Greetings all, Somebody mentioned that the reason you see so much more Linked Data in Europe is that they have been working with RDF in research and development projects for much longer than us and I cannot agree more. Their PhD students have their research developed around semantic web technologies and their PhD programs are strong and mature. Just look at what all those national libraries have done. Also the work of some teams and individuals is impressive. I would like to mention Europeana which is doing an amazing job of bringing digital collections from all over Europe into one centralized place. And it’s bringing them together by providing a data model used by the partner national libraries to model and map their data. By doing this all partner national libraries are engaging in linked data work and getting their hands dirty. Also I think it is important to mention that this is not driven by any money, since of course we all know there is no money in libraries. They don't care that there is no money, they care about research. Somebody else pointed out that we have no national library - but we do have the Library of Congress so that cannot be a valid excuse (in my opinion).
As for not having a LD platform to work on, here I disagree. There is the VIVO semantic web application and few other similar ones. VIVO was developed by Cornell University in 2003 as a relational database and with an NIH grant in 2009 grew to become an open source project based on semantic web principles. VIVO is an open, shared platform for connecting scholars, research communities, campuses, and countries using Linked Open Data. VIVO links data from institutional and public sources to create web profiles populated with researcher interests, activities, and accomplishments. It uses ontologies to express relationships between entities/individuals. The VIVO-ISF 1.6 ontology is a combination of the eagle-i ontology (Dr. Melissa Haendel from OHSU the brain behind it) already mentioned by someone. Only the subset of the VIVO-ISF is used in the VIVO application. Same for other ontologies used in VIVO: FOAF, BIBO, FABIO, SKOS, CiTO, CItation, OBO, VCARD. It is a great application developed by Cornell’s brilliant team and few other institutions as a result of the NIH grant. I know of few people working with VIVO that are on this list and they can jump in to explain further but I wanted to bring it to your attention since nobody mentioned it so far. And I am bringing this up since I do not agree that “no one has really show an impressive end user use for linked data, which American decision making tends to be more driven by.” We have VIVO – developed here in the States. It is embraced by many institutions in Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand. An interesting observation - many developers working on VIVO are not employed by the libraries, but by the provost office or a similar office and that is why we don't hear much about VIVO on this list or any other library specific list. Remember it was developed by the Cornell library staff. Also another brilliant application developed by people at ISI in California is the Karma data integration tool. Just take a look at what they have done: http://www.isi.edu/integration/karma/ Works great for modeling data into semantic web VIVO compliant data format – produces N-Triples. This is the tool some of us in the VIVO community use to produce RDF data. If I was constrained to one sentence comment on this list this is what I would have said: there is work done with linked data here in the States and there are applications that have demonstrated an impressive end user use for linked data. And there are many more to come. Regards and Happy Holidays, Violeta Violeta Ilik Digital Innovations Librarian Galter Health Sciences Library Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS) 303 E. Chicago Ave, 2-212 Chicago, Illinois 60611 office: (312) 503 0421 violeta.ilik at northwestern.edu www.galter.northwestern.edu<http://www.galter.northwestern.edu/> http://www.galter.northwestern.edu/staff/Violeta-Ilik ________________________________________ From: Code for Libraries [[email protected]] on behalf of Karen Coyle [[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 4:58 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access Off the top of my head: http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/what-linked-open-government-data http://aims.fao.org/agris http://data.gov.uk/location http://datos.bne.es/ http://statistics.data.gov.uk/ http://europeana.eu/ etc. What "linked" and "open" provide is exactly what it says - linked=able to be used in combination with data from other Web resources; open=anyone can use the data. There are projects that are using CSV or XSL files, but those function as self-contained bits of data, without the linking, even if they are openly available. kc On 12/22/14 7:30 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: >> And as has already been pointed out, no one has really show an impressive >> end user use for linked data, which American decision making tends to be >> more driven by. > Well, that raises an important question -- whether an 'end user use', or > other use, do people have examples of neat/important/useful things done with > linked data in Europe, especially that would have been harder or less likely > without the data being modelled/distributed as linked data? > > ________________________________________ > From: Code for Libraries [[email protected]] on behalf of Brent Hanner > [[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, December 22, 2014 6:11 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access > > There are deeper issues at work here than just the kind of obvious surface > issues. > > One of the reason Europe embraced rdf triples and linked data was timing. The > EU was forming its centralized information institutions the same time the > idea of linked data to solve certain problem came about. So they took it and > ran with it. In the US we have been primarily driven by the big data movement > that gained steam shortly after. And as has already been pointed out, no one > has really show an impressive end user use for linked data, which American > decision making tends to be more driven by. > > > Europeans can think about data and databases differently than we can here in > the US. In Europe a database is intellectual property, in the US only parts > of the database that fall under copyright law are intellectual property, > which for most databases isn't much. You can’t copyright a fact. So in the US > once you release the data into the wild its usually public domain. > > > As for government data, the Federal and most state governments are in need of > an overhaul that would make it possible. If you don’t have the systems or > people in place who can make it happen it won’t happen. Heck the federal > government can’t even get a single set of accounting software and what not. > > > So it isn’t just a lack of leadership or will, there are other things at work > as well. > > > > Brent > > > > > > > Sent from Windows Mail > > > > > > From: Karen Coyle > Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 10:32 AM > To: [email protected] > > > > > > Yep, yep, and yep. > > Plus I'd add that the lack of centralization of library direction (read: > states) is also a hindrance here. Having national leadership would be > great. Being smaller also wouldn't hurt. > > kc > > On 12/19/14 6:48 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: >> I don’t know about y’all, but it seems to me that things like linked data >> and open access are larger trends in Europe than here in the United States. >> Is there are larger commitment to sharing in Europe when compared to the >> United States? If so, is this a factor based on the nonexistence of a >> national library in the United States? Is this your perception too? —Eric >> Morgan > -- > Karen Coyle > [email protected] http://kcoyle.net > m: +1-510-435-8234 > skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600 -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net m: +1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600
