Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, April 16, 2008

How libraries can support open data

Fiona Bradley, A database of data, Semantic Library, April 16, 2008.  Excerpt:

...[L]ibraries may have missed an opportunity. We have been recommending and linking to various datasets on our websites for years, but there is a huge potential to go beyond this and build something collaboratively and use it as an input for different libraries. Many libraries now take in Open Access Journal records to their catalogues and search engines via DOAJ but there is no reason to not do something similar for Open Data.

Certainly, it is an issue that few of these datasets can talk to each other - but perhaps the move towards a more standards-based Semantic Web will encourage standardisation and interoperability, at least within, for example, individual government departments so that Census records can be analysed against education records....