Re: Linked data in packaged content (ePub)
One aspect of this thread concerns reasoning on limited-compute (i.e. mobile) platforms. I'd like to point out Pychinko, the Python-based reasoner (c.f. http://bit.ly/bPglu1 ), which was designed to run on mobile platforms such as Nokia phones where Java-based reasoners were considered too compute-intensive. Granted, given the current closed nature of Apple, we should probably be looking for Cocoa/Objective-C based reasoners... :P John On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 11:36 PM, John Erickson olyerick...@gmail.com wrote: Stuart, t's not clear to me what you're trying to accomplish...For whom are you trying to add value? We are funded to digitise teaching, learning and research materials for our staff and students. Value to anyone else is incidental, but indicative. Are you imagining creating some kind of meshup within the reading experience, perhaps meshing metadata and links bound to entities within the ePub'd document with external linked data? Ideally, I'd like a protocol such as Open URL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_URL ), linking books on the device up to the bibliographies of other books that also happen to be on the device. For low CPU devices the links might have to be pre-calculated when connected to a desktop PC. I understand that Open URL can't actaully do this because it assumes the web. cheers stuart -- John S. Erickson, Ph.D. http://bitwacker.wordpress.com olyerick...@gmail.com Twitter: @olyerickson
Re: Linked data in packaged content (ePub)
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 8:42 PM, Ed Summers e...@pobox.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: Does anyone know of any other attempts to put linked data into packages like this? While arguably not Linked Data per-se, you might be interested in work being done on the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) [1], which aims to use Atom for making metadata about ebooks available. A key part of an OPDS feed are opds:acquisition links between an atom:entry and a epub document identified with a URI and a media type, for example: link type=application/epub+zip href=http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4440.epub; rel=http://opds-spec.org/acquisition/ Implementors include people at O'Reilly, Internet Archive, Ibis Reader, FeedBooks, to name a few. Much of the work is actually going on in open bi-weekly conference calls, and on a discussion list [3] if you are interested. On a recent call Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks was talking about embedding opds atom documents in the ebook serializations, so it might be worthwhile pinging him and/or the discussion list to see where things are at. //Ed [1] http://code.google.com/p/openpub/wiki/CatalogSpecDraft [2] http://ibisreader.com/ [3] http://groups.google.com/group/openpub Thank Ed. I was unaware of some of those developments. The schema in the draft looks very useful, because it's something solid to check against, rather than sucking it and seeing. cheers stuart
Linked data in packaged content (ePub)
I'm interested in putting linked data into eBooks published in the (open standard) ePub format (http://www.openebook.org/ ). The format is essentially a relocatable zip file of XHTML, associated media files and a few metadata files. The target platforms of this content impose some restrictions on what is practical: e-ink devices (which are the only current eBook readers with the battery life to last an entire novel) typically don't have an internet connection (thus no resolving of links) and have very little in the way of processing power (thus no full reasoning). We already have some data-interlinking between our collection (http://www.nzetc.org/ ) and librarything (http://www.librarything.com/ ) at the FRBR work level (http://vocab.org/frbr/core.html#Work ) and also some links to wikipedia / dbpedia for named entities (principally authors and places). We believe we have quite good authority control over author names, even those who published under multiple names (see, for example http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-208662.html or http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-208310.html ). We have ~1300 ePubs, the largest of which exceed the size limits of most ePub tools. Does anyone know of any other attempts to put linked data into packages like this? There are two main issues I can see: (a) how to self-identify the package (naive hashing doesn't work, as some eBook readers open the package and add custom metadata) and (b) how to package the linked data to get maximal use when a paucity of CPU precludes a full reasoner. The traditional identifier used in this field, the ISBN, is essentially a print-run identifier, and not of a whole lot of obvious use to us since: (a) most of our books' original publishing predates ISBNs and (b) our digital republishing of them doesn't qualify for an ISBN according to our local ISBN issuer (the National Library of New Zealand). cheers stuart
Re: Linked data in packaged content (ePub)
2010-04-27 22:40 Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com: I'm interested in putting linked data into eBooks published in the (open standard) ePub format (http://www.openebook.org/ ). The format is essentially a relocatable zip file of XHTML, associated media files and a few metadata files. ... Does anyone know of any other attempts to put linked data into packages like this? The mere embedding is a current topic of interest of the RDFa WG (see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa-wg/2010Mar/0200.html), and I suppose they will be quite interested in the further implications you mentioned. Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype duke4701
Re: Linked data in packaged content (ePub)
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: Does anyone know of any other attempts to put linked data into packages like this? While arguably not Linked Data per-se, you might be interested in work being done on the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) [1], which aims to use Atom for making metadata about ebooks available. A key part of an OPDS feed are opds:acquisition links between an atom:entry and a epub document identified with a URI and a media type, for example: link type=application/epub+zip href=http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4440.epub; rel=http://opds-spec.org/acquisition/ Implementors include people at O'Reilly, Internet Archive, Ibis Reader, FeedBooks, to name a few. Much of the work is actually going on in open bi-weekly conference calls, and on a discussion list [3] if you are interested. On a recent call Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks was talking about embedding opds atom documents in the ebook serializations, so it might be worthwhile pinging him and/or the discussion list to see where things are at. //Ed [1] http://code.google.com/p/openpub/wiki/CatalogSpecDraft [2] http://ibisreader.com/ [3] http://groups.google.com/group/openpub
Re: Linked data in packaged content (ePub)
Stuart, t's not clear to me what you're trying to accomplish...For whom are you trying to add value? Since ePub is XHTML, it makes sense to embed metadata as RDFa. But why? Is the purpose to enhance the reading experience? Or perhaps the local collection management experience? Publishers should be, and most likely are, obtaining DOIs http://doi.org for their materials through a registration agency such as CrossRef http://crossref.org. As we have discussed elsewhere (and for more than a decade...) the DOI enables multiple stakeholders to manage and publish metadata about the item; linked data best practices are a promising approach , but RDFa on an RA's landing page for the item is also a possibility. The DOI is not about embedding metadata in individual instances, however, which is what you seem to be asking about. Are you imagining creating some kind of meshup within the reading experience, perhaps meshing metadata and links bound to entities within the ePub'd document with external linked data? John On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: I'm interested in putting linked data into eBooks published in the (open standard) ePub format (http://www.openebook.org/ ). The format is essentially a relocatable zip file of XHTML, associated media files and a few metadata files. The target platforms of this content impose some restrictions on what is practical: e-ink devices (which are the only current eBook readers with the battery life to last an entire novel) typically don't have an internet connection (thus no resolving of links) and have very little in the way of processing power (thus no full reasoning). We already have some data-interlinking between our collection (http://www.nzetc.org/ ) and librarything (http://www.librarything.com/ ) at the FRBR work level (http://vocab.org/frbr/core.html#Work ) and also some links to wikipedia / dbpedia for named entities (principally authors and places). We believe we have quite good authority control over author names, even those who published under multiple names (see, for example http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-208662.html or http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-208310.html ). We have ~1300 ePubs, the largest of which exceed the size limits of most ePub tools. Does anyone know of any other attempts to put linked data into packages like this? There are two main issues I can see: (a) how to self-identify the package (naive hashing doesn't work, as some eBook readers open the package and add custom metadata) and (b) how to package the linked data to get maximal use when a paucity of CPU precludes a full reasoner. The traditional identifier used in this field, the ISBN, is essentially a print-run identifier, and not of a whole lot of obvious use to us since: (a) most of our books' original publishing predates ISBNs and (b) our digital republishing of them doesn't qualify for an ISBN according to our local ISBN issuer (the National Library of New Zealand). cheers stuart -- John S. Erickson, Ph.D. http://bitwacker.wordpress.com olyerick...@gmail.com Twitter: @olyerickson
Re: Linked data in packaged content (ePub)
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 11:36 PM, John Erickson olyerick...@gmail.com wrote: Stuart, t's not clear to me what you're trying to accomplish...For whom are you trying to add value? We are funded to digitise teaching, learning and research materials for our staff and students. Value to anyone else is incidental, but indicative. Are you imagining creating some kind of meshup within the reading experience, perhaps meshing metadata and links bound to entities within the ePub'd document with external linked data? Ideally, I'd like a protocol such as Open URL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_URL ), linking books on the device up to the bibliographies of other books that also happen to be on the device. For low CPU devices the links might have to be pre-calculated when connected to a desktop PC. I understand that Open URL can't actaully do this because it assumes the web. cheers stuart
Re: Linked data in packaged content (ePub)
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: Ideally, I'd like a protocol such as Open URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_URL ), linking books on the device up to the bibliographies of other books that also happen to be on the device. For low CPU devices the links might have to be pre-calculated when connected to a desktop PC. I understand that Open URL can't actually do this because it assumes the web. So the zeroth answer is to only provide such behavior under only certain conditions, for example when explicit DOIs for the items in the bibliographic record are provided and the other items on the device have DOIs...this would allow for an easy registration when books were put on the device. The browser of course would have to know to intervene, however. To actually do what OpenURL enables --- embed citation data ala COinS http://ocoins.info/, use that as the basis for constructing OpenURL references, and resolve those on the device --- would be a stretch on a disconnected device, but not impossible. The citation metadata for each installed ePub would have to be indexed, and then a proxy on the device would have to check this before attempting to resolve off-device. This sort of resolution doesn't require any advanced reasoning, although it still might be intense. Is this what you were thinking? -- John S. Erickson, Ph.D. http://bitwacker.wordpress.com olyerick...@gmail.com Twitter: @olyerickson
