linked data

Having beein involved for more than a year on a project to explore how semantic technologies, namely linked data, could serve as "enabling" technologies...

• to connect up disparate datasets
• for novel querying
• for re-packaging/publishing of content to make it more "nimble" via better structure, "meaning" and metadata

... I have to say, I'm very excited while retaining a realistic outlook on the ins and outs of actually implementing these technologies in the enterprise. Here are some random observations:

Just a quick post here on what I think is a major announcement/step forward for both the linked data/semantic web/web of data community and the field of library and info science. LOC recently announced that it will be replacing the 40-year-old MARC format for cataloging and data management structures with a framework based on RDF and linked data principles. Although this is, in some ways, not surprising, it is most-certainly a welcome development. As I mentioned in a previous post where I reviewed a book entitled Facilitating Access to the Web of Data: A guide for librarians, librarians and information professionals are in a unique position to facilitate much of so-called Web 3.0, which encompasses linked data and web of data developments.

The announcement states that:

This thread in the Semantic Web group on groups.drupal.org now contains a long comment by Steve Macbeth from Bing in which he attempts to clarify some of the issues around the launch of schema.org.

In a previous post, I discussed my excitement about the developments surrounding RDF and linked data in the Drupal community - namely, that these technologies will be part of core in Drupal 7, the newest release of the CMS. The work of folks like Lin Clark convinces me that Drupal can play a pivotal role in the linked data and semantic web taking off. Our recent experience here in my team further supports this idea.

In the last few weeks, we've been able to take ca. 4,600 items (abstracts of our articles) and import them into a Drupal 6 site and via the Open Calais module, auto-tag them with a few of the entities in Open Calais and thus have a quick "on-ramp" into using semantic technologies and linked data.  We have many questions about where to go from here, how to make our RDF richer, how to use modules like SPARQL Views to leverage the connections between our data and other data sets, etc. But, one thing's for certain, using a CMS like Drupal has made the process thus far effortless and user-friendly.