Envisioning Social Applications of Library Linked Data

Title: Envisioning Social Applications of Library Linked Data

Name of presenter(s): Jodi Schneider and Uldis Bojars

About the presenter(s): Jodi Schneider trained as a librarian at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC and worked at several US libraries; she is now a Ph.D. student at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway Ireland. Her research interests are in argumentation, scientific and scholarly communication, and the Social/Semantic Web. She was a founding member of the Code4Lib Journal and a coauthor of the reports of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group.

Uldis Bojars works at National Library of Latvia where he explores library applications of Linked Data. He took part in the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group and worked on curating the Social Uses cluster of use cases. Uldis is a co-founder of the SIOC Project aimed at applying Semantic Web technologies to Social Web sites. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Intended audience: The talk will not be overly technical therefore everyone interested in the topic is welcome to attend.

Abstract:  

This talk discusses two streams of innovation on the Web--the Social Web and Linked Data--and explains how bringing them together can move library services to the 21st century. Long a mainstay of social networking sites, social features such as user-contributed content and crowd curation are becoming more important for libraries, since they help to build communities (which is one of the functions of libraries) as well as to provide users with better and more relevant services.

Linked Data has been widely adopted by businesses and media organizations, as well as by large libraries, in order to facilitate data interoperability on the Web.

Combining the two provides an opportunity to create new applications of library data. In particular, we are interested in applying linked data in order to create novel, social uses of library-related information--uses that might support collaboration or that depend on information contributed by a large number of people.

The presentation will consist of a short introduction to Library Linked Data and social features related to library data, followed by an overview of use cases collected by the Social Uses cluster of the W3C Library Linked Data (W3C LLD) Incubator Group.

The core of the presentation will provide an in-depth look at a few of these envisioned use cases: social annotation, peer-to-peer bookswapping and social recommendations. The goal is to create interest in combining new technologies and to start a discussion about how to bring these and similar use cases to fruition.

The presentation is based on authors' work in the W3C LLD Incubator Group and the output of its Social Uses cluster in particular.