-=( In Between )=-

I played around with Google Wave a bit. I didn’t get it first, but after a while I saw its charms, well, potential charms. We finally seem to have a non clumsy tool to collaborate and communicate, the latter perhaps more than the former.

It may help to streamline thoughts on how to proceed if we want our (digital) libraries to become part of the semantic web. I started a wave therefore, and posted the following message.

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Working from the assumption that the library should become part of the semantic web, what should we do? Is the following a reasonable set of things to do?

1) Identify what we have, and give it a URI (meaning that authors, documents (objects), keywords, and concepts should get a URI

2) deposit the URI’s in a registry, with a minimal set of triples (relate URI of documents to URI of authors, etc…): what is the minimal set?

1 and 2 are data level requirements, the following are service level

3) use OAI-ORE to define compound objects

4) define owl:sameAs relations between URI’s when needed (what is the workflow here?)

5) Which vocabularies/ontologies can/should be used for which services. Do we need a service catalogue first?

what else?

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Now, if you are interested in active participation, let me know

Last sunday Freebase reached a milestone: freely available data for over 10 million topics are now available. It has reached the milestone by reusing data from a load of other websites and initiatives.  The following quote highlights this:

In October, we rounded out our TV domain by synchronizing with the excellent user-curated TV fan site TVRage.com.  Combined with earlier data loads from thetvdb.com, we now have comprehensive coverage of nearly every TV show and episode created in the United States.  It includes cast and credits, as well as links to key TV websites like tvguide.com and Hulu — nearly a million topics in all!

But the load that took us over the 10 million mark was the final load of editions from Open Library.  Compromising 650,000 authors, almost 2 million books and 2.1 million book editions,   this load pushed new boundaries in our data acquisition, curation, reconciliation and QA processes.

The semantic web company has opened a demo zone  that

compiles a suite of the best software tools, services and information sources for every aspect of the Semantic Web. Finding, creating, linking and publishing information – the flexibility and richness of the Semantic Web is only a few mouse clicks away.