Re: library patron data in RDF

>> Has anyone started to express patron data in RDF?

> What's the use-case? e.g. internal structure of an RDF-backed library
> system maybe?
>
> I was looking around recently to see if I could find any bulk
>(aggregate, 'anonymised', etc) loans data, but it seems a pretty taboo
> topic due to the privacy concerns. Since RDF is largely about sharing
> data, I'm curious if you have a particular use in mind.

RDF is not only about sharing but also about information integration.
I found the support of NCIP in integrated library systems somehow
disappointing and report of the Digital Library Federation more like
a lip service. The chance of someone writing a Linked Data seems
more likely than someone writing an NCIP wrapper, as RDF is much 
more common than library-specific formats. In addition, mapping
one part of your library system to RDF helps you to map the rest. 

> Re loans data and their un-shareability, if that info could be kept
> long enough *within* a library to compute similarities and generate
> recommendations, sharing the results of such processing would be
> interesting. However I have the impression that many (all? most?)
> libraries try to keep such data for as short a time as possible...

I had only aggregation on a smaller scale in mind: a user (or a user's
client) would aggregate patron data from different libraries, for
instance
to show a combined list of his loans. For this reason I was looking for
a simple ontology to express the most relevant library patron data in 
RDF. I guess that user account information can be expressed with SIOC
and FOAF, but some specific properties such as 

- due-date
- number-of-renewals
- sum-of-dues
...

would be needed. I hesitate to create yet another library-specific
ontology (in addition to DAIA/RDF) and I wonder why no integrated
library system has started to use RDF. Maybe hacking it into Koha
is a good strategy, as I do not expect any commercial vendor to do so.

Jakob


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