Re: Recommendation: Plan for migration

Ed, these are good points. I wonder if we can get this into the  
document as an area to be studied. There are obviously issues and  
difficulties with both (all?) options and there really isn't a way to  
know today what LD might evolve into ten years or so down the road.  
Perhaps we can say that there are lots of ways to get to LLD and that  
it isn't something that has to happen all at once. (On a recent panel  
I was on we came up with the Y2K analogy: there is no Y2K drop dead  
date for LLD and we don't have to all move in the same direction at  
the same time.) However, we think it should involve planning where  
possible. The recommendation would be able to refer to less-disruptive  
options like an interface layer over current systems as something to  
consider as a starting point.

One thing that to me colors all of this is that we really are coming  
to the end of the utility of the MARC format, for reasons unrelated to  
LLD but because of its own limitations. Any change to our primary data  
carrier needs to be forward-looking. This therefore puts us in one of  
those "opportunity" moments. I personally think that we could replace  
MARC without embracing LLD but we should at least adopt some of the  
primary principles that have come out of the semantic web -- not  
because they are semantic web but because they are simply a good idea  
for data management. For example, using identifiable things rather  
than text strings; defining your properties in a machine-readable way;  
etc.

kc

Quoting Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>:

> I like the idea of emphasizing Linked Data as an option for publishing
> data, and de-emphasizing discussions around converting all our MARC
> data over to RDF, followed by powering down the legacy MARC-based
> systems.
>
> For example, there is a lot of iterative work that ILS vendors could
> do now to layer RDFa into existing OPAC displays, to make the data
> easier to scrape, and for search companies to index. This would
> necessarily imply thoughtful use of URIs as well. But it would not
> mean that their back end data store would need to be thrown out, and
> all their MARC data converted over to RDF.
>
> //Ed
>
>



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

Received on Monday, 2 May 2011 18:56:12 UTC