An Overview of the Current State of Linked and Open Data in Cataloging

Abstract

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a core Semantic Web technology that makes knowledge and information spaces of different knowledge domains manageable, reusable, shareable, exchangeable, and interoperable. The LOD approach achieves this through the provision of services for describing, indexing, organizing, and retrievingknowledge artifacts and making them available for quick consumption and publication. Thisis also alignedwith the role and objective of traditional library cataloging. Owing to this link, majorlibraries of the world are transferring their bibliographic metadata to the LOD landscape. Some developments in this direction include the replacement of Anglo-American Cataloging Rules 2nd Edition by the Resource Description and Access (RDA) and the trend towards the wideradoption of BIBFRAME 2.0. An interestingand related development in this respect arethe discussions among knowledge resources managers and library community on the possibility of enriching bibliographic metadata with socially curated or user-generated content. The popularity of Linked Open Data and its benefit to librarians and knowledge management professionals warrant a comprehensive survey of the subject. Althoughseveral reviews and survey articles on the application of Linked Data principles to cataloging have appeared in literature, a generic yet holistic review of the current state of Linked and Open Data in cataloging is missing. To fill the gap, the authors have collected recent literature (2014–18) on the current state of Linked Open Data in cataloging to identify research trends, challenges, and opportunities in this area and, in addition, to understand the potential of socially curated metadata in cataloging mainlyin the realm of the Web of Data. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this review article is the first of its kind that holistically treats the subject of cataloging in the Linked and Open Data environment. Some of the findings of the review are: Linked and Open Data is becoming the mainstream trend in library cataloging especially in the major libraries and research projects of the world; with the emergence of Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), the bibliographic metadata is becoming more meaningful and reusable; and, finally, enriching bibliographic metadata with user-generated content is gaining momentum.Conclusions drawn from the study include the need for a focus on the quality of catalogued knowledge and the reduction of the barriers to the publication and consumption of such knowledge, and the attention on the part of library community to the learning from the successful adoption of LOD in other application domains and contributing collaboratively to the global scale activity of cataloging.

Databrarian ed? Preparing Information Specialists for Participation in an Open Datafied Society

“…Additional open activities in libraries encompass open science (Schmidt et al, 2018), open infrastructure (Lewis et al, 2018) and linked open data (ARL, 2019;Ullah et al, 2018). Public librarians around the world are engaging with open government agenda and connecting their communities with open data, helping people to find, use, apply and publish local data, in their traditional roles as 'civic infomediaries' (Ayre and Craner, 2017;Robinson and Mather, 2017).…”

Study of library data models in the semantic web environment

“…Even though the use of paths enabled representations and mappings, the lack of tools for path-oriented mappings did not. The lack of tools that are needed for several library linked data processes has also been confirmed in OCLC (Smith-Yoshimura, 2016 and LIBER (Frosterus et al, 2020) studies, as well as in the related literature (Taniguchi, 2017b;Ullah et al, 2018;Wahid et al, 2018).…”

“…During the development of mappings and the assessment process (second and third objectives), a significant lack of tools, also observed in (Smith-Yoshimura, 2016Ullah et al, 2018;Wahid et al, 2018), was encountered. As an example, the inexistence of a metadata registry that includes updated definitions from several models and enables advanced search functions forced many searches in each model's documentation.…”

“…(Zeng, 2019). Studies about library linked data projects have already identified important differences between the projects with regard to semantic interoperability issues, meaning the selected models, schemas and value vocabularies (Smith-Yoshimura, 2016Suominen & Hyvönen, 2017;Tallerås, 2018;Ullah, Khusro, Ullah, & Naeem, 2018). The existence of so many and different library linked datasets further raises the concern if the published datasets can be linked to one another, and if they can ultimately support the explore user task (H. Park & Kipp, 2019;Patrício et al, 2020;Suominen & Hyvönen, 2017;Tallerås, 2018).…”

“…These studies revealed (a) the discordance of entity-relationship modeling adopted by the FRBR model to semantic web principles, (b) the lack of consensus among libraries regarding the linked datasets' underlying conceptual models, as well as (c) the abundance of element and value vocabularies for the same metadata. Such practices will likely impact semantic interoperability, which is already affected by 1) the plethora of conversion tools from MARC21 to FRBR, BIBFRAME or to other custom-made models generating bibliographic datasets with great differences between them (H. Park & Kipp, 2015), 2) the coincidental unavailability of tools for publishing linked data (Frosterus et al, 2020;Smith-Yoshimura, 2016Taniguchi, 2017a;Ullah et al, 2018;Wahid, Warraich, & Tahira, 2018) causing the development of custom solutions and "locally developed routines" (Frosterus et al, 2020), and 3) the mixture of metadata elements (many of them are deprecated ones) used in library linked data projects to describe bibliographic resources (H. Park & Kipp, 2019). Toward the end of liberating library data from legacy silos, new models are developed and the danger of creating new linked data silos has already been expressed (H. Park & Kipp, 2019;Patrício et al, 2020;Suominen & Hyvönen, 2017;Tallerås, 2018).…”