NAISC: A Linked Data Interlinking Framework for Information Professionals

Publishing records as Linked Data (LD) has many potential benefits for Libraries including exposing collections to a larger audience and allowing for more efficient user searches. Despite this, relatively few libraries have invested in LD projects and the majority of existing projects display limited interlinking of resources across institutional datasets. As one of the fundamental prerequisites of the SW is the existence of large amounts of meaningfully interlinked data, it is key that libraries not only publish their records as LD, but that they also interlink these records with other authoritative datasets on the SW. Library datasets that have been enriched with interlinks would allow for seamless navigation between internal and external datasets, guiding users to a web of related information from a single information search. A survey was conducted to understand Information Professionals’ (IPs) position with regards to LD. The survey was completed by a total of 185 international librarians, archivists, metadata cataloguers and researchers. Results indicated that IPs find many current LD tools to be technologically complex and unsuitable for the needs of the library domain. Results also showed that, when attempting to interlink LD resources, IPs find the process of ontology and property selection to be particularly challenging. Selecting an appropriate property, or link term, to interlink a pair of resources is a known challenge across the SW, not just within the library domain. Our research is focused on identifying the types of interlinks IPs wish create to between two resources, how to accurately describe these relationships in LD, and how to describe the decision making processes behind creating these interlinks. This has led to the development of NAISC – an interlinking framework and tool designed to facilitate increased IP engagement in the interlinking process. NAISC stands for the Novel Authoritative Interlinking of Schema and Concepts, and is also the Gaelic word for links. NAISC includes a set of processes and standards for the creation of an interlink between an internal and external resource. NAISC also includes a provenance data model that allows for the description of the decision-making processes behind the interlinks generated. An accompanying graphical user interface, that guides IPs through the NAISC interlinking process, has also been designed. We adopted a User-Centred Design Science Approach to developing NAISC to ensure that it meets the unique requirements of IPs. As per this approach, each version of NAISC has been evaluated by IPs, with the results of each evaluation being used to iteratively refine the framework. At LIBER 2019 we will discuss the results of our Library LD Survey and the design process behind the development of NAISC. Additionally, we will demonstrate the most current iteration of NAISC and discuss how NAISC could be applied by libraries to interlink their LD datasets. We will also focus our discussion on the process of link term selection and the provision of provenance data as a means of publishing more authoritative interlinks