Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER) — Association of European Research Libraries is the voice of Europe’s research library community. The Linked Open Data Working Group is one of LIBER’s Working Groups. It produces guidelines, best practices, and tools for opening library data, according to the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD) and with an emphasis on semantic interoperability.
The Linked Open Data Working Group recently conducted and published the results of a survey on the practices research libraries follow in publishing LOD. The survey also examined the processes for making data semantically interoperable and covered the challenges and the possibilities from a technical as well as from a librarian’s perspective.
From the survey, it was evident that many libraries were already using LOD in their processes. The survey brought out the many similarities in the practices they followed, the minor divergences, and the situations where libraries could have followed less divergent approaches.
Furthermore, according to the respondents of the survey, one of the significant expenses related to publishing linked data incurred by the libraries was the cost of human labor. Therefore, providing libraries with guidance in the form of training and how-to guide was of the utmost importance.
The survey revealed that the libraries employed a wide variety of commercial, open and specialized tools along with locally developed routines. GeoNames, VIAF, ISNI, Wikidata and Dublin Core were the most commonly used vocabularies with the Wikidata standing out as the most common external resource the projects were linking to.
Furthermore, most of the libraries deployed LOD related data schemas such as SKOS and Schema.org and some mentioned that they were using FOAF and Dublin Core. A significant minority had opted for library domain-specific schemas like the European Data Model or BIBFRAME.
The survey also found that libraries professed a keenness to cooperate and exchange ideas though only a few networks allowed them to exhibit the intrinsic character of LOD— acting and thinking globally while executing at a local scale.
The LOD Working Group will be comparing and combining the results of this survey with the results from other studies. The intent is to harvest the best practices and create a basic workflow to guide institutions through a LOD project. The group aims to include case studies highlighting how individual projects dealt and subsequently used the LOD. In addition, the group will discuss the topic of semantic interoperability in detail and intends to complete the second phase of its work by summer 2020.
Click here to read the original article published by LIBER.
Please give your feedback on this article or share a similar story for publishing by clicking here.
