Thursday, October 27, 2011

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop, 27 June – 1 July 2011 (published October 2011)

The Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop, 27 June – 1 July 2011 was published in October 2011. The report was compiled by Michael A. Keller, Jerry Persons, Hugh Glaser, and Mimi Calter. (60 pages, PDF)

The Stanford University Libraries (SULAIR) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) had a week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery and navigation of academic information resources. The report summarizes the workshop, charts the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and has short biographies and statements from each of the participants.

The accompanying survey is available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/linked-data-survey/


With the assistance of other participants, the Stanford team will generate a model for a multi-national, multi-institutional discovery environment built on Linked Open Data demonstrating to end users, our communities of researchers the value of the Linked Data approach.

From the conclusion:
"Given the proliferation of URIs, whether RDF triples or more, from numerous sources it seems plausible to attempt to model and then construct a discovery and navigation environment for research purposes based on the open stores of RDFs becoming available. To many of us, this seems a logical next step to the vision of the hypertext/media functions in a globally networked world of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Englebart. It is highly significant to us as well that Tim Berners-Lee, responsible for the launch of the World Wide Web, has led this line of thought through his publications and presentations and those of his colleagues at the University of Southampton, Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt."