Pushing, Pulling, Harvesting, Linking: Rethinking Bibliographic Workflows for the Semantic Web

In this paper we describe the ongoing move of the AGRIS repository toward a decentralized approach based on Linked Open Data (LOD) (Bizer, et al., 2008). This move has progressively required modifications and enhancements to data, models and workflows. The growing demand for freely accessible data has brought a rise in data distributed using LOD, which combines Resource Description Framework (RDF) (McBride, 2004a) and RDF Schema (McBride, 2004b) with vocabularies such as Dublin Core (DC) (Miles, et al., 2009) and Simple Knowledge Organisation System, together with interfaces such as SPARQL query language for RDF (Prud'hommeaux, et al., 2008). While LOD implementations are by now a well-established pattern, the impacts that such approaches have on underlying business processes is less well understood. The openness of the LOD paradigm can expose flaws in information management workflows. Poor metadata, lack of metrics, vague provenance; all can contribute to the inability of an LOD-enabled system to satisfy the demands of the Semantic Web.