In the previous post I gave an overview of the JiscEXPO project outputs available so far, and hinted at ones coming soon. In this post I focus more on the themes and issues that are starting to appear. It can be quite difficult to distill these out of the information available, but I have been able to see a few patterns emerging, even though it is still relatively early days.

Archives Hub Record for Sir Ernest Shackleton

Given that linked data is of course, about data, a number of issues have been appearing around this subject. Linked data will generally require some data modeling, and as the Locah project report, this may mean having to change your data model mindset:

“it took me quite a while to get away from the idea of modelling the EAD record, rather than the actual data.”

“I found actually getting a ’starting point’ a bit difficult. I think this is because everything can be a starting point”

There can also be inherent complexities in the existing data that can make the modeling difficult:

“perhaps one of the thorniest [questions] is that arising from one of the fundamental characteristics of the nature of archival description [which is] typically based on a “hierarchical”, “multi-level” approach”

“One consequence of the multi-level approach in archival description practice is a strong sense of the importance of “context” … the descriptions of the “lower level” units should be read and interpreted in the context of the higher levels of description”

“So, there is arguably a (perhaps unavoidable) element of tension between the strongly “contextual” emphasis of EAD and ISAD(G) and the “bounded descriptions” of “Linked Data”.”

The process of transforming and exposing linked data can also highlight ‘dirty’ data, and issues around disambiguation. The MusicNet project mentions problems arising from different naming conventions and input error when looking for records that represent the same musical composer in multiple data sets. They’ve been experimenting with a data alignment tool they developed to help solve these issues, and have put together this YouTube video demo:

Locah have also been finding numerous examples of inconsistencies, such as where the ‘creator’ is ‘Joe Bloggs and others’ rather than just a name for example.

Linkbrainz have noted some scalability challenges that can arise with some linked data:

“[the] problem becomes acute for classical composers like Bach who are credited with tens of thousands recordings … the complete RDF resource description for Bach would be immense. This would cause an unacceptable load on the database server and long wait times for dereferenced URIs.”

They suggest a solution that uses the pagination of the HTML pages for the RDF or RDFa, but note that this is not ideal from a modeling point of view. They also mention that including RDFa in the MusicBrainz HTML pages can increase the page by somewhere between 5% and 30%.

Linkbrainz have also had to contend with some licensing issues:

“… some content in the MusicBrainz database is licensed as by-nc-sa… JISC considers this license incompatible with completely open data. Therefore, this small subset of the MusicBrainz database will likely be omitted from our translation moving forward.”

However, the JiscOpenBib project appears to have sorted out data licensing without too many problems, having recently announced that the British Library is providing bibliographic data under CC0 Public Domain Dedication Licence.

MusicNet have drawn attention to the question of how to sustain the data from the JiscEXPO projects, and the HE sector in general in the longer term, suggesting that we need provision for UK academic data to be hosted on the JANET network under a suitable .ac.uk domain. A hosted data.ac.uk is proposed, possibly JISC funded, to lower the technical and financial barrier to entry to publish RDF. One suggestion is that this could be possible via the data.gov.uk education datastore.

Locah believe there is a significant skills and training gap in the linked data area, noting a lack of domain specific examples, and a lack of helpful information about how to create a data model. They suggest that at the moment, a certain level of expertise is needed to model data and output RDF, and that efforts to address this and make it easier would help the take up of linked data. They do however note that adopting the linked data approach is already paying dividends by making development more user focused:

“the very big plus with this different kind of thinking is that by definition it puts what the user is interested in at the forefront of your thinking”

So we can see the projects are meeting a range of challenges in exposing their linked data. It’s worth noting that many of the difficulties do not uniquely arise from outputting linked data, and in fact, the projects are in many cases simply ‘exposing’ existing problems that have thus far remained hidden behind data silos. It’s good to hear about the positive effects the linked data approach can have on helping to steer development in a more user focused direction. It will be interesting to see how the projects get on and what further themes arise when the demonstration prototypes start to appear this year.

A key aim of this JISC programme newsletter is to highlight some of the outputs and emerging themes from across the ten projects that make up the ‘JiscEXPO‘ programme funded by the 2/10 grant funding call, and, if possible, use these to identify any themes that cut across other ongoing JISC programmes. This work is invaluable to JISC, as the information is fed directly back into the overall evaluation of the programme which informs the Digital Infrastructure Directors, and which in turn is synthesised for JISC’s Senior Management Team.

The broad aims of the ‘exposing content for education and research’ call (‘JiscEXPO’ for short) were to make a collection of resources available as structured linked data by adopting Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘four rules of linked data’, and to produce a prototype that meets a ‘compelling end user case’. Projects were also invited to report on opportunities and barriers in making the linked data available so other UK HE and FE institutions could learn from their experiences. The information in this newsletter is mainly taken from the projects’ blogs, and most of the links below point to these. A single blog post from a project can end up being discussed at the top of JISC, which can and often does affect new policy decisions. So projects, please keep your blog posts coming!

We’re about a third of the way through JiscEXPO, and we’re now starting to see some emergent themes appear. I’ve attempted to summarise where JiscEXPO is up to so far, and give an overview of the themes arising.

A notable early JiscEXPO output was data.open.ac.uk from the LUCERO project which exposes the data available in the Open University’s various institutional repositories and makes it openly available for re-use. Already live are Open Research Online, the OU Podcasts, and some of the courses from the Study at the OU website.The LinkBrainz project will be publishing the metadatabase from the popular MusicBrainz service as Linked Data, along with a number of tutorials for users. BBC Music is one of a number of sites that pulls in data from MusicBrainz, so we can look forward to some exciting developments following the release of their linked data. In September they announced that their RDFa test server was available, so we can now see what the data they’re embedding in MusicBrainz will look like. I had a quick look at the RDFa for John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ using the Sindice service.

The fishDelish project have also just provided access to their FishBase species linked data, and the JISC OpenBibliography project expects to have data available soon as referred to in a recent progress report.

The LOCAH project will be making data from the Mimas based Archives Hub and Copac services available as Linked Data. I happen to know (as I’m managing the project) that we have linked data available via SPARQL interfaces on a number of test servers. We’re still working on refining our data models, as well as cleaning up and enhancing the data before we make these available publicly, but we have made details of our Hub and Copac modeling work available on the blog. Pete Johnston has also posted about our approach to URI patterns, and our blog post on the challenges of exposing linked data has been well received.

The aim of the JISC Open Citations project is to publish life science bibliographic citation data as Open Linked Data. They have recently made available their first four ontologies of SPAR, the Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies, an integrated ecosystem of generic ontologies.

So, that gives an idea of where we’re up to with outputs so far. I’ve not covered every project in this post, so as not to make it too long, but I will be sure to highlight all the significant outputs in forthcoming posts (so please don’t be offended if you’re one of the JiscEXPO projects not mentioned yet ). In the next post I’ll be looking at the themes that have been emerging.

lod: relevant content on this site

JiscEXPO Emerging Themes

JiscEXPO Quarterly Executive Newsletter