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In June 2011, Stanford University hosted a group of librarians and technologists to examine issues and challenges surrounding the use of linked data for library applications. This report summarizes the activities and discussions that took place during the workshop, describes what came out of the workshop, outlines next steps identified by the participants, and provides contextual and background information, including preliminary reports and biographies of workshop participants. The workshop report was produced and edited by the participants and staff at Stanford University Libraries.

As background for workshop participants, CLIR commissioned Jerry Persons, technology analyst at Knowledge Motifs and Chief Information Architect emeritus at Stanford, to produce a survey of the linked-data landscape, and the projects and individuals associated with it. The survey focuses on the practical aspects of understanding and applying linked data practices and technologies to the metadata and content of libraries, museums, and archives. There are numerous links in the report and the survey that lead readers to many other sources and examples regarding the use of linked data methods.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

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Key recommendations of the report are:

• That library leaders identify sets of data as possible candidates for early exposure as Linked Data and foster a discussion about Open Data and rights;
• That library standards bodies increase library participation in Semantic Web standardization, develop library data standards that are compatible with Linked Data, and disseminate best-practice design patterns tailored to library Linked Data;
• That data and systems designers design enhanced user services based on Linked Data capabilities, create URIs for the items in library datasets, develop policies for managing RDF vocabularies and their URIs, and express library data by re-using or mapping to existing Linked Data vocabularies;
• That librarians and archivists preserve Linked Data element sets and value vocabularies and apply library experience in curation and long-term preservation to Linked Data datasets.

See also the related reports: Library Linked Data Incubator Group: Datasets, Value Vocabularies, and Metadata Element Sets and Library Linked Data Incubator Group: Use Cases.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

• PersID – III: Current State and State of the Art (IIIa) & User Requirements (IIIb)
• PersID – IV: Prototype for a Meta Resolver System/ Work on Standards
• PersID – V: Sustainability

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The studies have aimed to overcome the confusing variety of existing persistent identifier systems, by analysing the current national URN:NBN and other identifier initiatives; by providing guidelines for an international harmonized persistent identifier framework that serves the long-term preservation needs of the research and cultural heritage communities, and advise these communities about a roadmap to gain the potential benefits. This roadmap also includes a blueprint for an organisation for the distribution and maintenance of the Persistent Identifier infrastructure

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

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Scientific data stands to represent a significant portion of the linked open data cloud and science itself stands to benefit from the data fusion capability that this will afford. However, simply publishing linked data into the cloud does not necessarily meet the requirements of reuse. Publishing has requirements of provenance, quality, credit, attribution, methods in order to provide the reproducibility that allows validation of results. In this paper we make the case for a scientific data publication model on top of linked data and introduce the notion of Research Objects as first class citizens for sharing and publishing.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Ex Libris® Group . . . is pleased to announce the general release of version 4.0 of its SFX® OpenURL link resolver, already deployed at over 1800 institutions in 53 countries. With the updated and enhanced administrative interface and the redesigned structure of the SFX KnowledgeBase, librarians benefit from streamlined workflows, new functionality, and more frequent KnowledgeBase updates for both hosted and local SFX installations.

New administrative functions—many of which are the direct result of feedback from the customer community—further emphasize the importance that libraries attribute to maintaining full control over the way in which they expose their e-collection to their users and brand the library’s scholarly services. And what’s more, SFX has been keeping up with the times. As the scholarly environment has evolved, configurations have been added to SFX to accommodate changes in library services and the development of new ones, such as the bX article recommender service.

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In what is believed also to be a world-first, ECS has become the UK’s first University department to release all its public data in open linked data format.

The School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is at the forefront of the open linked data initiative through the work of its Professors Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt.

Now, in accordance with the spirit of the initiative, ECS has released all its own data for public reuse. This includes data about research papers in the EPrints archive (announced this in the official global rankings as one of the top ten in the world), people in the School, research groups, teaching modules, seminars and events, buildings and rooms.

All public (RDF) data from rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk and eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk is now available and can be reused for any legal purpose, including derivative works and commercial use. The School has opted for a creative commons public domain (CC0) license to allow the data to be reused.

Christopher Gutteridge, ECS Web Projects Manager, comments: "We believe that in the future this will become common practice for certain types of open data, and it is our responsibility to lead the way in setting the standards of best practice."

"We have decided not to make attribution of our data a legal requirement, as this makes it difficult to create large scale mashups."

"So, rather than "MUST attribute", our policy is 'please attribute'. Obviously an attribution would be nice, but we don't want to restrict innovation by requiring it under all circumstances."

Professor Nigel Shadbolt comments: "The University of Southampton has pioneered some of the most important developments in the Semantic Web and Open Access in recent years. This announcement will ensure more data is released in the right format to enable new innovative uses of the information."

"This kind of open data policy will become the standard by which all public institutions are judged. Working with the UK government over the past year Tim Berners-Lee and I have been looking to change everyone's attitude to data. Publicly-held non-personal data is now being released all over the country and as this continues we'll see innovation to exploit it and applications that use it." . . .

More information on the available data from ECS: http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/docs/.

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This briefing paper will provide a high level overview of key concepts relating to the Semantic Web, semantic technologies, linked and open data; along with references to relevant examples and standards. The briefing is intended to provide a starting point for those within the teaching and learning community who may have come across the concept of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web but who do not regard themselves as experts and wish to learn more. The examples and links are intended as starting points for further exploration.

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Europeana's first White Paper looks at the key role linked data will play in Europeana's development and in helping Europe's citizens make connections between existing knowledge to achieve new cultural and scientific developments. Without linked data, Europeana could be seen as a simple collection of digital objects. With linked data, the potential is far greater, as the author of the white paper, Prof. Stefan Gradmann, explains.

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UKSG and NISO are pleased to announce the first report by the KBART (Knowledge Bases and Related Tools) Working Group, a joint initiative that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain. The KBART Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2010) contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.

The KBART Recommended Practice, a report from Phase I of the KBART project, provides all parties in the information supply chain with straightforward guidance about the role of metadata within the OpenURL linking standard, and recommends data formatting and exchange guidelines for publishers, aggregators, agents, technology vendors, and librarians to adhere to when exchanging information about their respective content holdings.

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The project team set out to gain a good understanding of the technical, legal, and administrative challenges and opportunities related to sharing and using OpenURL link server data and to assess the relative and complementary value of data from the OpenURL router and from OpenURL resolvers within institutions by gathering and inspecting those data. We also sought to explore potential uses of these data through consultation and through manipulating the sample data available. Our conclusions are organised by four themes: (1) the level of interest and viability of services based on aggregated OpenURL data; (2) libraries' willingness to share data; (3) the availability of OpenURL resolver usage data; and (4) the value of the OpenURL Router as a source of data on which useful services may be built.

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RKBExplorer (http://rkbexplorer.com/) is a system for publishing Linked Data to Semantic Web standards, also providing a browser that allows users to explore this interlinked Web of Data, primarily in the domain of scientific endeavour. As part of the activity, we have harvested the metadata from a number of the larger ePrints repositories into http://eprints.rkbexplorer.com, and republished it as Linked Data. This allows the RKBExplorer browser to present a unified view of these repositories and related data from other sources such as dblp and dbpedia (a Semantic Web version of Wikipedia). Users can thus investigate concepts related to the ePrints people and articles, such as related people, projects and institutions.

Here's a description of he Handle System from its home page:

The Handle System is a general purpose distributed information system that provides efficient, extensible, and secure HDL identifier and resolution services for use on networks such as the Internet. It includes an open set of protocols, a namespace, and a reference implementation of the protocols. The protocols enable a distributed computer system to store identifiers, known as handles, of arbitrary resources and resolve those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, contact, authenticate, or otherwise make use of the resources. This information can be changed as needed to reflect the current state of the identified resource without changing its identifier, thus allowing the name of the item to persist over changes of location and other related state information.

• Citation Manager: "Citation Manager allows faculty, students and staff to quickly and accurately capture citations or references from library resources into their own personal, online database."
• CUFTS (serials management): "As a knowledgebase of over 375 fulltext resources, CUFTS provides Electronic Resource Management services, an integrated serials database, link resolving, and MARC records for your library."
• dbWIZ (federated searching): "dbWiz provides library users with a single interface for searching a wide range of library resources, and returns records in an integrated result listing."
• GODOT (link resolution): "Launched from a link embedded in your library's citation databases or other resources, GODOT provides direct links to your fulltext collections, using the CUFTS knowledge base, and also reveals holdings in your catalogue or in other locations."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On March 6, representatives of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), academic libraries, and major library application vendors met in Berkeley, California to discuss a draft recommendation from the DLF for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

At the meeting, participants agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards.

These functions are:

1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.
2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.
3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.