Webinars in 2015

In this second more technical webinar in the series, Independent Consultant, Richard Wallis, explains the Schema.org extension mechanism, for external and reviewed/hosted extensions, and their relationship to the core Schema.org vocabulary. He will take an in-depth look at, demonstrate, and share experiences in designing, and creating a potential extension to the vocabulary. He will step through the process of creating the required vocabulary definition and examples files on a local system using a few simple tools then sharing them on a publicly visible temporary cloud instance before proposing to the Schema.org group.

In this first webinar in the series, Independent Consultant, Richard Wallis, traces the history of the Schema.org vocabulary, plus its applicability to the bibliographic domain. He will share the background to, and activities of, the Schema Bib Extend W3C Community Group he chairs; why it was set up; how it approached the creation of bibliographic extension proposals; and how those proposals were shaped. He will then review the current status of the vocabulary and the recent introduction of the bib.schema.org and auto.schema.org extensions. Although Richard will be using bibliographic examples, the content of this webinar will be of interest and relevance to those in other domains, and/or considering other extensions.

Opening up and linking data is becoming a priority for many data producers because of institutional requirements, or to consume data in newer applications, or simply to keep pace with current development. Since 2014, this priority has gaining momentum with the Global Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition initiative (GODAN). However, typical small and medium-size institutions have to deal with constrained resources, which often hamper their possibilities for making their data publicly available. This webinar will be of interest to any institution seeking ways to publish and curate data in the Linked Data World. Keizer and Caracciolo will provide an overview of bottlenecks that institutions typically face when entering the world of open and linked data, and will provide recommendations on how to proceed. They will also discuss the use of standard and linked vocabularies to produce linked data, especially in the area of agriculture. They will describe AGRISAs, a web-based resource linking agricultural datasets as an example of linked data application resulting from the collaboration of small institutions. They will also mention AgriDrupal, a Drupal distribution that supports the production and consumption of linked datasets. Redux: An update of a webinar first presented in 2013.

The OpenAIRE Guidelines for Data Source Managers provide recommendations and best practices for encoding of bibliographic information in OAI metadata. They have adopted established standards for different classes of content providers: (1) Dublin Core™ for textual publications in institutional and thematic repositories; (2) DataCite Metadata Kernel for research data repositories; and (3) CERIF-XML for Current Research Information Systems. The principle of these guidelines is to improve interoperability of bibliographic information exchange between repositories, e-journals, CRIS and research infrastructures. They are a means to help content providers to comply with funders Open Access policies, e.g. the European Commission Open Access mandate in Horizon2020, and to standardize the syntax and semantics of funder/project information, open access status, links between publications and datasets. The presenters will provide an overview of the guidelines, implementation support in major platforms and tools for validation.

The PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata is the international standard for metadata to support the preservation of digital objects and ensure their long-term usability. Developed by an international team of experts, PREMIS is implemented in digital preservation projects around the world, and support for PREMIS is incorporated into a number of commercial and open-source digital preservation tools and systems. The PREMIS Editorial Committee coordinates revisions and implementation of the standard, which consists of the Data Dictionary, an XML schema, and supporting documentation. The PREMIS Data Dictionary is currently in version 2.2. A new major release 3.0 is due out this summer. This webinar gives a brief overview of why digital preservation metadata is needed, shows examples of digital preservation metadata, shows how PREMIS can be used to capture this metadata, and illustrates some of the changes that will be available in version 3.0.

This webinar provides an introduction to SPARQL, a query language for RDF. Users will gain hands on experience crafting queries, starting simply, but evolving in complexity. These queries will focus on coinage data in the SPARQL endpoint hosted by http://nomisma.org: numismatic concepts defined in a SKOS-based thesaurus and physical specimens from three major museum collections (American Numismatic Society, British Museum, and Münzkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) linked to these concepts. Results generated from these queries in the form of CSV may be imported directly into Google Fusion Tables for immediate visualization in the form of charts and maps.

Being able to reliably and efficiently identify entire or subsets of data in large and dynamically growing or changing datasets constitutes a significant challenge for a range of research domains. In order to repeat an earlier study, to apply data from an earlier study to a new model, we need to be able to precisely identify the very subset of data used. While verbal descriptions of how the subset was created (e.g. by providing selected attribute ranges and time intervals) are hardly precise enough and do not support automated handling, keeping redundant copies of the data in question does not scale up to the big data settings encountered in many disciplines today. Furthermore, we need to be able to handle situations where new data gets added or existing data gets corrected or otherwise modified over time. Conventional approaches, such as assigning persistent identifiers to entire data sets or individual subsets or data items, are thus not sufficient. In this webinar, Andreas Rauber will review the challenges identified above and discuss solutions that are currently elaborated within the context of the working group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) on Data Citation: Making Dynamic Data Citeable. The approach is based on versioned and time-stamped data sources, with persistent identifiers being assigned to the time-stamped queries/expressions that are used for creating the subset of data. We will further review results from the first pilots evaluating the approach.

VocBench is a web-based platform for the collaborative maintenance of multilingual thesauri. VocBench is an open source project, developed in the context of a collaboration between the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO) and the University of Rome Tor Vergata. VocBench is currently used for the maintenance of AGROVOC, EUROVOC, GEMET, the thesaurus of the Italian Senate, the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus of Harvard University, as well as other thesauri. VocBench has a strong focus on collaboration, supported by workflow management for content validation and publication. Dedicated user roles provide a clean separation of competencies, addressing different specificities ranging from management aspects to vertical competencies in content editing, such as conceptualization versus terminology editing. Extensive support for scheme management allows editors to fully exploit the possibilities of the SKOS model, as well as to fulfill its integrity constraints. Since version 2, VocBench is open source software, open to a large community of users and institutions supporting its development with their feedback and ideas. During the webinar we will demonstrate the main features of VocBench from the point of view of users and system administrators, and explain in what way you may join the project.

As a founding sponsor, Zepheira's introduction of the Libhub Initiative creates an industry-wide focus on the collective visibility of libraries and their resources on the Web. Libraries and memory organizations have rich content and resources that the Web can not see or use. The Libhub Initiative aims to find common ground for libraries, providers, and partners to publish and use data with non-proprietary, web standards. Libraries can then communicate in a way Web applications understand and Web users can see through the use of enabling technology like Linked Data and shared vocabularies such as schema.org and BIBFRAME. The Libhub Initiative uniquely prioritizes the linking of these newly exposed library resources to each other and to other resources across the Web, a critical requirement of increased Web visibility. In this webinar, Eric will talk about the transition libraries must make to achieve Web visibility, explain recent trends that support these efforts, and introduce the Libhub Initiative — an active exploration of what can happen when libraries begin to speak the language of the Web.