A web of meaning: Linked open data resources on the web
Cliff Landis · College & Research Libraries News · 2014
internet resources L ibrarians have been talking about the Semantic Web for years, but with the increasing adoption of linked data standards and frameworks by major information and search providers, we are finally beginning to see it grow.Academic librarians are uniquely equipped to take advantage of this growing set of technologies to reach out to our users and to make our unique resources infinitely more useful and reusable.Linked open data is based around the idea of creating a web of open-licensed, structured data and metadata that can be processed by computers.For example, a simple "dumb link" to a website can be enriched to add semantic meaning of not just where it's linking to, but what it is linking to.Therefore, rather than containing only a URL address, a link could include information about who created the link, when the link was created, the title of the work that it links to, the author of that work, and when the work itself was created.This information is represented in factual "triples" of subject, predicate, and object (i.e., http://crln.arcl.org/-TITLE -College & Research Libraries News).These triples can then be linked together to create an open web of facts (i.e., College & Research Libraries News -PUB-LISHER -Association of College and Research Libraries).And as this open web of facts grows, we can search, visualize, understand, and reuse incredibly complex collections of data in new and interesting ways.Although not exhaustive, the following resources will help you learn about the prin-ciples behind linked open data, identify some of the ways it is already being used, see how knowledge organizations are contributing to this emerging field, and get involved with creating the next version of the web.