FaBiO and CiTO

Purpose – This paper sets out to investigate the meaning, role and implications of contextual information associated with digital collections.Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on an extensive review and analysis of both the scholarly literature from many disciplines about the concept of context and the professional literature (including standards) related to the description of information artifacts. The paper provides an analysis of context, distinguishing three main ways in which that term has been used within the scholarly literature. It then discusses contextual information within digital collections, and presents a framework for contextual information. It goes on to discuss existing standards and guidance documents for encoding information related to the nine classes of contextual entities, concluding with a discussion of potential implications for descriptive practices through the lifecycle of digital objects.Findings – The paper presents a framework for contextual information that is...

A framework for contextual information in digital collections

Contemporary metadata principles and standards tended to result in document-centric rather than data-centric; human-readable rather than machine-processable metadata. In order for libraries to create and harness shareable, mashable and re-usable metadata, a conceptual shift can be achieved by adjusting current library models such as Resource Description and Access (RDA) and Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) to models based on Linked Data principles. In relation to technical formats, libraries can leapfrog to Linked Data technical formats such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), without disrupting current library metadata operations. This paper provides six key recommendations for libraries and standards agencies. These include rising to the challenges and embracing the opportunities presented by current technological trends, adopting minimal requirements of Linked Data principles, developing ontologies, deciding on what needs to be retained from current library models, becoming part of the Linked Data cloud, and developing mixed-metadata (standards-based and socially-constructed) approaches. Finally, the paper concludes by identifying and discussing five major benefits of such metadata re-conceptualisation. The benefits include metadata openness and sharing, serendipitous discovery of information resources, identification of zeitgeist and emergent metadata, facet-based navigation and metadata enriched with links.

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Linked data for libraries: benefits of a conceptual shift from library-specific record structures to RDF-based data models

Scholia is a tool to handle scientific bibliographic information through Wikidata. The Scholia Web service creates on-the-fly scholarly profiles for researchers, organizations, journals, publishers, individual scholarly works, and for research topics. To collect the data, it queries the SPARQL-based Wikidata Query Service. Among several display formats available in Scholia are lists of publications for individual researchers and organizations, plots of publications per year, employment timelines, as well as co-author and topic networks and citation graphs. The Python package implementing the Web service is also able to format Wikidata bibliographic entries for use in LaTeX/BIBTeX. Apart from detailing Scholia, we describe how Wikidata has been used for bibliographic information and we also provide some scientometric statistics on this information.

/pdf/scholia-scientometrics-and-wikidata-4o171up624.pdf

Marie-France Plassard

Papers

Functional requirements for bibliographic records : final report