Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
Greetings all, Somebody mentioned that the reason you see so much more Linked Data in Europe is that they have been working with RDF in research and development projects for much longer than us and I cannot agree more. Their PhD students have their research developed around semantic web technologies and their PhD programs are strong and mature. Just look at what all those national libraries have done. Also the work of some teams and individuals is impressive. I would like to mention Europeana which is doing an amazing job of bringing digital collections from all over Europe into one centralized place. And it’s bringing them together by providing a data model used by the partner national libraries to model and map their data. By doing this all partner national libraries are engaging in linked data work and getting their hands dirty. Also I think it is important to mention that this is not driven by any money, since of course we all know there is no money in libraries. They don't care that there is no money, they care about research. Somebody else pointed out that we have no national library - but we do have the Library of Congress so that cannot be a valid excuse (in my opinion). As for not having a LD platform to work on, here I disagree. There is the VIVO semantic web application and few other similar ones. VIVO was developed by Cornell University in 2003 as a relational database and with an NIH grant in 2009 grew to become an open source project based on semantic web principles. VIVO is an open, shared platform for connecting scholars, research communities, campuses, and countries using Linked Open Data. VIVO links data from institutional and public sources to create web profiles populated with researcher interests, activities, and accomplishments. It uses ontologies to express relationships between entities/individuals. The VIVO-ISF 1.6 ontology is a combination of the eagle-i ontology (Dr. Melissa Haendel from OHSU the brain behind it) already mentioned by someone. Only the subset of the VIVO-ISF is used in the VIVO application. Same for other ontologies used in VIVO: FOAF, BIBO, FABIO, SKOS, CiTO, CItation, OBO, VCARD. It is a great application developed by Cornell’s brilliant team and few other institutions as a result of the NIH grant. I know of few people working with VIVO that are on this list and they can jump in to explain further but I wanted to bring it to your attention since nobody mentioned it so far. And I am bringing this up since I do not agree that “no one has really show an impressive end user use for linked data, which American decision making tends to be more driven by.” We have VIVO – developed here in the States. It is embraced by many institutions in Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand. An interesting observation - many developers working on VIVO are not employed by the libraries, but by the provost office or a similar office and that is why we don't hear much about VIVO on this list or any other library specific list. Remember it was developed by the Cornell library staff. Also another brilliant application developed by people at ISI in California is the Karma data integration tool. Just take a look at what they have done: http://www.isi.edu/integration/karma/ Works great for modeling data into semantic web VIVO compliant data format – produces N-Triples. This is the tool some of us in the VIVO community use to produce RDF data. If I was constrained to one sentence comment on this list this is what I would have said: there is work done with linked data here in the States and there are applications that have demonstrated an impressive end user use for linked data. And there are many more to come. Regards and Happy Holidays, Violeta Violeta Ilik Digital Innovations Librarian Galter Health Sciences Library Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS) 303 E. Chicago Ave, 2-212 Chicago, Illinois 60611 office: (312) 503 0421 violeta.ilik at northwestern.edu www.galter.northwestern.eduhttp://www.galter.northwestern.edu/ http://www.galter.northwestern.edu/staff/Violeta-Ilik From: Code for Libraries [CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] on behalf of Karen Coyle [li...@kcoyle.net] Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 4:58 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access Off the top of my head: http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/what-linked-open-government-data http://aims.fao.org/agris http://data.gov.uk/location http://datos.bne.es/ http://statistics.data.gov.uk/ http://europeana.eu/ etc. What linked and open provide is exactly what it says - linked=able to be used in combination with data from other Web resources; open=anyone can use the data. There are projects that are using CSV or XSL files, but those function as self-contained bits of data, without the linking, even if they are openly available
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
Well, that raises an important question -- whether an 'end user use', or other use, do people have examples of neat/important/useful things done with linked data in Europe, especially that would have been harder or less likely without the data being modelled/distributed as linked data? I'm sure they're doing quite a few things in Europe, but there is also practical stuff going on with linked data in the US. Eagle-i which aims to facilitate sharing of biomedical research. My guess is that a number of people working on that are on this list. At my own institution, research is being done on using ontology and linked data to diagnose diseases. The method requires huge amounts of data, but it potentially allows diagnosis of problems that could not be discovered any other way. One of the people working on that group was hired by Tesla last year -- they apparently use linked data to solve problems internally, but I'm not sure what. kyle
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
Off the top of my head: http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/what-linked-open-government-data http://aims.fao.org/agris http://data.gov.uk/location http://datos.bne.es/ http://statistics.data.gov.uk/ http://europeana.eu/ etc. What linked and open provide is exactly what it says - linked=able to be used in combination with data from other Web resources; open=anyone can use the data. There are projects that are using CSV or XSL files, but those function as self-contained bits of data, without the linking, even if they are openly available. kc On 12/22/14 7:30 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: And as has already been pointed out, no one has really show an impressive end user use for linked data, which American decision making tends to be more driven by. Well, that raises an important question -- whether an 'end user use', or other use, do people have examples of neat/important/useful things done with linked data in Europe, especially that would have been harder or less likely without the data being modelled/distributed as linked data? From: Code for Libraries [CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] on behalf of Brent Hanner [behan...@mediumaevum.com] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2014 6:11 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access There are deeper issues at work here than just the kind of obvious surface issues. One of the reason Europe embraced rdf triples and linked data was timing. The EU was forming its centralized information institutions the same time the idea of linked data to solve certain problem came about. So they took it and ran with it. In the US we have been primarily driven by the big data movement that gained steam shortly after. And as has already been pointed out, no one has really show an impressive end user use for linked data, which American decision making tends to be more driven by. Europeans can think about data and databases differently than we can here in the US. In Europe a database is intellectual property, in the US only parts of the database that fall under copyright law are intellectual property, which for most databases isn't much. You can’t copyright a fact. So in the US once you release the data into the wild its usually public domain. As for government data, the Federal and most state governments are in need of an overhaul that would make it possible. If you don’t have the systems or people in place who can make it happen it won’t happen. Heck the federal government can’t even get a single set of accounting software and what not. So it isn’t just a lack of leadership or will, there are other things at work as well. Brent Sent from Windows Mail From: Karen Coyle Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 10:32 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Yep, yep, and yep. Plus I'd add that the lack of centralization of library direction (read: states) is also a hindrance here. Having national leadership would be great. Being smaller also wouldn't hurt. kc On 12/19/14 6:48 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: I don’t know about y’all, but it seems to me that things like linked data and open access are larger trends in Europe than here in the United States. Is there are larger commitment to sharing in Europe when compared to the United States? If so, is this a factor based on the nonexistence of a national library in the United States? Is this your perception too? —Eric Morgan -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net m: +1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600 -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net m: +1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
There are deeper issues at work here than just the kind of obvious surface issues. One of the reason Europe embraced rdf triples and linked data was timing. The EU was forming its centralized information institutions the same time the idea of linked data to solve certain problem came about. So they took it and ran with it. In the US we have been primarily driven by the big data movement that gained steam shortly after. And as has already been pointed out, no one has really show an impressive end user use for linked data, which American decision making tends to be more driven by. Europeans can think about data and databases differently than we can here in the US. In Europe a database is intellectual property, in the US only parts of the database that fall under copyright law are intellectual property, which for most databases isn't much. You can’t copyright a fact. So in the US once you release the data into the wild its usually public domain. As for government data, the Federal and most state governments are in need of an overhaul that would make it possible. If you don’t have the systems or people in place who can make it happen it won’t happen. Heck the federal government can’t even get a single set of accounting software and what not. So it isn’t just a lack of leadership or will, there are other things at work as well. Brent Sent from Windows Mail From: Karen Coyle Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 10:32 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Yep, yep, and yep. Plus I'd add that the lack of centralization of library direction (read: states) is also a hindrance here. Having national leadership would be great. Being smaller also wouldn't hurt. kc On 12/19/14 6:48 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: I don’t know about y’all, but it seems to me that things like linked data and open access are larger trends in Europe than here in the United States. Is there are larger commitment to sharing in Europe when compared to the United States? If so, is this a factor based on the nonexistence of a national library in the United States? Is this your perception too? —Eric Morgan -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net m: +1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
And as has already been pointed out, no one has really show an impressive end user use for linked data, which American decision making tends to be more driven by. Well, that raises an important question -- whether an 'end user use', or other use, do people have examples of neat/important/useful things done with linked data in Europe, especially that would have been harder or less likely without the data being modelled/distributed as linked data? From: Code for Libraries [CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] on behalf of Brent Hanner [behan...@mediumaevum.com] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2014 6:11 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access There are deeper issues at work here than just the kind of obvious surface issues. One of the reason Europe embraced rdf triples and linked data was timing. The EU was forming its centralized information institutions the same time the idea of linked data to solve certain problem came about. So they took it and ran with it. In the US we have been primarily driven by the big data movement that gained steam shortly after. And as has already been pointed out, no one has really show an impressive end user use for linked data, which American decision making tends to be more driven by. Europeans can think about data and databases differently than we can here in the US. In Europe a database is intellectual property, in the US only parts of the database that fall under copyright law are intellectual property, which for most databases isn't much. You can’t copyright a fact. So in the US once you release the data into the wild its usually public domain. As for government data, the Federal and most state governments are in need of an overhaul that would make it possible. If you don’t have the systems or people in place who can make it happen it won’t happen. Heck the federal government can’t even get a single set of accounting software and what not. So it isn’t just a lack of leadership or will, there are other things at work as well. Brent Sent from Windows Mail From: Karen Coyle Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 10:32 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Yep, yep, and yep. Plus I'd add that the lack of centralization of library direction (read: states) is also a hindrance here. Having national leadership would be great. Being smaller also wouldn't hurt. kc On 12/19/14 6:48 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: I don’t know about y’all, but it seems to me that things like linked data and open access are larger trends in Europe than here in the United States. Is there are larger commitment to sharing in Europe when compared to the United States? If so, is this a factor based on the nonexistence of a national library in the United States? Is this your perception too? —Eric Morgan -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net m: +1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
Yes, I absolutely agree Eric - I am not sure if it is because we have no National Library - it might just be because of the US notions of individuality and freedom of commerce - as a country, we just won't tell anyone what to do, even if it’s to be open. LIBER open data agreement: http://libereurope.eu/libers-open-access-publication-guidelines/ Sir Tim, Open Data Institute in Britain: http://theodi.org/team/timbl ; http://theodi.org/ EU/EC Neelie Kroes, open data - http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/tags/data My 2 cents and worth every penny - deb On Dec 19, 2014, at 8:48 AM, Eric Lease Morgan emor...@nd.edu wrote: I don’t know about y’all, but it seems to me that things like linked data and open access are larger trends in Europe than here in the United States. Is there are larger commitment to sharing in Europe when compared to the United States? If so, is this a factor based on the nonexistence of a national library in the United States? Is this your perception too? —Eric Morgan dsshap...@wisc.edu Debra Shapiro SLIS, the iSchool at UW-Madison Helen C. White Hall, Rm. 4282 600 N. Park St. Madison WI 53706 608 262 9195 mobile 608 712 6368 FAX 608 263 4849
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
I can not speak much on the Linked Open Data but I think the reason you see so much more Linked Data in Europe is that they have been working with RDF in research and development projects much longer then we have here in the US (i.e. European Linked Data research is much more mature than Linked Data research in the US). If I may then expand into the Open Data issue. I think Europe was just 'at the right place at the right time'. When the Open Data movement took off (in the mid 2000s), Europeans saw this new emerging web based model (RDF) as a natural fit for publishing open data. Conversely in the US the Open data movement, lets say the Open Government Data movement (http://www.data.gov/) so we can point to a specific service, relied on older data formats and even worse sometimes proprietary formats (Excel spreadsheets for example) to publish the open data. I can not speak much on other US open data initiatives but but that is my opinion with regards to Linked Open Data in Europe vs the US (for what it is worth). Thanks, Jeff Mixter Research Support Specialist OCLC Research 614-761-5159 mixt...@oclc.org From: Code for Libraries CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU on behalf of Debra Shapiro dsshap...@wisc.edu Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 10:18 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access Yes, I absolutely agree Eric - I am not sure if it is because we have no National Library - it might just be because of the US notions of individuality and freedom of commerce - as a country, we just won't tell anyone what to do, even if it’s to be open. LIBER open data agreement: http://libereurope.eu/libers-open-access-publication-guidelines/ Sir Tim, Open Data Institute in Britain: http://theodi.org/team/timbl ; http://theodi.org/ EU/EC Neelie Kroes, open data - http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/tags/data My 2 cents and worth every penny - deb On Dec 19, 2014, at 8:48 AM, Eric Lease Morgan emor...@nd.edu wrote: I don’t know about y’all, but it seems to me that things like linked data and open access are larger trends in Europe than here in the United States. Is there are larger commitment to sharing in Europe when compared to the United States? If so, is this a factor based on the nonexistence of a national library in the United States? Is this your perception too? —Eric Morgan dsshap...@wisc.edu Debra Shapiro SLIS, the iSchool at UW-Madison Helen C. White Hall, Rm. 4282 600 N. Park St. Madison WI 53706 608 262 9195 mobile 608 712 6368 FAX 608 263 4849
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
On Dec 19, 2014, at 9:48 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: I don’t know about y’all, but it seems to me that things like linked data and open access are larger trends in Europe than here in the United States. Is there are larger commitment to sharing in Europe when compared to the United States? If so, is this a factor based on the nonexistence of a national library in the United States? Is this your perception too? —Eric Morgan I can't comment on the linked data side of things so much, but in following all of the comments from the US's push for opening up access to federally funded research, I'd have to say that capitalism and protectionist attitudes from 'publishers' seem to be a major factor in the fight against open access. I've placed 'publishers' in quotes, because groups that I would've considered to have been 'scientific societies' submitted comments against the opening up of the research, and in the case of AGU, referred to themselves multiple times as a 'publisher' and never as a 'society'.[1] I dropped my membership when I realized that. Statements from the 2011 RFI from OSTP: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/library/publicaccess Statements from the 2013 NAS meetings: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DBASSE/CurrentProjects/DBASSE_082378 (note that I made statements at the National Academies meeting on opening access to federally funded research data) [1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/scholarly-pubs-(%23065).pdf -Joe ps. I still haven't seen what any of the official policies are (last year's government shutdown delayed the white house response to their submissions, and I have no idea if they've finally publicized anything) ... but I hosted a session at the AGU last year, where we had representatives from NOAA, NASA and USGS speak about what they were doing, and the NASA policy seemed to be heavily influenced by the more senior scientists ... who were more likely to be editors of journals. They haven't updated their 'Data Information Policy' (http://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/earth-science-data/data-information-policy/) page in over three years.
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
Yep, yep, and yep. Plus I'd add that the lack of centralization of library direction (read: states) is also a hindrance here. Having national leadership would be great. Being smaller also wouldn't hurt. kc On 12/19/14 6:48 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: I don’t know about y’all, but it seems to me that things like linked data and open access are larger trends in Europe than here in the United States. Is there are larger commitment to sharing in Europe when compared to the United States? If so, is this a factor based on the nonexistence of a national library in the United States? Is this your perception too? —Eric Morgan -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net m: +1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 7:57 AM, Joe Hourcle onei...@grace.nascom.nasa.gov wrote: I can't comment on the linked data side of things so much, but in following all of the comments from the US's push for opening up access to federally funded research, I'd have to say that capitalism and protectionist attitudes from 'publishers' seem to be a major factor in the fight against open access. That definitely doesn't help. But quite a few players own this problem. Pockets where there is a culture of openness can be found but at least in my neck of the woods, researchers as a group fear being scooped and face incentive structures that discourage openness. You get brownie points for driving your metrics up as well as being first and novel, not for investing huge amounts of time structuring your data so that everyone else can look great using what you created. Libraries face their own challenges in this regard. Even if we ignore that many libraries and library organizations are pretty tight with what they consider their intellectual property, there is still the issue that most of us are also under pressure to demonstrate impact, originality, etc. As a practical matter, this means we are rewarded for contributing to churn, imposing branding, keeping things siloed and local, etc. so that we can generate metrics that show how relevant we are to those who pay our bills even if we could do much more good by contributing to community initiatives. With regards to our local data initiatives, we don't push the open data aspect because this has practically no traction with researchers. What does interest them is meeting funder and publisher requirements as well as being able to transport their own research from one environment to another so that they can use it. The takeaway from this is that leadership from the top does matter. The good news is that things seem to be moving in the right direction, even if it is at the speed of goo. kyle
Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data and open access
On Dec 19, 2014, at 12:28 PM, Kyle Banerjee wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 7:57 AM, Joe Hourcle onei...@grace.nascom.nasa.gov wrote: I can't comment on the linked data side of things so much, but in following all of the comments from the US's push for opening up access to federally funded research, I'd have to say that capitalism and protectionist attitudes from 'publishers' seem to be a major factor in the fight against open access. That definitely doesn't help. But quite a few players own this problem. Pockets where there is a culture of openness can be found but at least in my neck of the woods, researchers as a group fear being scooped and face incentive structures that discourage openness. You get brownie points for driving your metrics up as well as being first and novel, not for investing huge amounts of time structuring your data so that everyone else can look great using what you created. There's been a lot of discussion of this problem over the last ~5 years or so. The general consensus is that : 1. We need better ways for people to acknowledge data being re-used. a. The need for standards for citation so that we can use bibliometric tools to extract the relationships b. The need for a citation specifically to the data, and not a proxy (eg, the first results or instrument papers), to show that maintaining the data is still important. c. Shift the work in determining how to acknowledge the data from the re-user back to the distributor the data. 2. We need standards to make it easier for researchers to re-use data. Findability, accessibility of the file formats, documentation of data, etc. 3. We need institutions to change their culture to acknowledge that producing really good data is as important for the research ecosystem as writing papers. This includes decisions regarding awarding grants, tenure promotion, etc. Much of this is covered by the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles: https://force11.org/datacitation There are currently two sub-groups; one working on dissemination, to make groups aware of the issues the principles, and another (that I'm on) working on issues of implementation. We actually just submitted something to PeerJ this week, on how to deal with 'machine actionable' landing pages: https://peerj.com/preprints/697/ (I've been pushing for one of the sections to be clarified, so feel free to comment ... if enough other people agree w/ me, maybe I can get my changes into the final paper) Libraries face their own challenges in this regard. Even if we ignore that many libraries and library organizations are pretty tight with what they consider their intellectual property, there is still the issue that most of us are also under pressure to demonstrate impact, originality, etc. As a practical matter, this means we are rewarded for contributing to churn, imposing branding, keeping things siloed and local, etc. so that we can generate metrics that show how relevant we are to those who pay our bills even if we could do much more good by contributing to community initiatives. But ... one of the other things that libraries do is make stuff available to the public. So as most aren't dealing with data, getting that into their IRs means that they've then got more stuff that they can serve to possibly help push up their metrics. (not that I think those metrics are good ... I'd rather *not* transfer data that people aren't going to use, but the bean counters like those graphs of data transfer going up ... we just don't mention that it's groups in China attempting to mirror our entire holdings) With regards to our local data initiatives, we don't push the open data aspect because this has practically no traction with researchers. What does interest them is meeting funder and publisher requirements as well as being able to transport their own research from one environment to another so that they can use it. The takeaway from this is that leadership from the top does matter. The current strategy is to push for the scientific societies to implement policies requiring the data be opened if it's to be used as evidence in a journal article. There are some exceptions*, but the recommendations so far are to still set up the landing page to make the data citable, but instead of linking directly to the data, provide an explanation of what the procedures are to request access. Through this, we have the requirement be that if the researcher wants to publish their paper ... they have to provide the data, too. We're run into a few interesting snags, though. For instance, some are only requiring the data that directly supports the paper to be published; this means that we have no way of knowing if they cherry-picked their data and the larger collection might have evidence to refute their findings. The 'publishers' seem to
