Using open linked data to manage ERM activities

Hi @ all,
we’d like to use this opportunity to jump into the conversation and say “hi”.

We are a small team of librarians and developers at Leipzig University Library, Germany. In an environment of many interesting and open technical projects, our context is electronic resource management. Since 2013 we are working on an open source linked data solution to manage our ERM data, that is contracts, licenses, packages and metadata for indexing in our discovery system.

Our editor (http://amsl.technology/?lang=en) is used productively in 4 German university libraries and is completely based on LD technologies, with an Open Link Virtuoso triple store holding all data.

For several reasons we are looking for a new technical platform, and are very interested in using FOLIO - both for its promising technology stack and its big international community.

Currently we are working on a small prototype app for one part of our system, mostly to try out linking FOLIO with a Virtuoso instance and a LD vocabulary. If this works well, we will decide whether to continue developing our whole Linked Data ERMS as a FOLIO module - which we think would be a great way to integrate it into a modern library environment, especially as it is a promising candidate to migrate our whole library systems to in the future.

I din’t see in your post where exactly your current interest in using Linked Data for FOLIO lies - is it in working with the data itself (as we plan to do), importing data or in publishing metadata as LOD?
Either way, we’ll be very interested in taking part in the discussions and developments to come.

Best regards from Germany,
Annika - and the amsl team

Ooh this is really interesting Annika! GOKb has a linked data adapter that uses the GOKb OAI interface to sync KB records (Titles, Publishers, Orgs, etc) with a virtuoso based triple store also. A few weeks ago we bound the GOKb relational model to a folio module as an experiment, but then after the discussions last week, we also had a go at binding a Virtuoso storage engine to a Folio module (Via the Virt-Jena API). This actually worked surprisingly well, although it’s still not clear to me how we might coerce Virtuoso to behave in a way compatible with the multi-tenant requirements of FOLIO. Certainly as a mechanism for modelling global data tho, I think there are really good reasons to consider a strong semantic model.

Because Virtuoso has solid support for federated SPARQL I wonder if it might help us with some of the thorny questions of local/remote storage also.

Be really interested in keeping up with your work - if you fancied dropping regular updates I for one would welcome them!

Hi Annika! I don’t think there are any firm plans for how linked data would work in the FOLIO platform, so we are starting from a “clean slate” of thinking about how it could work. There will likely be several areas that use linked data. The one that comes to mind most often for me is making use of data about works and authority records. The description of how your system makes use of linked data for ERM is an exciting possibility.

At the meeting of the Metadata Management SIG last week it was decided that a working group of that SIG would be formed to consider how linked data could be used in FOLIO. Contact @Lynn_W to express your interest in joining that working group.

What you are describing is more in line with the work of the Resource Management SIG, and @kmarti is the convener of that SIG. Right now the Resource Management SIG and the Metadata Management SIG are working closely together on the FOLIO Codex. (The Codex is “a normalization and virtualization layer that allows for FOLIO to integrate metadata about various resources regardless of format, encoding, or storage location” – current working definition.) Linked data might be another place where these two SIGs work closely together.

Hi Annika,

I’d encourage you to check out the work of the Resource Management SIG: https://wiki.folio.org/display/RM/Resource+Management. We are trying to integrate what is sometimes separate ERM functionality into the core of library resource management (hence the name). You are welcome to come to our meetings or just pursue the minutes to see whether you think it’s useful. We haven’t actually discussed the underlying technical functionality for RM, nor have we discussed linked data at length. Currently we are working on acquisitions functionality that should cover all resources, as well as a workflow app that should serve for both Resource Management and other apps within FOLIO. A lot of ERM needs are based on workflow, so we hope this will help. Martina Tumella (who doesn’t seem to have a Discuss identity) from HBZ and Maria Grzeschniok (@mariagrzeschniok) from GBV are both members of the SIG. Martina has been involved in the LASeR project (https://www.hbz-nrw.de/projekte/LASeR). I don’t know how that project might be shared with other German states.

Hi Kristin, thank you for your reply and the invitation to join your RM SIG meetings!

I already took a short glimpse at your Meeting notes and it indeed seems very interesting for us to follow your topics.

Especially the workflow app seems very promising for our use cases as well. Maybe, when the more electronic resource related topics come up (such as license terms, usage statistics or package management) we could provide a small bit of input from our working experience so far.

It’s also nice to hear that people from LAS:eR project are involved into FOLIO in some way, because that is another system we are very curiously looking forward to.

I don’t know if I will have enough time to regularly take part in your meetings, but I would like to participate from time to time and try to comment on the notes etc.
Would this be okay with you?

@peter, thanks for your reply as well!
The working group for linked data seems a very good solution to me for discussing this topic. I have just contacted Lynn to join there - thanks for the info!

Hi @ianibbo, great to hear of someone else in the library context running a virtuoso in an erm scenario - and even involved into FOLIO. We are trying Jena as well, it seems very promising to stay in touch with you. For the more technical details you could best contact my colleague Richard (@rch), who is one of our two developers currently working on our prototype FOLIO app.

Will you also be joining the working group for Linked Data? It would be great to hear more of your modelling concepts and this seems a good place for talking abut it.

You are welcome to participate in the meetings as you have time, or just follow through Discuss and wiki. We do record the meetings, so if there is a topic of interest, you can also catch it later.