Transforming Library Catalogs into Linked Data

Traditionally, in most digital library environments, the discovery of resources takes place mostly through the harvesting and indexing of the metadata content. Such search and retrieval services provide very effective ways for persons to find items of interest but lacks the ability to lead users looking for potential related resources or to make more complex queries. In contrast, modern web information management techniques related to Semantic Web, a new form of the Web, encourages institutions, including libraries, to collect, link and share their data across the web in order to ease its processing by machines and humans offering better queries and results increasing the visibility and interoperability of the data. Linked Data technologies enable connecting related data across the Web using the principles and recommendations set out by Tim Berners-Lee in 2006, resulting on the use of URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) as identifiers for objects, and the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework) for links representation. Today, libraries are giving increasing importance to the Semantic Web in a variety of ways like creating metadata models and publishing Linked Data from authority files, bibliographic catalogs, digital projects information or crowdsourced information from another projects like Wikipedia. This paper reports a process for publishing library metadata on the Web using Linked Data technologies. The proposed process was applied for extracting metadata from a university library, representing them in RDF format and publishing them using a Sparql endpoint (an interface to a knowledge database). The library metadata from a subject were linked to external sources such us another libraries and then related to the bibliography from syllabus of the courses in order to discover missing subjects and new or out of date bibliography. In this process, the use of open standards facilitates the exploitation of knowledge from libraries.This research has been partially supported by the Prometeo project by SENESCYT, Ecuadorian Government, by CEDIA (Consorcio Ecuatoriano para el Desarrollo de Internet Avanzado) supporting the project: “Platform for publishing library bibliographic resources using Linked Data technologies” and by the project GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03) supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain (MINECO)