Implementation of the RDF data model in digital collections of Spanish libraries, archives and museums
Hello,
We are very proud to announce the publication in the Revista española de Documentación Científica [Spanish Journal of Scientific Documentation] of our last paper Aplicación del modelo de datos RDF en las colecciones digitales de bibliotecas, archivos y museos de España [Implementation of the RDF data model in digital collections of Spanish libraries, archives and museums].
The article discusses how and to what extent the RDF data model is applied in major Spanish digital collections of heritage materials. With this objective, we analysed fifty-one digital repositories to determine whether they expressed their records in RDF, offered SPARQL query points searchable by external agents, and used references as property values.
Our main conclusion is that the use of RDF is unequal and excessively conditioned by the use of applications that automatically convert records into RDF triples. Actually, few of the collections analysed give SPARQL points for external queries.
Another finding is the very scarce use of linked data that connect data of the Spanish repositories with other datasets. In this sense, our recommendation is that these collections should enrich their data and define aggregation levels for generated RDF data in order to be disseminated, made accessible, and adapted to the semantic web.
Actually, nowadays we are researching ways to semi-automatically enrich data of DSpace repositories with external links to other datasets (VIAF, DBpedia, GeoNames, etc.). We’ll keep you updated.
Meanwhile… Enjoy it!
Andreu Sulé
University of Barcelona