Your Website is your API - How to integrate your Library into the Web of Data using RDFa
Audience: Librarians and technicians interested in Linked Open Data and the related technologies, Webmasters
Felix Ostrowski, Adrian Pohl
Audience: Librarians and technicians interested in Linked Open Data and the related technologies, Webmasters
Short description: Libraries and related institutions have begun to migrate legacy data such as bibliographic records, authority data and holdings information from traditional subject-specific data formats to a general standard that is inherently web-compatible and interdisciplinary: RDF (Resource Description Framework). This step allows library data to be truly integrated into the World Wide Web and to be linked to other data. But it is not only "classic" catalogue-data that is important to information seekers. Moreover, information about the institutions themselves, their collections, opening hours, holdings, contact options and lending possibilities is of interest.
Most libraries nowadays have a website, which they use to present such information in a human-readable way. This bootcamp focusses on how to enhance these websites using RDFa, which basically means adding semantic attributes to the underlying HTML, effectively turning the website into a machine-readable interface - an API. This API can then be used by aggregators to provide new services, e.g. by search engines to enhance their search results.
The bootcamp deals with conceptual questions, including a discussion of possible vocabularies that can be used to describe libraries and their services, as well as with technical details on how to enrich library websites with RDFa. In the practical part of the workshop we will create descriptions in HTML+RDFa for some institutions the attendees work in. In the end we would like to discuss the question on how to spread these practices in the international library community.
Bootcamp outcomes:
- The attendees have learned about the basic concepts of RDFa.
- The attendees have learned how to implement RDFa on their websites.
- The attendees have internalized the acquired knowledge by applying it to their own institution's website.
- Perspectives for broadening RDFa implementation in the international library community have been discussed.
Resources
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/introduction-to-rdfa/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/introduction-to-rdfa-ii/
http://lobid.org/en/organisation.html
http://blog.lobid.org/2010/07/building-linked-data-based-index-of.html
http://www.slideshare.net/literarymachine/slides-4805597
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170
