David Tarrant

Where the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Meet Format Risk Management: P2 Registry

The Web is increasingly becoming a platform for linked data. This means making connections and adding value to data on the Web. As more data becomes openly available and more people are able to use the data, it becomes more powerful. An example is file format registries and the evaluation of format risks. Here the requirement for information is now greater than the effort that any single institution can put into gathering and collating this information. Recognising that more is better, the creators of PRONOM, JHOVE, GDFR and others are joining to lead a new initiative: the Unified Digital Format Registry. Ahead of this effort, a new RDF-based framework for structuring and facilitating file format data from multiple sources, including PRONOM, has demonstrated it is able to produce more links, and thus provide more answers to digital preservation questions - about format risks, applications, viewers and transformations - than the native data alone. This paper will describe this registry, P2, and its services, show how it can be used, and provide examples where it delivers more answers than the contributing resources. The P2 Registry is a reference platform to allow and encourage publication of preservation data, and also an examplar of what can be achieved if more data is published openly online as simple machine-readable documents. This approach calls for the active participation of the digital preservation community to contribute data by simply publishing it openly on the Web as linked data.

Releasing the Power of Digital Metadata: Examining Large Networks of Co-related Publications

Bibliographic metadata plays a key role in scientific literature, not only to summarise and establish the facts of the publication record, but also to track citations between publications and hence to establish the impact of individual articles within the literature. Commercial secondary publishers have typically taken on the role of rekeying, mining and analysing this huge corpus of linked data, but as the primary literature has moved to the world of the digital repository, this task is now undertaken by new services such as Citeseer, Citebase or Google Scholar. As institutional and subject-based repositories proliferate and Open Access mandates increase, more of the literature will become openly available in well managed data islands containing a much greater amount of detailed bibliometric metadata in formats such as RDF. Through the use of efficient extraction and inference techniques, complex relations between data items can be established. In this paper we explain the importance of the co-relation in enabling new techniques to rate the impact of a paper or author within a large corpus of publications.

Releasing the power of digital metadata: examining large networks of co-related publications

Bibliographic metadata plays a key role in scientific literature, not only to summarise and establish the facts of the publication record, but also to track citations between publications and hence to establish the impact of individual articles within the literature. Commercial secondary publishers have typically taken on the role of rekeying, mining and analysing this huge corpus of linked data, but as the primary literature has moved to the world of the digital repository, this task is now undertaken by new services such as Citeseer, Citebase or Google Scholar. As institutional and subject-based repositories proliferate and Open Access mandates increase, more of the literature will become openly available in well managed data islands containing a much greater amount of detailed bibliometric metadata in formats such as RDF. Through the use of efficient extraction and inference techniques, complex relations between data items can be established. In this paper we explain the importance of the co-relation in enabling new techniques to rate the impact of a paper or author within a large corpus of publications.