Recommendation: Plan for migration

(You've probably noticed that these recommendations are not in any  
particular order. I'm sending them out as we feel they have been  
sufficiently worked over by the group.)

****

Plan for migration to LLD: technical, managerial, and intellectual

A migration to Linked Data for library and cultural heritage metadata  
will likely be a lengthy and highly distributed effort. The length of  
time to perform the migration will be large because of the number of  
activities: emergence of best practices for LLD, creation and adoption  
of new software, consensus on global identifiers and deduplication  
strategies, and so forth. A plan must be drawn up that stages  
activities in ways that allow innovators to participate sooner while  
paving the path for the late majority adopters to make use of the work  
later. Adoption of the plan would also reduce duplication of effort as  
the community moves from a self-contained, record-based approach to a  
worldwide graph approach for bibliographic data.

One question to be addressed in a plan is whether conversion can be  
done in managed stages. For instance: First create globally unique  
URIs for each record. Then, if necessary, automatically create WEMI  
URIs for each record. Next, "map" attributes/fields to existing  
properties (or create appropriate new ones). Lastly, "map" object  
values to existing URIs where appropriate, etc.

Another possible path is a pure MARC ontology to create linked data  
from legacy records without thinking about linked data. That is, a  
very preliminary, high-level map that produces triples like  
<my:RecordID> <marc:100a> <"Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826"> without any  
attempt to substitute an existing URI for the predicate or object.  
This would help very large scale data dumps that others could  
subsequently work on.

Each of these plans has costs and benefits that should be studied and  
understood as part of the transition to linked data, taking into  
account the investment that libraries have in their current systems  
and economic factors.

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

Received on Thursday, 28 April 2011 21:34:10 UTC