- From: John Erickson <olyerickson@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:36:20 -0400
- To: public-lod community <public-lod@w3.org>
Stuart, t's not clear to me what you're trying to accomplish...For whom are you trying to add value? Since ePub is XHTML, it makes sense to embed metadata as RDFa. But why? Is the purpose to enhance the reading experience? Or perhaps the local collection management experience? Publishers should be, and most likely are, obtaining DOIs <http://doi.org> for their materials through a registration agency such as CrossRef <http://crossref.org>. As we have discussed elsewhere (and for more than a decade...) the DOI enables multiple stakeholders to manage and publish metadata about the item; linked data best practices are a promising approach , but RDFa on an RA's landing page for the item is also a possibility. The DOI is not about embedding metadata in individual instances, however, which is what you seem to be asking about. Are you imagining creating some kind of meshup within the reading experience, perhaps meshing metadata and links bound to entities within the ePub'd document with external linked data? John On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Stuart A. Yeates <syeates@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm interested in putting linked data into eBooks published in the (open standard) ePub format (http://www.openebook.org/ ). The format is essentially a relocatable zip file of XHTML, associated media files and a few metadata files. > > The target platforms of this content impose some restrictions on what is practical: e-ink devices (which are the only current eBook readers with the battery life to last an entire novel) typically don't have an internet connection (thus no resolving of links) and have very little in the way of processing power (thus no full reasoning). > > We already have some data-interlinking between our collection (http://www.nzetc.org/ ) and librarything (http://www.librarything.com/ ) at the FRBR work level (http://vocab.org/frbr/core.html#Work ) and also some links to wikipedia / dbpedia for named entities (principally authors and places). We believe we have quite good authority control over author names, even those who published under multiple names (see, for example http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-208662.html or http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-208310.html ). We have ~1300 ePubs, the largest of which exceed the size limits of most ePub tools. > > Does anyone know of any other attempts to put linked data into packages like this? > > There are two main issues I can see: (a) how to self-identify the package (naive hashing doesn't work, as some eBook readers open the package and add custom metadata) and (b) how to package the linked data to get maximal use when a paucity of CPU precludes a full reasoner. > > The traditional identifier used in this field, the ISBN, is essentially a print-run identifier, and not of a whole lot of obvious use to us since: (a) most of our books' original publishing predates ISBNs and (b) our digital republishing of them doesn't qualify for an ISBN according to our local ISBN issuer (the National Library of New Zealand). > > cheers > stuart > > > -- John S. Erickson, Ph.D. http://bitwacker.wordpress.com olyerickson@gmail.com Twitter: @olyerickson
Received on Wednesday, 28 April 2010 11:36:53 UTC