New Article by Stanford's Michael Keller: "Linked Data: A Way Out of the Information Chaos and toward the Semantic Web"

A superb “not to technical intro” that is absolutely worthy or your time and also worth sharing.

Direct to Full Text Column:
“Linked Data: A Way Out of the Information Chaos and Toward the Semantic Web”

by: Michael A. Keller
Source: EDUCAUSE Review (42.4; July/August 2011)

A new approach to reducing the chaos of the stovepipes of metadata and the disparate gaggles of valuable information involves the use of simple, machine-readable statements of relationships among ideas, people, places, things, events, times, and information objects, whether physical (including the digital referents to them) or virtual. Those simple statements are made possible by Resource Description Frameworks (RDFs) and typically involve a subject, an object or descriptor, and a predicate. “The sky is blue” is an example of an RDF triple statement. The RDF triple links to information objects and even information services through Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

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Semantic Web approaches in general and Linked Data methods specifically offer new opportunities for addressing the traditional and prevailing problems of too many silos of content, too many disparate modes of search and access, and too little precision and too much ambiguity in search results in the extreme environments of academic information resources intended to support and report on the research and teaching in large research enterprises.

Read the Complete Article: “Linked Data: A Way Out of the Information Chaos and Toward the Semantic Web”

Michael A. Keller (Michael.Keller@stanford.edu) is University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Publisher of HighWire Press, and Publisher of the Stanford University Press, Stanford University.

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Data Files, Publishing, Resources