For review: Benefits, Part II

********* Please forward to appropriate parties and lists ******

The W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group would like a comments and  
suggestions on the group's final report. All comments should be sent  
to the public mailing list: public-lld@w3.org. Posting is allowed to  
non-subscribers. Because each of these mails contains only a small  
section of the report, it is advised to view the section in its context:

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/DraftReportWithTransclusion

********* Benefits, Part II ***********

Benefits to Researchers, Students and Patrons

Users of library and cultural institution services may not be  
immediately aware that linked data is being employed. Although the  
changes that occur will be "under the hood," the underlying structured  
data will become more richly linked and the user experience will  
provide greater discovery and use capabilities. The resulting data  
webs will result in more sophisticated discovery and navigation across  
library and non-library information resources. Links can be used to  
expand indexes much easier than required for today's federated  
searching, and can offer users a nearly unlimited number of pathways  
for browsing.

Library users should be comfortable with the basic concepts of linked  
data since it uses HTTP, the Web's standard retrieval protocol.  
Applications may allow users to "follow their nose" (i.e., resolve  
trails of URI links) to the data itself. Once retrieved, the  
recombinational nature of RDF will allow information seekers to  
extract the parts of the data they need and understand, re-mix as  
required, or even to add their own annotations as contributions to the  
global graph. These capabilities meet expectations for an interactive  
user experience, such as is found in social networking applications.

Relationships to and from non-library services such as Wikipedia,  
Geonames, and Musicbrainz will help connect local collections into the  
larger universe of information available on the Web. The rise of  
semantics in HTML, which plays a role in the crawling and relevancy  
algorithms of Google, Google Scholar, and Facebook, will provide a way  
for libraries to enhance their visibility through search engine  
optimization (SEO), allowing resources to be discovered from Websites  
they use routinely. Citation management can be made as simple as  
cutting and pasting URLs. Embedding structured data in Web pages  
using, for example, RDFa markup in HTML pages, will also facilitate  
re-use of library data in services to information seekers. Automating  
the retrieval of citations from linked data or creating links from Web  
resources to library resources will mean that library data is fully  
integrated into research documents and bibliographies.



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2011 19:22:38 UTC