Designing the Garden: Getting Grounded in Linked Data

Designing the Garden: Getting
Grounded in Linked Data
#rwlod
Jenn Riley (@jenlrile)
Associate Dean, Digital Initiatives
McGill University

"Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.”
--Shakespeare, The Tempest
#rwlod Beyond the Looking Glass, ALCTS Preconference 2015

Photo by Liam Moloney, https://flic.kr/p/7Qux27, CC BY-SA

1. It’s not “our” data and “their”
data – it’s one big graph.

It’s about the connections
https://linkedjazz.org/network/

Graph-based world views
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2015/06/06/querying-rdf-data-with-text-annotated-graphs/

Connecting things together
dbpedia:Willia
m_Shakespeare
1615-04-23
1564-04-26
dbpedia:Str
atford-
upon-Avon
dbpedia-owl:
birthDate
worldcat-
work:10745266
81
fast:1069678
# Political
Refugees
“Tragicomedy’
“Shakespeare’s
Comedy of the
Tempest”
schema:
genre
viaf:9699404
8
# William
Shakespeare
foaf:person
rdf:
type
schema:
CreativeWork
rdf:
type

 Creating so much data!
 Where the scope of “library data” ends
 What it is and isn’t “our job” to do
 Making “complete” descriptions ourselves
 Mapping data from “other” vocabularies into “library”
vocabularies
This means we can stop worrying about…

 Learning other metadata cultures
 Being Linked Data ecosystem good citizens
 How the technology and the data can most effectively work
together
 Making connections between things
 Understanding other vocabularies and communities
And start worrying about…

2. We can expect more
intelligence in the system.

http://hangingtogether.org/?p=4167; September 2014

Guido Reni (1575-1642)
Hercules Killing the Hydra of Lerna
c. 1620-1621
oil on canvas
commissioned along with other
scenes from the mythology of
Hercules in 1617 by Ferdinando
Gonzaga, for a room in the Villa
Favorita in Mantua, Italy inv. 535
Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

 Mine usage data to enhance relevance and utility in discovery
 Start from the most relevant information and provide easy
means for quick expansion on demand
 Coherently display conflicting information
 Give indications of provenance of information
What systems must do for users

If we’re serious about
information literacy, we have to
give our users tools and then
trust them.

 Flag dead ends for review and action
 Normalize most string-based data
 Highlight potentially conflicting information
 Hide complexity (URIs, etc)
 Mine and show candidate connections for review
What systems must do for metadata maintainers

 Choosing one authoritative “correct” assertion in the face of
conflicting data
 Whether or not a given source meets a certain standard for
authority
 Authorized headings, access points
 And textual justifications for them
 A large proportion of the data cleanup tasks we used to do
 For example, the formatting of strings
 But we can expect a new set of these to emerge!

 How to enhance system algorithms
 How users best interact with complicated information
 Methods for automated metadata creation and cleanup
 Getting large amounts of new data into the system

3. The information age has provided
a new definition of “authority.”

 Current narrative:
 Libraries create good
metadata!
 Because we’re trained to do so
 We’re consistent and follow
rules
 That’s what makes good data
 Other people create bad data
 Because it’s not consistent
 Using a well built record
structure is a key part of good
metadata
 But…
 We don’t read the books we
catalogue
 We don’t typically have expertise in
the subjects of the works we
describe
 Sometimes we don’t even read or
speak the language those works use
 Our perspective is pretty different
from our users’
 Number of things to describe is
quickly expanding and our budgets
are shrinking
Let’s take a good, hard look at our “authoritative” data

 Remember, we’re looking at more intelligent systems in the LD
world
 That can deal with inconsistency, masking it or cleaning it up
 The LD graph allows us to not worry about metadata structures
 So consistency and rules are no longer the primary drivers of
good metadata
 Which means we can turn large swaths of the creation of
metadata over to domain experts
Wait, it’s not about consistency and rules?

https://www.digitalcommonwealt
h.org/search/commonwealth:5h7
3q9544

If we’re serious about good
metadata, we need to start from
expert information.

We need this guy
http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/scholars-lose-themselves-in-their-research/

And we need these folks too!
Photo by veggiesosage, https://flic.kr/p/5WjAsK, CC-BY-NC-ND

Really, it’s going to be OK
https://xkcd.com/386/

The Linked Data community cares about provenance
http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/provenance#w3c_all

 Deep research on materials for which there’s already a
knowledgeable community
 Descriptions being “complete”
 Making sure everything is “right”

 Mining the data that’s already out there
 Promoting voices of those who engage with content
 How usable systems can be built to generate Linked Data from
activities real people already partake in
 Seeding basic information for the rare and unique materials we
hold that have never been released
 Connecting data from communities operating in different
languages

4. Our job is to tend the garden.

Metadata is an ecosystem
Photo by Temari 09, https://flic.kr/p/6UskT1, CC-BY-NC

The garden needs tending
Photo by Center for International Forestry Research, https://flic.kr/p/dbx1Gt,CC-BY-NC-ND

A new model – making connections
https://thenounproject.com/term/connection/25392/

 “Original cataloguing” and “copy cataloguing”
 Getting data into “our systems”
 Doing all the work that needs to be done the first time we think
about a specific item

 Understanding the Linked Data environment
 Locating large and useful datasets
 Understanding vocabularies developed elsewhere
 Finding good people that can analyze relationships and make
new connections

 The data and systems are all in the cloud
 Library-based discovery less important but likely still around for a
while
 Several ways systems can navigate the graph
 Crawling
 Dereferencing
 Query federation
 (See http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/#htoc84)
So how will Linked Data systems work?

 This is all the way it should work
 It’s going to be a while before we get there
 Big effort needed to start connecting up these data sets
 Data sets and tools will get better as we start using the data in
this way and demand more
 The library community can help to shape this evolution, but only
if we fully understand and engage with the assumptions and
mechanisms in play in the Linked Data community
Reality check

 This will be hard. But that won’t stop us.
 We need to redefine our baseline.
 We need to rethink what new models mean for us.
 And, most importantly, we need to put the right people in
positions to work through these issues and get the details
settled.
A sea-change? Most definitely.
We got this.

 jenn.riley@mcgill.ca
 @jenlrile
 These presentation slides:
http://www.jennriley.com/presentations/alaannual2015/riley-
garden.pptx
Thank you!

Designing the Garden: Getting Grounded in Linked Data

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