Linking data is a structuring method being used by researchers and search service providers. Researchers in diverse domains e.g. glycomics and linguistics use linked open data in tandem with computational methods, to share, annotate and publish their research data.
Intersect is supporting Australian colleagues in the digital humanities and GLAM communities to learn more about this data structuring method to support research and innovation in the development of data infrastructure. Last year in partnership with the State Library of New South Wales, Intersect coordinated the 2015 LODLAM Summit, and facilitated a panel session on “Experiments in linked open data” at the Libraries Australia forum convened by the National Library of Australia.
International search service providers, e.g. Europeana, OCLC, and the Digital Public Library of America and holders of scholarly resources (data and publications) (Stanford, Harvard and Cornell university libraries) are using linked open data methods to improve their resource discovery services. Linked open data is now firmly on Australia’s digital library agenda and two keynotes at the 2016 VALA conference focused on the use of linked open data in library resource discovery infrastructure development. Valentine Charles from Europeana spoke about the agile approach to the ontology and data infrastructure development and strong stakeholder engagement with service providers and researchers, in the creation and use of linked open data. Kevin Ford spoke about the pros and cons of “Bibframe” a data model developed by the Library of Congress and Zepheira used to restructure bibliographic data (captured in the library cataloguing standard MARC) as linked open data. Three session papers focused on the uptake of linked open data methods were delivered by: Ben Chadwick (Education Services Australia), Ingrid Mason and Rowan Brownlee (Intersect and ANDS), and Prof Deb Verhoeven (Humanities Networked Infrastructure, HuNI). Note: the VALA 2016 papers, videos and presentations will be publicly accessible later this year.