Re: LD and Redundancy

> It's a fundamental issue of primary importance to libraries.  It should be discussed in the report


+1, it is an important organization/communication issue for the entire domain:

- whether in a centralized or de-centralized model, libraries should be able to identify and point to external LD descriptions of the entities they have in their own LD, and I think this can't happen without some form of coordination at the domain-level.

- more-or-less centralized aggregations will emerge, as a useful service to end users and intermediary data consumers. In this perspective I regard Stu's view on OCLC's role and Andrian's CultureGraph project to be of the same kind, even though with difference scope/scale. Europeana and other aggregators would provide a similar service. And this requires some coordination as well.
On Alexander's point that this is likely to be easier for authority data. It is true that such organizations are already in place. E.g. (if I'm not mistaken?) for person names in Germany DNB coordinates PND which is a first level of aggregation (it benefits from input from other German libraries) and then PND is itself aggregated into VIAF. But in fact even for bibliographic data the same kind of organization already exists: this is what union catalogues are about, no?

Antoine



>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Mar 24, 2011, at 9:10 AM, Karen Coyle<kcoyle@kcoyle.net>  wrote:
>
>> Following up to this, we seem to agree that there will be redundancy of data and of identifiers. Is this a particular LLD issue that should be included in the group's report, or is this a general SemWeb issue that we can assume will be addressed in the normal course of things? At the moment there is a brief mention of this in the issues area of the report, but we're unsure what to say about it.
>>
>> Perhaps we can resolve this on tomorrow's call.
>>
>> Thanks, all,
>> kc
>>
>> Quoting Ross Singer<ross.singer@talis.com>:
>>
>>> I think we're going to have to assume there will be lots of duplication of
>>> resources describing the same thing with different identifiers (although,
>>> hopefully interrelated) for a couple of reasons:
>>>
>>> 1) A centralized repository will never be able to keep up with everything -
>>> there will always be nodes with resources described prior to being added to
>>> the repository; possibly never added.  These could also spring up in
>>> multiple places independently
>>> 2) We should not expect universal, 100% agreement on how things are
>>> defined/described.  We don't have this now, we certainly can't expect this
>>> to change.
>>> 3) There are lots of non-authoritative resources (subject headings, people,
>>> class numbers, etc.)
>>> 4) A centralized repository would have to rely quite heavily on discovery
>>>     - there's a huge danger of GIGO here (there are plenty of typos in the
>>> historical record)
>>>     - plenty of chances of failed searches
>>>
>>> Couple this to the fact that (most) everybody is going to to have to
>>> duplicate all of the data for local indexing purposes, anyway...
>>>
>>> -Ross.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Owen Stephens<owen@ostephens.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> I tend to agree with Joachim - we will see more data publication and at
>>>> least in this phase will see plenty of institutions coining their own URIs.
>>>> However, I also believe that the web tends towards less duplication (this
>>>> isn't anything close to no duplication, just less duplication than we would
>>>> have otherwise).
>>>>
>>>> We are already seeing that established URIs will be used where they exist
>>>> (e.g. for LCSH) - and I guess we can expect to see more of these.
>>>>
>>>> That said, I think aggregations are a good thing (and inevitable) - and the
>>>> more identifiers are shared, and the more people make sameas and similar
>>>> statements, the easier aggregation will become.
>>>>
>>>> In terms of what we should be doing now? I'd say:
>>>>
>>>> Encourage re-use of URIs (ideally this would be baked into record creation
>>>> in libraries, but that's a whole other ball game)
>>>> Encourage sameas statements where new URIs have been coined (and
>>>> appropriate)
>>>> Start looking at how existing linked data representations of bibliographic
>>>> data can be crawled and aggregated and see what works and what doesn't
>>>>
>>>> I'm sure there is other stuff, but those are the ones that spring to mind
>>>> first
>>>>
>>>> The work of the JISC 'RDTF' (Resource Discovery Task Force) in the UK is
>>>> looking at the strategy of 'publish' and 'aggregate' - although this doesn't
>>>> dictate the use of Linked Data or RDF, many of the project falling into this
>>>> area are adopting that approach, so hopefully we will see a good exploration
>>>> of some of the issues from this area soon. See http://rdtf.mimas.ac.uk/ for
>>>> more information on this.
>>>>
>>>> Owen
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Owen Stephens
>>>> Owen Stephens Consulting
>>>> Web: http://www.ostephens.com
>>>> Email: owen@ostephens.com
>>>> Telephone: 0121 288 6936
>>>>
>>>> On 23 Mar 2011, at 17:16, stu wrote:
>>>>
>>>> *On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 1:18 AM, Neubert Joachim<J.Neubert@zbw.eu>wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'm not sure that a centralized model for building clusters (like VIAF) or
>>>> a pre-declared central hub ("everybody maps to
>>>> WorldCat/OpenLibrary/whatever") could work.*
>>>>
>>>> A centralized model is essential if global bibliography is to be an
>>>> important part of the Web.  Sure, there are work-arounds involving declared
>>>> or inferred equivalence.  These all require additional work on the part of
>>>> systems and people, which will rarely be expended, with the result that link
>>>> potency will (continue to) be diluted to insignificance.
>>>>
>>>> Is it important enough for the global library community to expend the
>>>> resources to consolidate meaningful global bibliography?  Can the political
>>>> impediments be overcome?
>>>>
>>>> I continue to believe that OCLC is the only likely candidate with a chance
>>>> to make this happen, and it appears that the business cases are too weak,
>>>> and constituent demand too feeble for that to happen in the current
>>>> environment.
>>>>
>>>> I just Googled the book closest to hand, and on the first page, Wikipedia
>>>> was number one, and there were two Amazon links in the top ten.  No library
>>>> link of any sort appeared on the page.
>>>>
>>>> Linked data isn't going to change this without a centralized identifier
>>>> infrastructure.
>>>>
>>>> stu
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Karen Coyle
>> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
>> ph: 1-510-540-7596
>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>> skype: kcoylenet
>>
>>
>

Received on Thursday, 24 March 2011 10:23:12 UTC