Open, Linked, Hacked

Open, Linked, Hacked
RLUK: Introduction To The European Library
24 Sep 2013
Monday, 30 September 13

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/withassociates
What does ‘open’ mean?
Not a simple binary open/closed... but rather a continuum
Amount of friction...
Things that create friction:
Explicit restrictions
Uncertainty about possible restrictions
Unusual/Unfamiliar interfaces (Z39.50 anyone?)
Lack of information on data and where it is available
Formats - Paul Walk argues we need a ’richer understanding of openness’ which encompasses
not just permissive licensing but, more broadly, the ease with which data can be used, taking
into consideration aspects such as format and access mechanisms

“Open”
©Monday, 30 September 13
Survey about use of RLUK database carried out on behalf of RLUK found:
A public domain licence would support 89% of intended uses
An attribution licence would support 55% of intended uses
A non-commercial licence would support 17% of intended uses
No explicit licence would support 11% of intended uses

http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/03/api-design-is-
ui-for-developers/
“Yes, you love XML.
Guess what? I don’t!”
“Open”
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/03/api-design-is-ui-for-developers/
JSON and XML

“Yes, you love XML.
Guess what? I don’t!”
MARC
“Open”
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/index.php/2012/03/api-design-is-ui-for-developers/
Complexity of MARC. Sometimes simple is good enough
Why do I link to amazon? Why do I use the Amazon API?
Survey about use of RLUK database carried out on behalf of RLUK found majority could use
MARC 62.9% (n=62)
But if you ﬁltered out those from RLUK contributing institutions - changed to more even
balance between RDF (format underlying ‘linked data’) and MARC. But some see RDF a
complex
All this tells us we need to support multiple formats!
The European Library - offers JSON, XML and RDF

“Linked”
http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/author/alain-matthes/
Linked Data
Identiﬁers - create your own, use other peoples

Gibson,William, 1948-

Stuff that you don’t/can’t or won’t capture - but someone else will.
(Books about places that are mentioned in MO archive?)
Network effect - collapse the network - one more node makes the difference
Provenance

BBC Olympic coverage used linked data:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/04/sports_dynamic_semantic.html

Google Knowledge Graph uses linked data:
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html

“Hacked”
Image from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/29/Wargames.jpg
Hack days - not ‘hacking’ as in WarGames etc.
The why and what of Hack days:

Build relationships - between developers and between data/service providers and
developers

Rapid prototyping - Show the way - Don’t expect ﬁnished products (usually)
Different types - some ‘invite only’; some ‘everybody welcome’

Sometimes prizes
The When - hack day to engage developers in RLUK/TEL data:
When? Early next year?

“Note Dump” entry to Jisc’s Summer of Student Code
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIAjaZkdwfk
The Who? - Who might want to hack RLUK data?
Students
Researchers
Teachers
Librarians/Library developers
Developers from outside the sector
etc.
Hack day planned in conjunction with the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) - a non-proﬁt
organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all
their forms – including government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural
content. - See more at: http://okfn.org/about/#sthash.8C3M4HHX.dpuf

http://openbiblio.net
Earlier this month OKF ran open science/citizen science hack day
http://science.okfn.org/2013/09/19/show-tell-from-the-open-citizen-science-okcon-
hackathon/

http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/api/hack4europe
Competitions and events to encourage exploitation suggest that skills and enthusiasm exist
to innovate with open data:

Discovery developer competition

Europeana ‘Hack day’ - incredible outcomes
Might question if these would happen without ‘priming’ - manipulating the market
Europeana Hackday example - take photo of picture/art, brings back data from Europeana

Libraryhack entry ‘Queensland Churches’
http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/qld/default.aspx

National Archives of Australia Search

Tim Sherrat’s alternative interface
http://dhistory.org/archives/naa/

QueryPic
Tim Sherrat - using API to Australian and NZ newspapers - articles matching phrase search
http://dhistory.org/querypic/create/

http://bookworm.culturomics.org

http://sappingattention.blogspot.co.uk/
http://sappingattention.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/women-in-libraries.html
Ben Schmidt
Also mapped this against LC Class - found what types of book published written by women

iTunes App Store
Cambridge iPhone app built by student

My local council (Warwickshire) released a number of data sets and ran a competition to
encourage local developers to build applications on top of this data. One set of data with a list
of new books in the library - and a local developer (nothing to do with libraries) built this -
shows books, covers (from Amazon) and links to previews in Google books. This WON the
competition.
Not the only example. Rewired State is an organisation which “runs hackdays where
developers show government what is possible”, recently ran a ‘Youth’ event - and one of the
winners was based around integrating library services into Facebook

http://hackthecity.net/hack-project/library-
recommendation-service/
“Hack the City” Hackday in Sheffield

Not just about pretty things for library customers though
The Getting It System Toolkit (GIST) is a customizable set of tools and workﬂows that will enhance
interlibrary loan and just-in-time acquisitions services; purchase request processing; and cooperative
collection development efforts.
Developed at the State University of New York College at Geneseo
Brings together disparate information sources with key data, such as: uniqueness; free online sources;
reviews and rankings; and purchasing options and prices

http://www.vam.ac.uk/b/blog/digital-media-va/open-sourcing-digital-labels
V&A created digital replacement for printed labels in their new furniture gallery - using their
own API

http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2011/07/compose-yourself/
Linked data driven bookmarklet linking together sources relevant to classical music &
composers

http://whatsabout.lboro.ac.uk/whatsAbout/
Based on the linked data representation of the British National Bibliography published by the
British Library

http://wraggelabs.com/shed/presentations/ndf2012/storydata/
Linked data based narrative

http://www.thepund.it
Linked Data based web annotation system

Book marklet to ﬁnd contemporaries of authors - uses the linked data representation of the
British National Bibliography published by the British Library
http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2013/04/contemporaneous-part-one/

http://data.open.ac.uk/applications/red-author.php?uri=http://data.open.ac.uk/red/person/woolf-
virginia
Linked data based application that pulls together data from a
research project (The Reading Experience Database) and Dbpedia (a
linked data representation of wikipedia)
http://data.open.ac.uk/applications/red-author.php?uri=http://
data.open.ac.uk/red/person/woolf-virginia
Links http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/ to Dbpedia
...

http://oneweekonetool.org
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Europeana, and Flickr
Commons,
brought together a group of twelve digital humanists of diverse
disciplinary backgrounds and practical experience to build a
working piece of scholarly software

Open, Linked, Hacked

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