Two Engineers From OCLC Research Take a Look Inside the “Library Knowledge Vault”

Slides from a recent OCLC “Work in Progress” webinar held earlier this week (August 12, 2015) exclusively for OCLC Research Library Partners are now publicly available on the web and also embedded below. The slide deck can also be downloaded here (.pptx).
The title of the webinar was, “Looking Inside the Library Knowledge Vault.”
Presenters

• Bruce Washburn Consulting Software Engineer, OCLC Research
• Jeff Mixter Software Engineer, OCLC Research

Here’s a description of the webinar from OCLC:

How do we ascertain truth on the web? That’s a question being pursued by researchers at Google who have articulated a flow of data that generates discrete statements of fact from countless web sources, relates those statements to previously assembled stores of knowledge, and fuses these mathematically to identify which statements may be more “truthful” than others. They describe this assembly of scored statements as a “Knowledge Vault.”
As OCLC works with data from library, archive and museum sources, we grapple with the same question and similarly varying data. Though the number of statements made is smaller and there may be fewer conflicts, we benefit by taking a closer look at the Google Knowledge Vault idea, to see how it applies to a vault of library knowledge.
In this webinar Jeff Mixter and Bruce Washburn provided an update on how we’re evaluating this idea, including:

• extracting simple statements about entities and their relationships from bibliographic and authority records,
• establishing a relevant score for similar statements provided by different sources,
• viewing the Library Knowledge Vault data using a prototype application,
• and testing how statements contributed by users of that prototype can find their way back to the Vault

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