The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international community organization that develops standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. Its Incubator Activity division, which fosters rapid development, has formed a new group on Library Linked Data.
The mission of this group will be “to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web.”
This will bring together people involved in Semantic Web activities in the library community and beyond.
The Library of Congress and OCLC are among the members of this new group.
- W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group.
The group will explore how existing building blocks of librarianship, such as metadata models, metadata schemas, standards and protocols for building interoperability and library systems and networked environments, encourage libraries to bring their content, and generally re-orient their approaches to data interoperability towards the Web, also reaching to other communities.
It will also envision these communities as a potential major provider of authoritative datasets (persons, topics…) for the Linked Data Web.
The charter of the new group says:
The changing landscape of librarianship increases their need for visibility and interoperability on the Web. In particular, the ubiquitous growth of digital libraries has led them to broaden their practices, standards and activities. Shared catalogues are going online on the open Web, digitized items collections are being brought together in worldwide initiatives, digital resources like online serials, preprints or web archives are driving the need for re-inventing librarianship.
…A re-orientation in the library perspective on information interoperability is needed, building on existing Web architecture and standards, in order to bring this content to the Web. A lot of structured data is already available within library systems and could be released as Linked Data, using Semantic Web technologies. Cultural heritage institutions could be a major provider of authoritative datasets (persons, topics…) for the Linked Data Web.
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