comments from a readthrough of the whole report

I'm really impressed with the report: I think it gives a good summary of our work, and should generally be quite understandable to the audience. I had some questions and comments as I went along. Here those are.

-Jodi

==EXECUTIVE SUMMARY==
1) Should we indicate where the use cases are available? Perhaps not in the executive summary, but somewhere in the main report?

2) I wince every time I read this line: "There are few services yet making use of this data but the experience being gained is highly valuable."

3) "The Incubator Group will transition to a W3C community group to provide an ongoing focal point for this activity. The community group will form shortly after the ending date for the incubator group. At that point the founders of the community group will solicit membership and ideas for directions and activities." -- has someone agreed to lead the community group?

4) Overall, this is the weakest section; is someone taking on editing it?

==SCOPE==
1) "This report pragmatically distinguishes three types of library data based on their typical use: datasets, element sets, and value vocabularies." -- we should either define these here, or indicate that they are defined in the inventory section of the appendix

==BENEFITS==
1) "It provides multilingual facilities (e.g. multilingual labeling of concepts identified by a language-agnostic URI) for data and user services." -- 'provides' strikes me as a little overstrong here. While language-agnostic URIs are best practice, are they inherently required? Or perhaps I misunderstand this sentence!

2) Here, while I understand "unique expertise", it may not be clearly understood just from what is written: "linked data allows anyone to contribute unique expertise in a form that can be reused and recombined with the expertise of others." Perhaps an example would help? Or rephrasing?

3) "Through rich linkages with complementary data from trusted sources, libraries can increase the value of their own data beyond the sum of their sources taken individually." -- I'm not sure what "the sum of their sources" means here. That diverse, complementary sources are more valuable when combined?

==BENEFITS TO RESEARCHERS, STUDENTS, AND PATRONS==
1) "crawling and relevancy algorithms of Google, Google Scholar, and Facebook," -- do we want to also (or perhaps instead) talk about the general categories "search engines and social networking sites"?

2) "Structured data embedded in HTML pages will also facilitate the re-use of library data in services to information seekers: citation management can be made as simple as cutting and pasting URIs." -- is this the same 'citation management' as in bibliographies? This implies that LD will ensure persistence of URIs; I wish!

==BENEFITS TO ORGANIZATIONS==
1) Parts of this paragraph are repeated in the "Benefits to Developers and Vendors" section. I don't think that's a problem, but I noticed it.

"Today's library technology is specific to library data formats, leading to the existence of a special Integrated Library Systems industry specific to libraries. Library system vendors will benefit from the adoption of mainstream technology as it will give them an opportunity to broaden their user base. The fact of not being tied to the library-specific data formats will be a benefit to developers."

=== LIBRARY DATA IS NOT INTEGRATED WITH WEB RESOURCES===
1) "These could all be linked in a future linked data environment." -- The "future" in this sentence could lead one to believe that the technology is not sufficiently advanced yet. Could we rephrase this to "In a linked data environment, these could be linked." or something similar?

==DATA AVAILABILITY==
1) "More has been done on value vocabularies and element sets than on bibliographic datasets" -- The "more has been done" doesn't sound very good to my ears. Could we rephrase this? The best I can come up with is "Bibliographic datasets have received less work than value vocabularies and element sets"?

===MORE HAS BEEN DONE ON VALUE VOCABULARIES AND ELEMENT SETS THAN ON BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATASETS===
1) "Examples such the release of the British National Bibliography show that there are indeed considerable difficulties involved (many discussed in this report). However, this proves not deterring enough, and the number of datasets released as linked data keeps increasing at a fast pace."

I think the difficulties need to either be directly mentioned, or a report from the BNB mentioned; otherwise this stands as a caution against adopting LLD.

==RECOMMENDATIONS==
1) "The general recommendation of the report is for libraries to embrace of the web of information, both in terms of making their data available for use and in terms of making use of the web of data in library services." -- I think "web of information" and "web of data" may be too flowery and indirect for our audience.

===FOSTER A DISCUSSION ABOUT OPEN DATA AND RIGHTS===
1) "For the perspective of UK higher education libraries, see the Rights and licensing section of the Open bibliographic data guide."
Do these provide a model for non-UK institutions as well? If so, we should say that.

==DESIGN USER STORIES AND MODELS FOR USER INTERFACES==
1) "Because the semantic web is new it isn't going to be possible to predict all of the types of services that can be developed for information discovery and use, but the design of some use cases and experimental user services are necessary to test library data in this environment and to determine fruitful directions for development activities."

While this is definitely true, I think it understates the amount we know about information discovery and use with the semantic web. I think it would be apt to add a mention of bioinformatics services which provide a front end to LD services, as an example of pioneering work in interfaces. Does anyone have good examples in mind? Should I solicit one from a colleague here at DERI?

==THE LINKING ISSUE==
1) "We also observe that links are being built between library-originated resources and resources originating in other organizations or domains, DBpedia being an obvious case. " -- It might be worth saying more about DBpedia; I doubt it's well-known by the audience.

2) There's also a substantive pending todo listed in the text here: "@@TODO: more on linking systems and methods. there have been some implementations based on string matching and statistical techniques. However they are not ready as generalized applications." Is someone still working on that?



I also made some very minor changes while reading (e.g. hyphenation, adding 'the's, CMSs, ...). Unfortunately I only know how to show the diffs section by section. Here those are:
Benefits:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/index.php?title=Benefits&diff=5803&oldid=5744

Draft issues page take 2: 
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/index.php?title=Draft_issues_page_take2&diff=5810&oldid=5792

Draft Vocabularies Datasets As Current Situation
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/index.php?title=Draft_Vocabularies_Datasets_As_Current_Situation&diff=5808&oldid=5779

Draft recommendations page take2
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/index.php?title=Draft_recommendations_page_take2&diff=5811&oldid=5527

Draft Vocabularies Datasets Section2
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/index.php?title=Draft_Vocabularies_Datasets_Section2&diff=5816&oldid=5796

Draft Relevant Technologies
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/index.php?title=Draft_Relevant_Technologies&diff=5820&oldid=5785

Please revert anything I made worse!

-Jodi

Received on Saturday, 20 August 2011 12:04:35 UTC