In light of OCLC's two huge linked data announcements, I thought that on this Thursday TECH SET podcast, we'd feature Ellyssa Kroski's interview with Robin Fay and Michael Sauers, co-authors of Semantic Web Technologies and Social Searching for Librarians. Below the SoundCloud embed are highlights from the interview.
2:09. Robin notes as a motivation for writing the book that librarians deal with data and metadata in so many forms. She wanted to help people understand how it fits into the larger web.
2:54. With the wave of big data, and all the measuring and recording of data, Michael sees an opportunity for libraries to "grab a foothold."
3:58. Robin describes easy-to-start data projects covered in the book. Adding metadata by tagging photos from your library or community in Flickr and searching for Creative Commons content that you can make available to your patrons.
5:27. Michael discusses Wolfram Alpha as an alternative to Google when data is what you're after.
6:10. As parting messages, Robin hopes the book will inspire enthusiasm for the wonderful things you can do with data, which often comes off as dry. An emphasis in the book is choosing fun projects. Michael hopes the examples of the book well serve as a springboard for readers to create their own data projects.
Read a sample chapter on Scribd.