RDFa, schema.org, and open source library systems

Posted on Thu 20 March 2014 in Libraries

Two things of note:

  1. I recently submitted the camera-ready copy for my ESWC 2014 paper, Seeding Structured Data by Default via Open Source Library Systems (**preprint**). The paper focuses on the work I've done with Evergreen, Koha, and VuFind to use emerging web standards such as RDFa Lite and schema.org to attempt to improve the discoverability of library resources in the search engines with which most people start their research, and includes discussions about how that work informed my contributions to the SchemaBibEx community group and our proposals to the W3C WebSchemas group for extending schema.org. (Aside: It is written in LaTeX, per conference requirements, so PDF is the primary output and you won't find much structured data in the paper itself...)
  2. Slightly earlier in the day, I presented a more introductory take on my work and the work of SchemaBibEx at the Library Technology Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota. People seemed to be interested in finding out that roughly 4,000 library systems will begin publishing structured data by default as the Evergreen, VuFind, and Koha sites upgrade to the latest versions, and also seemed intrigued by my ideas around turning the union catalogue "perioidically upload MARC dumps" into a standard sitemap-based crawl and extract pull operation. That presentation was called Structuring library data on the web: we are on it! and you can find the slides, well... where I just linked :-)

It has been fun and invigorating to hear the responses of those who are seeing the results and direction of this work for the first time! More thoughts to come...