Vocabulary persistence, preservation, and access

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 09:27:04AM -0700, Karen Coyle wrote:
> In fact, there could be particular roles for libraries in this space,  
> building on their traditional role as preserver of culture:
> 
> * Libraries have a role to play as stable entities that can guarantee  
> the long-term preservation and access to Semantic Web vocabularies
> (There will be a longer write-up of this concept coming soon)

I wrote up a proposal for such a role, with Harry Halpin of
W3C, at [1].  The basic idea is that linked data will only
remain usable twenty years from now if its URIs persist and
remain resolvable to documentation of their meaning.

Since many important vocabularies belong to time-limited
projects, even individuals -- and for that matter no single
institution, even the biggest libraries, is ultimately too
big to fail, or at any rate to reassess its commitments in
the longer term -- one good defence against the loss of LD
vocabularies is redundancy.

The idea laid out in the paper is that vocabulary
maintainers would enter into an agreement with a cultural
memory organization such as a library -- member of a broader
digital preservation consortium -- specifying the conditions
under which ownership and control over their vocabulary would
revert to that library.  Example: Vocabulary maintainers
stipulate that ownership of a vocabulary will devolve to their
national library when they are no longer willing or able to
maintain it themselves.  I picture these agreements as a menu
of pre-defined contracts from which a vocabulary maintainer
could choose, displaying its logo on their Website, much like
people can now choose and display a Creative Commons license.

With help from automated mirrored-cache technology (e.g.,
the LOCKSS system), these libraries could help insure access
to the vocabularies against server failure by maintaining
up-to-date snapshots of a vocabulary's documentation and
automatically coming online whenever the primary server fails.

Details would need to be worked out, but given mature
supporting technologies such as LOCKSS, the challenge would
seem to be more of institutional will than of technology.
Preserving vocabularies and maintaining access to them
feels like tractable problem, and one that extends the
natural mission of libraries to preserve content of cultural
significance.

Tom

[1] http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS10/paper/view/1140/1450

-- 
Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>

Received on Thursday, 14 April 2011 13:51:22 UTC