Library Linked Data Incubator Group Publishes Final Report

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Library Linked Data Incubator Group published its final report on October 25, 2011. The Incubator Group's mission is "to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web, by bringing together people involved in Semantic Web activities — focusing on Linked Data — in the library community and beyond, building on existing initiatives, and identifying collaboration tracks for the future."

Recommendations in the report include:

• That library leaders identify sets of data as possible candidates for early exposure as Linked Data and foster a discussion about Open Data and rights;
• That library standards bodies increase library participation in Semantic Web standardization, develop library data standards that are compatible with Linked Data, and disseminate best-practice design patterns tailored to library Linked Data;
• That data and systems designers design enhanced user services based on Linked Data capabilities, create URIs for the items in library datasets, develop policies for managing RDF vocabularies and their URIs, and express library data by re-using or mapping to existing Linked Data vocabularies;
• That librarians and archivists preserve Linked Data element sets and value vocabularies and apply library experience in curation and long-term preservation to Linked Data datasets.

The report itself is available online at: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld-20111025/. Two supplementary reports, "Use Cases" (http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld-usecase-20111025/) and "Datasets, Value Vocabularies, and Metadata Element Sets" (http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/XGR-lld-vocabdataset-20111025/) are also available.