Bibliographic Data Towards the Semantic Web: A Review of Key Issues and Recent Experiences

Abstract

This article intends to review the underlying concepts and technologies of the Semantic Web and the potential they provide for metadata management covering bibliographic resources. To get closer to a semantic web data space, different libraries are adhering to the initiatives making their traditional Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) operational on the web through SKOS techniques, as well as releasing bibliographic data under open licenses (open bibliographic data) and publishing it with Linked Data (LD) mechanisms. LD meaningful semantic connections create the Web of Data, a global database representing the first practical step to the Semantic Web. Here interoperable data can be processed independently of application, platform or domain, providing rich retrieval results produced by powerful query languages. From a library perspective, a problem statement is a global promotion within the Library community of understanding and of adoption of Linked Open Data (LOD), of LODe-BD recommendations, as well as releasing bibliographic data as Linked Library Data (LLD). In this way, different bibliographic datasets could become full members of the Semantic Web making interoperable different knowledge datasets of heterogeneous web communities.