrelated nodes at ALA Annual. This is a continuation of their “paper tool” work which was presented at the Library of Congress last year.

The title of the presentation is From “Moby-Dick” To “Mash-Ups:” Thinking About Bibliographic Networks. The presentation will be Monday, June 28, 2010 at 8:05 a.m. in the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill, Yorktown/Valley Forge Rooms. The presentation is scheduled to go for 75 minutes.

Presentation Summary: Traditional and contemporary attempts to identify and describe simple and complex bibliographic resources have overlooked useful and powerful possibilities, due to the insufficient modeling of “bibliographic things of interest.” The presentation will introduce a resource description approach that remodels and strengthens FRBR by borrowing key concepts from Information Science and the History of Science. The presentation will reveal portions of a network of bibliographic (and other useful) relationships between printings of Melville’s novel dating from 1851-1975 into the present. In addition, structural similarities between the print publication network and the multimedia “mash-ups” seen on YouTube and other websites will be demonstrated and discussed.

I’m working with some colleagues at the Library of Congress on the on the description of complex analog and digital resources. In that research, we want to get a better sense of what people who read DLTJ call a “mash-up.” We invite readers to provide examples (in any medium) of what they think are mash-ups of different resources in the comment area of this post. If you nominate a web-accessible mash-up, please provide a link for it. If you nominate an analog mash-up (they do exist!), please provide a reasonable citation. If it is a hybrid – do your best! Also helpful would be a short statement as to why you think the example is a mash-up, and whether you like the results.

The research involves how we describe the parts of a whole guided by concepts provided by FRBR. These sorts of mashups are typically made up of independently created parts, and acknowledging those parts are in single-record frames of reference. We’re exploring the use of interconnected networks of descriptions, and mashups are one of the exemplars.

Examples

“Avatar, Daybreakers, Prince of Persia, Book of Eli, Wolfman, Legion, Sherlock Holmes Trailer Mashup” from YouTube.

FooBar Poster, by Eboy Arts Inc.

Earlier this year, Index Data started a new blog. I wanted to call out a series of posts (parts one and two) their newly started blog called Z39.50 for Dummies. Wolfram Schneider on the Index Data staff wrote these two posts.

In the introductory posting, Wolfram says:

Z39.50 is a client-server protocol for searching and retrieving information from remote computer databases. It is a mature low level protocol like HTTP and FTP. You don’t implement Z39.50 yourself, you use the YAZ utilities and the libraries and frameworks for in other languages (C++, PHP, Perl, etc.).

There are many people who thinks that Z39.50 is a dead standard, and hard to understand. That is not true. Z39.50 is still growing in use, stable and very fast. It is the only widely available protocol for metasearch.

Using Z39.50 is not harder than using FTP. I think that the overhead for learning Z39.50 is less than a half day for an experienced programmer. Every problem which you have later is not related to the Z39.50 protocol itself, it is related to underlying system behind the Z39.50 server. Keep in mind that Z39.50 is an API to access (bibliographic) databases. It does not define how the data is structured and indexed in the database.

I haven’t had to create an FTP client from scratch (which, looking at its standard document, I would propose would be a complicated task), but I have done HTTP before. Z39.50 is cumbersome enough to not want to do it from scratch, but the YAZ toolkit is a great abstraction from the underlying protocol complications. I would second Wolfram’s observation that difficulties with Z39.50 are most likely problems with the configuration of the server as well as underlying data structures and data encoding.

Thanks for taking on the “for Dummies” task, Wolfram, and I’m hoping to see more in the series — how to troubleshoot connections, what all of the codes in the standard and the community profiles mean, perhaps some insight into how different flavors of Z39.50 servers operate, etc.

The OCLC Review Board on Shared Data Creation and Stewardship is conducting a survey to gather opinions on OCLC’s proposed Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records. The survey is 6 pages long and took me about 20 minutes. After the demographic information, the survey asks about your organization’s practices for acquiring and sharing cataloging data. This is followed by a series of questions stating your preference for the existing and the proposed policies, how those policies affect your organization’s plans, and opinions about the roles of OCLC and WorldCat in sharing bibliographic records. You are then offered a chance to provide your contact information to the external research organization gathering the data. (The survey states that this information will not be provided to the OCLC review board.)

Here is the text of the announcement:

Dear Colleague:

As chair of the OCLC Review Board on Shared Data Creation and Stewardship, I invite you to participate in a Web-based survey among librarians and other interested constituents. The primary goal of this survey is to gather input from both OCLC members and non-members about a proposed OCLC policy, Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat(r) Records.

The Review Board will consider the results of this survey in its recommendations to OCLC.

Please review the existing guidelines and proposed policy if you have not already done so:

• Guidelines
• Proposed Policy

The OCLC Review Board is an independent committee convened by the OCLC Board of Trustees and the OCLC Members Council. If you wish to find out more about the Review Board, please visit these links:

• OCLC Review Board
• Press release – formation of Review Board
• Press release – Review Board members

The survey is available online at the following site, where you will find specific instructions on completing the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=c0hILWPafv97EDbNiRXXjg_3d_3d

I invite you to complete this survey yourself or forward it to a colleague with an interest in this issue. Your opinions and comments are vital to our evaluation, regardless of your current level of usage of OCLC services or your relationship to OCLC.

Please complete the questionnaire online by April 8, 2009. To protect the confidentiality of your responses, all data will be collected, tabulated, and analyzed by Linray, an independent market research consultant. We will receive data in aggregate form only; your answers will not be associated in any way with you or your organization.

If you have questions about the content of the survey, please send an e-mail to reviewboard@oclc.org. As an alternative to the survey, we welcome your feedback by sending an e-mail to reviewboard@oclc.org or posting comments at http://community.oclc.org/reviewboard/. Please feel free to provide input in the language of your choice.

Thank you for your participation in this survey.

Sincerely,

Jennifer A. Younger
Chair, OCLC Review Board of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship
Edward H. Arnold Director, Hesburgh Libraries
University of Notre Dame

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/policy/board/default.htm to http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090628150300/http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/policy/board/default.htm on February 11th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/policy/board/default.htm to http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090628150300/http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/policy/board/default.htm on February 11th, 2011.

There is a new page in the Record Use Policy area on the OCLC website with an invitation from Jennifer Younger, chair of the Review Board, inviting members of the community to send e-mail to reviewboard@oclc.org or to post public comments on the Review Board Online Feedback Forum. In reaction, I want to commend OCLC for trying to provide mechanisms for community feedback to the Review Board. I know that the messages to reviewboard@oclc.org are being read — within a minute of sending my comment late on a Saturday night I got back an automated out-of-the-office message from the account of one of the board members. Within 24 hours I got a reply from Ms. Younger. And adding comments to a single-post blog is one way to provide a public space for feedback to the Review Board.

I do have to scratch my head, though, at the mechanism chosen by OCLC and/or the Review Board as the public comment space. A linear list of moderated comments on a single-post blog is not really what I had in mind when I called for a space for “dialog among those interested in the guidelines and policies surrounding member-contributed creation and enhancements to WorldCat records.” This mechanism lacks the ability to focus comments on particular topics, to follow a thread of discussion as issues are debated, or even to view comments from the perspective of all-from-one-author or only-comments-on-selected-topic. An open mailing list with a public archive would be better than this. Surely members of the review board have used more interactive, engaging forms of online dialog than this. I’m left to wonder why this mechanism was chosen. I had also hoped that the source research from which the review board is drawing information (other than the public mailing list and blog commentary) would also be made public so there could be a shared understanding in the community of the topic leading up to the review board’s recommendations. (Documents such as those used by the OCLC staff study group leading up to the creation of the initial policy.) Perhaps these documents will be coming in another forum. Are my expectations out of line?

Still, if it is the only mechanism offered, I hope people will take advantage of it. If you do use other mechanisms to post your thoughts to others, I hope you will also update the OCLC Policy Change page on the Code4Lib Wiki as a finding aid for others.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/catalog/policy/board/default.htm to http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090318034041/http://www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/catalog/policy/board/default.htm on January 28th, 2011.

OCLC announced late yesterday the members of the review board. In addition, they announced the establishment of an e-mail address for communicating with the review board (reviewboard@oclc.org).

Members of the Review Board of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship are:

• Christopher Cole (FEDLINK): Associate Director for Technical Services, National Agricultural Library
• Poul Erlandsen (EMEA): Head, Document Access Services and Collection Management, Danish University of Education, National Library of Education
• Pat French (OCLC Western): Manager, Collection and Technical Services, Multnomah County Library
• Clifford A. Lynch: Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
• Brian E. C. Schottlaender (OCLC Western): The Audrey Geisel University Librarian, UC San Diego Libraries
• Ted Schwitzner (ILLINET): Head, Bibliographic Services Division, Illinois State University, Milner Library
• Roberta Shaffer (FLICC/FEDLINK/LC): Executive Director, Federal Library and Information Center Committee, Library of Congress
• Lamar Veatch (COSLA/SOLINET): State Librarian, Georgia Public Library Service—University System of Georgia
• Elsie Weatherington (SOLINET): Dean, University Library, Virginia State University
• Jennifer Younger (INCOLSA): Edward H. Arnold Director of Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame

Another member from a European national library is expected to be appointed to the Review Board.

I’ve already reiterated my call for more conversation with the members of the review board, rather than a one-way feed of “reports, letters and comments including blog and listserv messages.” This evening I sent this message to reviewboard@oclc.org:

Members of the Review Board:

I respectfully request that the review board establish a mechanism to promote dialog among those interested in the guidelines and policies surrounding member-contributed creation and enhancements to WorldCat records.  This is desirable, in part, to promote understanding by the members of the cooperative and the community; it is likely the outcome will be more accepted if the source documents from which the review board makes its determinations are commonly available.  It is also useful for the community to share a forum to debate the issues in a manner that effectively consolidates the points of discussion for the review board; as it stands, discussion is duplicated and scattered across the internet.

Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely,

Peter Murray, speaking for himself, not for his employer

Hat tip to Rick Mason for adding this to the OCLC policy tracking page on the Code4Lib Wiki. That’s where I found it first.