Category: Data Publishing

OCLC WorldCat Linked Data Release – Significant In Many Ways

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Typical!  Since joining OCLC as Technology Evangelist, I have been preparing myself to be one of the first to blog about the release of linked data describing the hundreds of millions of bibliographic items in WorldCat.org. So where am I when the press release hits the net?  35,000 feet above the North Atlantic heading for LAX, that’s where – life just isn’t fair. By the time I am checked in to my Anahiem hotel, ready for the ALA Conference, this will be old news.  Nevertheless it is significant news, significant in many ways. OCLC have been at the leading edge …

Schema.org Consensus at SemTechBiz

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Day three of the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco brought us a panel to discuss Schema.org, populated by an impressive array of names and organisations: Ivan Herman, World Wide Web Consortium Alexander Shubin, Yandex Dan Brickley, Schema.org at Google Evan Sandhaus, New York Times Company Jeffrey W. Preston, Disney Interactive Media Group Peter Mika, Yahoo! R.V. Guha, Google Steve Macbeth, Microsoft This well attended panel started with a bit of a crisis – the stage in the room was not large enough to seat all of the participants causing a quick call out for bar seats and …

Surfacing at Semtech San Francisco

Posted on by Richard Wallis

So where have I been?   I announce that I am now working as a Technology Evangelist for the the library behemoth OCLC, and then promptly disappear.  The only excuse I have for deserting my followers is that I have been kind of busy getting my feet under the OCLC table, getting to know my new colleagues, the initiatives and projects they are engaged with, the longer term ambitions of the organisation, and of course the more mundane issues of getting my head around the IT, video conferencing, and expense claim procedures. It was therefore great to find myself in San …

Who Will Be Mostly Right – Wikidata, Schema.org?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Two, on the surface, totally unconnected posts – yet the the same message. Well that’s how they seem to me anyway.

Post 1 – The Problem With Wikidata from Mark Graham writing in the Atlantic. Post 2 – Danbri has moved on – should we follow? by a former colleague Phil Archer.

Semantic Search, Discovery, and Serendipity

Posted on by Richard Wallis

An ambition for the web is to reflect and assist what we humans do in the real world. Search has only brought us part of the way. By identifying key words in web page text, and links between those pages, it makes a reasonable stab at identifying things that might be related to the keywords we enter.

As I commented recently, Semantic Search messages coming from Google indicate that they are taking significant steps towards the ambition. By harvesting Schema.org described metadata embedded in html

Linked Data a Recipe for Food?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

What relevance does Linked Data have for a City’s food supply you may ask. “We live in a world where the agri-food supply chain, from producer all the way through to final consumer, is extremely inefficient in the flow of knowledge.. ..with the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies along the food supply chain, it will make it easier for all actors along there to know more about where their food comes from and where their food goes.”

Libraries Through the Linked Data Telescope

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Linked Data and Linked Open Data have arrived on the library agenda. The consequence of this rise interest in library Linked Data is that the community is now exploring and debating how to migrate library records from formats such as Marc into this new RDF. In my opinion there is a great danger here of getting bogged down in the detail of how to represent every scintilla of information from a library record in every linked data view.

Is Linked Data DIY a Good Idea?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Most Semantic Web and Linked Data enthusiasts will tell you that Linked Data is not rocket science, and it is not.  They will tell you that RDF is one of the simplest data forms for describing things, and they are right.  They will tell you that adopting Linked Data makes merging disparate datasets much easier to do, and it does. They will say that publishing persistent globally addressable URIs (identifiers) for your things and concepts will make it easier for others to reference and share them, it will.  They will tell you that it will enable you to add value …

Free Data for 2.4 Million European Culture Heritage Items

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Europeana recently launched an excellent short animation explaining what Linked Open Data is and why it’s a good thing, both for users and for data providers.  They did this in support of the release of a large amount of Linked Open Data describing cultural heritage assets held in Libraries, Museums, Galleries and other institutions across Europe. The significant elements in the press release, from Europeana Professional (Europeana’s professional knowledge-sharing platform), are that they are releasing data for 2.4 million items, under a CC0 open data license, and it is Linked Data in RDF. This is a wonderful resource, and example …