Linked Open Data at the IGeLU conference in Berlin
By Lukas Koster, Corey HarperTwo years after the first one hour session on Linked Open Data at the IGeLU 2011 conference in Haifa, we saw a lot more LOD attention at the IGeLU 2103 conference in Berlin. We can regard this as a big success for the Linked Open Data Special Interest Working Group.
Linked Open Data was the topic in three channels: official Ex Libris presentations, the IGeLU/ELUNA Linked Open Data SIWG session, and a number of customer presentations.
Ex Libris
In the plenary Ex Libris Strategy and Roadmap session on Monday, Chief Strategy Officer Oren Beit-Ari stressed the fact that Ex Libris regards Linked Data as an important development.
In the plenary Primo and Primo Central Product Update, Roadmap and Q&A on Tuesday, Director of Product Management, Discovery and Delivery Solutions Gilad Gal announced development on an extra infobox in the Primo results screen, showing additional information about the topic of the search, much like the Google Knowledge Graph extra info box. Initially, this info will be taken from dbpedia.
In the LOD SIWG meeting on Monday, Chief Technology Officer Shlomo Sanders announced a number of interesting developments:
Ex Libris is working on giving every Primo Central record a URI, which will be able to return PNX or RDF. These URIs can be managed in the announced new API Gateway Platform in the next version of the EL Commons developer platform. Mappings to RDF vocabularies will be configurable through this platform. The focus will initially be on Institutional Repositories, Research Data and Open Access. Access to other content will come as Ex Libris work out legal issues. Ex Libris is looking for development partners to work on PNX to RDF mapping for institutional repositories and on URI/RDF access to hosted local Primo data. Another plan for 2014 is to look at the options for displaying Linked Data in a configurable Primo UI tile within the Details Display.
LOD SIWG meeting
Besides the presentation by Shlomo Sanders, the rest of the LOD SWIG meeting was mainly dedicated to the background, organisation, communication and activities of the group, with special attention on the monthly calls between the SIWG, Ex Libris and all interested customers, focusing on one individual use case at a time.
Customer presentations
The meaning of discovery: SLUB Dresden’s multilingual semantic search
– Jens Mittelbach, Head of User Services and Information Department,
Saxon State and University Library (SLUB)
– Tamar Sadeh, Director of Marketing at Ex Libris
In this presentation a very interesting add-on for Primo was described and shown: an extra “subject” facet, generated from WikiPedia/DBPedia, functioning as a multi-level, multilingual, semantic and disambiguation tool for search results. See it live: http://www.slub-dresden.de/en/home/ do a search in the box and find the “SLUBSemantics” facet.
The drawbridge to knowledge – Linking scholarly publications and research information in Primo
– Lukas Koster, Library Systems Coordinator, Library of the University of Amsterdam
– Dominique Ritze, Project staff/Research associate, Mannheim University Library
Two approaches to linking scholarly publications in Primo to related research project information and research data were presented: by using existing extra identifiers for authors and publications), and by text mining full text.
Linked Data: From ALEPH/PRIMO to the Dictionary of Luxembourgish Authors and back
– Roxana Popistasu, IT Staff, Bibliothèque Nationale de Luxembourg
A pilot project for embedding links and additional author information in Aleph and Primo originating from the Autorenlexikon (an external Luxembourgish author encyclopedia), focusing on issues with matching author names, identifiers, etc.