I just ret
urned from the International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums (LOD-LAM) Summit in San Francisco, CA . This was an intensive two-day conversation of what the internet could look like if libraries, archives, and museums unleashed their high quality metadata on the semantic web. How would the web differ from the way we know it today as primarily a tool for consumers?
The web as we know it now is built to display information that is easily interpreted by humans. The semantic web extends the human-readable world of web pages to the realm of machine-readable metadata allowing computers to process information more intelligently. In other words, the semantic web helps machines understand your data better and respond to complex requests based on human meaning. While we are still a long way from achieving this goal as Tim Berners-Lee envisioned it, the awareness that cultural memory organizations (e.g. libraries, archives, and museums) can play a pivotal role in transforming the consumer web to something far grander and more useful is slowly spreading.
The potential benefit to research is enormous. Imagine the rich catalog and finding aid data from each of the collaborating MHL institutions accessible in one place, linked to digitized content, as well as demographic, geographic, and other data sources. 100 digital archivists, librarians, scholars, publishers, and technologists converged on Japan town San Francisco last week to not only discuss this future, but to lay out a plan of action for building linked open data on the web. During these two days, I imagined wonderful things for the future of research as we discussed transforming hierarchies to open networks of information that could be manipulated and accessed in a variety of ways.
To catch a glimpse of what lies ahead for researchers, check out Mendeley–finally, a reference manager that can outsmart a TiVo. It is true, quite literally, that I saw the internet on Friday. I stood next to the servers of the Internet Archive. Perhaps it was the abundance of red bean paste I ingested after lunch, or the afternoon light streaming through the chapel windows of the former Christian Science Church, but I felt awed and humbled by the blinking lights as people from around the world accessed this incredible repository of human knowledge.
For more information on the summit and ongoing activity check out the LOD-LAM blog or the Google Group. Join the community and help us move linked data forward in the coming year.
Lori Jahnke
S. Gordon Castigliano CLIR Fellow
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia