Library metadata ontologies

The Semantic Web is not a library. It is not even a catalog, per se. It is a way of representing, sharing, and linking with basic statements of fact about things. The granularity of the Semantic Web is not at the level at which libraries have been traditionally concerned with information. Libraries collected and described intellectual products that consist of some form of narrative, a book, a journal, a research paper, a movie, an album, or a song. More recently libraries have begun to assist scientists in cataloging their data sets. But the cataloging of individual facts was left to Webster’s, encyclopedias, survey papers, and the like. And yet it makes a great deal of sense to take the fine-grained descriptive data that libraries have meticulously crafted about these various objects, and generate Semantic Web data from it, because this represents knowledge. This chapter takes a look at the issues and challenges of publishing library metadata as Semantic Web data. It briefly reviews several applicable ontologies that have been used by various projects to create triples about bibliographic metadata and subject and author authority data. It also looks at a few Linked Open Data efforts that have been undertaken by libraries.