library science

Facet Publishing's current "Book of the month" is David Stuart's excellent Facilitating Access to the Web of Data: A guide for librarians. From the description: "This book is a wide-ranging introduction to the emerging web of data and the semantic web, exploring technologies including APIs, microformats and Linked Data". And, the book is aimed at individuals exactly like myself: "library and information professionals and for LIS students and researchers [and is also] of value to information architects, web developers and all those interested in making sure that people have access to the information they need." Thus, I'm reviewing it! It's a very readable, but relatively thorough, without going overboard with the details, overview of the topic. I especially admired the use of simple, concrete examples of how linked data works. I always struggle to come up with these when giving presentations or trying to explain the basic concepts.

The book is structured into the following chapters:

Finally, I have a window of time, albeit a brief one, to write about something OTHER than Drupal on this blog. I am, after all, a librarian by training and am interested in, among other topics, metadata standards, cataloging and information retrieval as well as the so-called Semantic web.

For a while now, I've heard about projects involving the use of DBpedia to link data sets and function as a validation tool for information on the web. This concept isn't unfamiliar to traditional librarians or information science folks. In MARC, one has name authority records to facilitate standardization of names, of people, places, buildings, etc. So, the way I see it, DBpedia has the potential to be the (semantic) web's name authority file, or one of them at least.

Indeed, many organizations are already using DBpedia in this manner - see DBpedia Use cases for examples. I did a quick Google search before beginning this post for "dbpedia name authority file" and came up with 2 interesting blog posts that are relevant.

One, on the Catalogablog, about a DBpedia Faceted Browser which "allows you to explore Wikipedia via a faceted browsing interface. It supports keyword queries and offers relevant facets to narrow down search results, based on the DBpedia Ontology." Also on Catalogablog, I noticed this interesting post about the VIAF (Virtual International Authority File), a linked data set of many authority files. Could one use DBpedia in conjunction with something like VIAF? Or, rather, ARE people already doing this?

Another post on 'Modeling your data with DBpedia vocabularies' appeared on this blog. As a relative newcomer to linked data and RDF (well, not really. I've been reading about it for years but never actually WORKED with any!), this post illuminated several points for me, namely, this notion of how some URIs are, relatively speaking, "better" than others as they might provider "richer" ways of linking data. See the example of the Truffaut film in the post...

So, I'm noticing that I'm slightly rambling with this post, and I'm asking more questions than answering. So, I'll conclude with more questions :-)

Is the idea that DBpedia is/could be one of many vocabularies in a linked data web context that could be used to serve the "name authority" function for the semantic web?
So, via SPARQL queries, one could use DBpedia to verify names in other linked data sets?

Wow, I really need to obtain some "hands-on" experience working with some of these standards, data sets, queries, etc. Any suggestions on workshops, conferences or where to begin are very welcome?

I just discovered and joined the Librarian Bloggers site. I have to say that the site is really well done. I created a profile and simply added an RSS from this blog and dragged it to the center of my profile so that when I blog from here, it posts there. Have a look at my profile. Really simply designed and user-friendly site - wouldn't expect anything less from my librarian colleagues :-)

Seems like a great site to join for networking opportunities, information sharing and learning about other librarians who blog. I still need to explore all of the options and configuration choices for the site but on first use, I have to give it huge props!

Right now, I'm at the EAHIL (European Association of Health Information Libraries) Workshop in Dublin. On Tuesday, I taught a Web 2.0 course here - it was held in one of the libraries at Trinity College Dublin - very cool :-)

I think it went well. I might have rambled a bit, but it's easy to do when talking about web 2.0 tools and apps, especially Twitter which I have a particular fondness for as of late. Some of the issues raised by people in my course that I thought were of interest: