10  Linking library data

Jindřich Mynarz

Audience: 

This workshop is suggested for developers that are in charge of databases and other people dealing with datasets that are working in libraries and related cultural heritage institutions and who want to get a hands-on demonstration of enriching library data with links and interlinking it with external web datasets constituting the linked open data cloud. 

Short description: 

The workshop will start with a brief introduction to the linked data publication model to get the participants on the same level of understanding. It will feature a description of the key technologies involved in linked data, including the URI identification mechanism as a necessary pre-requisite for linking, RDF data format for storing data, SPARQL query language for accessing distributed datasets, and relevant parts of RDF vocabularies for expressing typed links. 

Workshop's participants will be walked through the different types of linking (deterministic, probabilistic, schema-level, instance-level) and will be provided with an overview of the methods for matching data entities (lexical, structural). During the workshop some of the common issues and pitfalls often encountered in interlinking will be discussed. A practical demonstration of linking methods will be showcased and participants will be guided to try some of the state-of-the-art techniques for linking data themselves. 

The aim of the workshop is also to discuss practical use cases for linking in the library environment; most notably to refer to authority data, to establish links in library catalogues, or to connect the library with the wider Web via links. The workshop's discussion topics will include the choice of datasets suitable for linking, link quality assessment, or the value of linking, considering how it may enrich the data and lead to their greater visibility. 

Discussion topics: Throughout the whole workshop there will be a space for various focused discussions among the workshop's participants. The discussions' topics will focus primarily on the non-technical aspects of linking, such as:

• What constitutes data worth linking to?
• How to find datasets suitable for interlinking?
• How to make my dataset worth linking to?
• How to encourage others to link to my data?
• What is the added value of links?
• How to determine the quality of a link?

Practical part: The practical part of the workshop will be aimed at demonstrating how to create links for library data in real-world cases. The participants will first search for library-related datasets available in RDF that have little or no links to other data and then they will evaluate to which external data it is worth to link these datasets. Consequently, they will be guided through a hands-on interlinking of the chosen datasets, which will involve either a voluntary installation and setup of the Silk,  a link discovery framework, or the use of the LIMES interlinking software's web interface, writing the linking specification, and running the linking procedures to generate links.

Workshop outcomes: The participants of the workshop will be introduced to the practices of linking data and provided with a working knowledge necessary to start experimenting with interlinking on their own. The workshop will explore the possibilities for applying linking data in the field of libraries and participants will be lead to try the covered techniques for linking data for themselves.

Created workshop material on Google Docs

Workshop report