“How Linking Changes the Role of Library Data: Examples from the Wider World” :
“Discussion in the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group (2010-2011) tended to focus on the benefits of linked-data technology to libraries. This talk explores how library data – datasets, element sets, and value vocabularies – when linked, provide new forms of support to scholarly and cultural communities in the wider world. Well-maintained value vocabularies, their concepts identified by URI and backed by institutional persistence policies, can function as magnets, forming hubs of incoming links from thousands of providers. The global agricultural research community maintains a key thesaurus, AGROVOC, through an effort distributed across multiple language areas. Its linked data strategy aims at solutions that will work in low-resource and low-bandwidth conditions and at tools that can use natural-language processing to assign appropriate URIs and automate the “triplification” of existing data (“wrapping the legacy”).
In the library world, the standards underpinning bibliographic description, such as ISBD, FRBR, FRAD, FRSAD, and RDA, are being translated into the language of linked data. Triplified standards provide building blocks for descriptive practice based not on fixed records, but on statements that can be differently recombined and bundled for diverse, even unanticipated, uses – aggregated “just in time” instead of being maintained “just in case”. As for other artifacts of long-term cultural importance, libraries could play a key role in preserving the underlying vocabularies, ensuring their long-term usefulness as the “footnotes” of library data.”