Statements - 2nd DL.org Workshop

DL.org would like to thank those participants at the 2nd DL.org Workshop (September 2010), during the 14th European Conference on Digital Libraries in Glasgow, Scotland, who offered their views on the presentations and the interactive discussion on Linked Data.

Pablo de Castro – Carlos III University Madrid, Spain
Interesting discussion on linked data! Suggested ORE-OAI would be worth taking a look at as precedent specification for digital object linking (and particularly research datasets). If this standard was widely-enough implemented, it might make up for a good starting point for further work.
Great workshop! Looking forward to having future opportunities for cooperation with DL.org from the Sonex Workgroup! Thank you!

Geneva Henry – Rice University, U.S.
The discussions throughout the workshop were interesting but sometimes seemed to focus on concepts tangential to the key topic of interoperability. It would be good to continually tie the discussions to the main theme so that the workshop is more coherent.

Perla Innocenti – University of Glasgow, UK
On Digital Libraries and Linked Data Session
I think it is useful that we address linked data from a digital library perspective, in particular regarding the ever increasing importance of Unique Resource Identifiers (URIs) and the implications for their reference and accessibility; the formalisms that will inform a new generic metadata-driven structure and interfaces for linked data; responsibilities and validation in a web-centric environment; the possibilities opened by e.g. the open annotation framework and memento for persistent web centric annotations and analysis of time series referencing a single URI; and finally sustainability of linked data.

Sarantos Kapidakis – Ionian University, Greece
Interoperability has many aspects, the data and controlled vocabularies interoperability is attached with linked-data. Linked-data is crucial for all next generation Digital Libraries. There is a debate on simplicity vs. functionality and linked data serves the functionality perspective. The linking is not simple, as the context has to be considered.

Jonathan Leidig  – Virginia Tech, U.S.
The work in functionality descriptions should be leveraged to produce a collection/repository/registry of DL functions for developer discovery and reuse. The topic of linked data internal and external to a Digital Library is worth perusing in the community.

Lukasz Mesek – Jagiellonian University, Poland
The issue of linked data should be discussed in the context of practical solutions. It would be useful to try to apply the linked data model to some of existing and working digital libraries and find out how the model works in reality.

Edwin Montoya – EAFIT University, Colombia
Discussions about the relation between interoperability and lack of standards!
What about standardisation in Digital Libraries?
How to build best practices in Digital libraries in order to apply those?

Stephanie Parker – Trust-IT Services, UK
Many of the challenges around Linked Data are context specific and thus hard to define. Linked Data is both a friend and foe of data provenance with the risk of losing it on the one hand but also with the potential to start to describe it on the other. There are a number of horizontal challenges also at play here that are not just related to Linked Data: access, authority and ownership, search and search filtering, and the evolution of schema across distributed resources in the future. Horizontal actions addressing these issues might prove to be a valuable asset. Some important next steps are defining different types of data, investigating areas such as modelling data and ontologies, as well as the role of standards groups (e.g. W3C and Dublin Core) coupled with use cases, policy and roadmaps for broader uptake. It will be interesting to see how this field evolves in general and the digital library and repository space in particular.

Giuseppina Vullo – University of Glasgow, UK
I really trust the feedback Digital Library research community can have from the community of practice to face the interoperability challenges. As for the linked data issue, I think Digital Libraries can benefit from the advances of Semantic Web without forgetting the active role of users and society and the values implicit in open access to information.