My Recent Presentations

My recent presentations at SWIB23 (YouTube), and the Bibframe Workshop in Europe, attracted many questions regarding the how, what, and most importantly the why of the unique cloud-based Linked Data Management & Discovery System (LDMS) we developed, in partnership with metaphacts and Kewmann, in a two-year project for the National Library Board of Singapore (NLB). Several of the answers were technical in nature. However, somewhat surprisingly they were mostly grounded in what could best be described as business needs, such as:

• Seamless Knowledge Graph integration of records stored and managed in separate systems.

Do You Have a List of Terms Relevant to Your Data?

Things such as subjects, topics, job titles, a glossary or dictionary of terms, blog post categories, ‘official names’ for things/people/organisations, material types, forms of technology, etc.

Extending or Enhancing Schema.org

I am often asked by people with ideas for extending or enhancing Schema.org how they go about it. These requests inevitably fall into two categories: either ‘How do I decide upon and organise my new types & properties and relate them to other vocabularies and ontology?’ or ‘Now I have my proposals, how do I test, share, and submit them to the Schema.org community?’

I touch on both of these areas in a free webinar I recorded for DCMI/ASIS&T a couple of months ago. It is in the second in a two-part series Schema.org in Two Parts: From Use to Extension. The first part covers the history of Schema.org and the development of extensions, based on my experiences applying and encouraging the use of Schema.org with bibliographic resources, including the setup and work of the Schema Bib Extend W3C Community Group – bibliographically focused but of interest to anyone looking to extend Schema.org.

The Role Type in Schema.org

This post is about an unusual, but very useful, aspect of the Schema.org vocabulary — the Role type.

Getting Library Data into a Linked Data Form

The phrase ‘getting library data into a linked data form’ hides a multitude of issues. There are some obvious steps such as holding and/or outputting the data in RDF, providing resources with permanent URIs, etc. However, deriving useful library linked data from a source, such as a Marc record, requires far more than giving it a URI and encoding what you know, unchanged, as RDF triples.

Schema.org Adoption

I have been banging on about Schema.org for a while. For those that have been lurking under a structured data rock for the last year, it is an initiative of cooperation between Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex to establish a vocabulary for embedding structured data in web pages to describe ‘things’ on the web. Apart from the simple significance of having those four names in the same sentence as the word cooperation, this initiative is starting to have some impact. As I reported back in June, the search engines are already seeing some 7%-10% of pages they crawl containing Schema.org.