Services on linked data
LD4L Workshop Breakout Session, Tuesday, February 24
facilitator: Jon Corson-Rikert
Risk of not knowing what to search for
- Providing discovery endpoints
- ‘hardened’ SPARQL endpoints may be less prone to down time – e.g., Fuseki documentation states that "authentication and control of the number of concurrent requests can be added using an Apache server"
- publishing starting points with examples and standard extracts may help
- emulate Social Explorer http://socialexplorer.com as a way to query the contents of a larger data source, in that case census data
- the linked data fragments technology (http://linkeddatafragments.org) may facilitate hosting linked data without the server-side overhead and risk of a public SPARQL endpoint
- VIVO/Vitro 'rich export' – augmenting standard linked data responses with standard queries
- e.g., get all a person's publications from a single request rather than client having to issue multiple requests
Synchronizing harvested information
- Risk of harvested or aggregated information going out of sync
- Resource sync standard addressed the need to repeatedly synchronize and update
- Semantic Web crawling leveraging HTML web crawler experience
- what's attached
- what has changed
Desire to be able to query on different axes
Reconciliation services
- not necessarily centralized or monopolies
- would work best in an iterative mode, with curation and provenance to manage difference of opinion (or evidence)
- who's made that assertion – differentiate librarians from crowdsourcing
- some way to express variable confidence levels
- incorporate feedback from users
- need protocols – could leverage a common API for reconciliation building on the OpenRefine API — specify as much metadata as you have, get ranked results back
- surface (publish) the results – known servers, as with annotations – select which servers to request responses or harvest data from
- notifications of new matches?
- ability to +1 or thumbs-up the connection to corroborate – Reddit gets a lot of traction that way
- repeating assertions in multiple repositories
- sameAs.org but with other expressions for and levels of confidence in the relationship
Validation
- RDF data shapes working group
- DCMI tutorial on RDF validation
- Measure the consistency of ontology use
- Linked data needs mashup tools that test connections and illustrate bringing data together
Ontology extension mechanisms
Ability to push bookmarks
- Small graphs of data, consumable by others, to a platform similar to Mendeley but not limited to bibliographic material
- A service where I can push the results of my search, organized by topic
- Add things to a collection I have
- Similar to an annotation service
- You search, you refine it, you step back — now only save as bookmarks at one level
- Nobody can use your web bookmarks now
- Hide the URIs behind a UI
Additional ideas
- Semantic autotagging
- Nanopublications – breaking academic articles into independent assertions with a mechanism to agree/disagree
- Side wikis – a plugin for the Netscape browser where a wiki could be associated with any web page and display additional, user-entered content or commentary on any web page
- individual libraries will become the authorities for special collections — items, people, events
- regular expressions to apply against EAD to suggest what is linked to; feed into a system to validate, then give pointers to the link
- a clustering algorithm to track the number of times a link between two entities is traversed, effectively shortening the distance between them
- a better page rank algorithm for linked data
- anybody a favorite semantic search engine (no – too siloed)
- visualizations have to be crafted individually