This session being presented by Jerry Persons.

This workshop spent a week looking at Linked Data – ‘be part of the web, not just on it’. Workshop sponsored by a variety of research and national libraries, research groups, companies, etc.

The workshop focused on “crafting fund-able plans for creating tools, processes and vehicles to expedite a disruptive paradigm shift in the workflows, data stores and interfaces used for managing, discovery and navigating…”

The workshop was deliberately ‘library focussed’ but recognise much wider issues – especially synergy for GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums)

“I’ve liked to characterize the current moment as a circle of libraries, museums, archives, universities, journalists, publishers, broadcasters and a number of others in the culture industries standing around, eyeing one another and at the space between them while wondering how they need to reconfigure for a world of digitally networked knowledge” – Josh Greenberg

“The biggest problem we face right now is a way to ‘link’ information that comes from different sources that can scale to hundereds of millions of statements” – Stefano Mazzocchi

22 issues were identified by the mid-point of the workshop – just a few here:
co-referencings, reconciliation
use of extant metadata
killer apps
user seduction and training
workflow
scalability
licensing
…

Jerry says … “The elevator pitch for linked data does not yet exist”

Thinking about ‘novice’ (apprentice), ‘journeyman’, ‘master’ stages of engaging with Linked Data:

• Value statement use cases
• Publishing data
• etc.

At each stage we should be looking model implementations that people can look at/follow

Elephants in the room:
URIs not strings – don’t underestimate the amount of effort required to transform large subsets of GLAM metadata into linked data with URIs as identifiers

Caveats…
Management of co-refereces needs to be a bottom up process
Build systems that accept the way the world is, not what you would like to be
Focus on changing current practices (in the long run) not only on reconciling data (in the short run) – preventing problems better than solving them!

Some docs will be coming out from the workshop very soon as well as proposals for work – over next few months