Wiring the semantic web
Last month Google announced another kind of searching the web, what’s basically known as semantic search. Instead of searching by words or phrases, you search for some concepts.
The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query.
Linked Open Data
Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. This is achieved by publishing, exposing and sharing the data and its relations with other data in some standards such as RDF and using URIs.
The potentiality of this web ecosystem is huge. You can link an author with his publications, songs, films, his city of birth, and so on; and in the same way, in another part of the web, his city of birth can be linked with its monuments, traditions, historical dates. The result is a graph of linked data that can be explored in many ways depending on what you need to solve or visualize.
And what about libraries?
The last ELAG Conference was very concerned about the evolution of the linked data thing. The conclusions of the workshop about linked library data were aligned with what Tim Berners-Lee is been saying for the last ten years. Libraries must open their data, blow up the data silos and become a node of interlinked and valuable data on the internet. As Lukas Koster claims, the classical discovery problem is not an interface problem but a data structure one.
About this post
This post was first published on LibTechNotes, a blog from the Library team at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya to share our everyday findings, solutions and inspirations.
