Archive for the 'Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web' Category

“RKBExplorer: Repositories, Linked Data and Research Support”

Posted in Digital Repositories, Institutional Repositories, Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web, Metadata on July 1st, 2009

Hugh Glaser, Ian Millard, and Les Carr have self-archived "RKBExplorer: Repositories, Linked Data and Research Support" in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

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.

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Podcast: Interview with Herbert van de Sompel

Posted in Digital Repositories, Institutional Repositories, Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web, OAI-ORE, OAI-PMH on September 7th, 2008

Talis has released a podcast of an interview with Herbert van de Sompel, Digital Library Researcher at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, about SFX, OAI, and digital repositories.

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Handle System Workshop Presentations Available

Posted in Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web, Metadata, Techie on June 20th, 2008

Presentations from the Corporation for National Research Initiatives' Handle System Workshop are now available.

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.

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reSearcher: Open Source Citation Management, Federated Searching, Link Resolution, and Serials Management

Posted in Electronic Resource Management Systems, Electronic Resources, Federated Searching, Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web on April 11th, 2008

Simon Fraser University Library's Linux-based reSearcher, which is widely used in Canada, is an open source software suite that includes:

  • 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."
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Digital Library Federation and 10 Vendors/Developers Reach Accord about ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces

Posted in ILS, Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web, OAI-PMH, OPACs, Web 2.0/Social Networking on April 9th, 2008

Ten vendors and application developers have agreed to support standard ILS interfaces that will permit integration and interoperability with emerging discovery services. These interfaces will be developed by the Digital Library Federation's ILS-Discovery Interface Committee. The participants are AquaBrowser, BiblioCommons, California Digital Library, Ex Libris, LibLime, OCLC, Polaris Library Systems, SirsiDynix, Talis, and VTLS.

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.
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Citation, Location, and Deposition in Discipline & Institutional Repositories

Posted in Digital Repositories, Institutional Repositories, Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web on January 16th, 2008

The JISC CLADDIER project has published Citation, Location, and Deposition in Discipline & Institutional Repositories: CLADDIER Project Report III, Recommendations for Data/Publication Linkage.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

A key aim of the CLADDIER project is to investigate the cross-linking and citation of resources (in particular data and their associated publications) held in institutional and subject-based repositories within the research sector. Typically traditional citations are partial in that they are "backward citations", referring to work which influenced the current research, and they only cite other formal publications, ignoring other artefacts which are the output of research, in particular research data. Online repositories storing more dynamic digital objects gives the opportunity to provide a more complete picture of the relationships between them, with backward and forward citations to data and publications being propagated between repositories.

This report motivates the cross-citations of data from the CLADDIER use case example, and considers the approaches which have been implemented to harvest and propagate citation information. Most of these existing approaches depend on centralised services, which were considered unsatisfactory in an environment where independent repositories wish to maintain control of their resources and do not wish to be dependant on third-party services. Criteria are identified for building a Citation Notification Service to propagate citation references and links between repositories, including using a peer-to-peer protocol. A number of different architectures are proposed and evaluated.

The requirement for a light-weight peer-to-peer service which is as widely applicable as possible lead to the selection of Linkback services, in particular Trackback which provides an existing simple specification which can be implemented quickly and adapted to the requirements of citation notification. A detailed description the Trackback protocol is then given, together with the design of the adaptations and extensions identified as required for citation notification. This extended Trackback protocol has been implemented in the STFC ePubs institutional repository; this implementation is described and a use case is described.

Geoffrey Bilder has commented on the report in "CLADDIER Final Report."

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OpenURL Referrer Now Available for Both Firefox and IE

Posted in Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web on October 26th, 2007

OCLC now offers its OpenURL Referrer plug-in for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. It provides OpenURL links to local electronic resources for COinS-enabled (Context Objects in Spans) Web documents, Google Scholar search results, and Google News Archive search results.

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Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain Report

Posted in Linking, Linked Data, and Semantic Web on May 21st, 2007

The UK Serials Group has issued a report by James Culling titled Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain: Final Report for UKSG.

Here’s a summary of major issues and barriers from the "Summary of Findings":

  • Whilst some content providers are very aware of the role of link resolvers and the significance of data feeds to them for driving traffic to their content, there remains a significant number that do not make their collection details available to resolver suppliers at all, simply through not realising that this is a desirable thing to do.
  • Whilst some content providers are very aware of the role of link resolvers and the significance of data feeds to them for driving traffic to their content, there remains a significant number that do not make their collection details available to resolver suppliers at all, simply through not realising that this is a desirable thing to do.
  • Whilst link resolver suppliers state that the level of co-operation from some publishers is still not all that it might be, many publishers comment that a lack of open engagement and transparency regarding knowledge base requirements from the link resolver suppliers (as a group) has been problematic for them.
  • Where data is provided to link resolver suppliers and libraries by content providers, a lack of understanding or appreciation as to the use to which the data will be put may be a factor in incompleteness and inaccuracy.
  • Most of the link resolver suppliers have separately invested much time and staff resource in working around difficulties with data from content providers, rather than trying to address the problems at source. Many have concluded that full text aggregators in particular focus their energies in other areas and metadata accuracy is never (voluntarily at least) going to be of high concern to them.
  • Competition between organisations in the supply chain sometimes hinders co-operation and data sharing.
  • There is a lack of clarity and transparency in the supply chain regarding: standards for data formats, expected frequency of data updates, construction of inbound linking syntaxes and OpenURL support. These issues hinder broader adoption and limit the pace of information transfer through the supply chain, restricting the potential of link resolver systems.
  • Whilst the community’s attention has been mostly focused on what it means to be OpenURL compliant, a code of practice and information standards to ensure optimal knowledge base compliance have been sorely absent and overlooked.
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