Semantic Web Meetup with the NYPL, NYU, Library of Congress & Knoodl

Knoodl.com supplies the market with a web-based, semantic information management platform. It fully embraces many web 2.0/3.0 concepts such as semantics, collaboration, distributed data, distributed people, and cloud computing. Currently, Knoodl facilitates community-oriented development of OWL based ontologies and RDF knowledgebases and offers a JAVA service-based interface or a SPARQL-based interface so that communities can build their own semantic applications using their ontologies and knowledgebases. The presentation will describe the full vision behind the creation of Knoodl, Knoodl's current state, and the road map for Knoodl's future development. http://www.knoodl.com

Mike Lang Jr. works for a semantic technology company Revelytix (http://www.revelytix.com) where he is Lead Ontologist and Product Manager. He is a semantic technology expert and has a good understanding of web-based software architecture. Mike graduated from the University of Maryland - College Park with a BS in Mathematics. He is the son of the founder of Revelytix, Mike Lang Sr.

Mark A. Matienzo
Applications Developer in the Digital Experience Group of the New York Public Library

Ed Summers,Library of Congress
Ed Summers is currently working at the Library of Congress, on a team that is examining what digital repositories mean for the loc.gov enterprise, and implementing practical solutions. LCSH, SKOS and Linked Data with the Chronicling America project & more.

Slides: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?docid=dv89m3d_56tgwsppcf

Corey Harper
Metadata Services Librarian at New York University

Library data has spent the first decades of the Web trapped in silos, partly due to the use of outdated and esoteric standards for data storage and transmission. These standards, while original designed to facilitate printed card catalogs and dictionary catalogs, have served well enough to support mounting approximations of these card catalogs on the web. In recent years, however, Libraries have been grappling with the question of how to better take advantage of the Web's unique characteristics in Library Discovery Environments, and have begun to embrace the goal of integrating these environments with the larger ecosystem of the Web.

The vast stores of quality bibliographic data and other library metadata cordoned off in library specific systems present a compelling resource to enrich the emerging web of data coming out of the SemWeb and LOD communities. This data, along with myriad controlled vocabularies, thesauri and classification schemes developed by libraries over the years, has the potential to join DBPedia as the hub of the Linked Data Cloud.

The convergence of these trends is bringing about a variety of interesting initiatives and experiments to more cleanly and systematically model library metadata and offer Web based interfaces in accordance with the guidelines for publishing linked data. The Library of Congress, as well as other National Libraries around the word have begun to publish the vocabularies they maintain, and some of their other data, in this way. OCLC, the library world's primary utility for data sharing, is also moving into this space. Perhaps most significantly of all, the next generation of library cataloging rules, Resource Description and Access, is attempting to create a compromise approach bridging the need to maintain and work with legacy data, but at the same time focusing more on relationships between resources. RDA is being defined in such a way as to support the principles of Linked Data and of the Semantic Web.