ShareFamily:NewsAndUpdates

Find out the latest news about the Share Family of initiatives and the most relevant updates on the developments going on within the various branches of the family.

Share-VDE and Share Family periodic update (May 2022)

We are happy to announce the Share-VDE semi-annual workshop for current and former members and for observer institutions on Monday June 27th at 8am - 10am PDT | 11am - 1pm EDT | 5pm - 7pm CEST. It’s a great pleasure to announce that the meeting will be held in hybrid format, both in presence and online. For those who are able to join the session in presence, the venue is in the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, in the Room # LJ119.

Much gratitude goes to the Library of Congress for hosting the meeting.

In the file https://bit.ly/SVDE_workshop_2022-Jun-27 you can find the link to the agenda document that includes the instructions to join remotely. See below an extensive update on the latest developments for Share-VDE and the other branches of the Share Family that are supported by the same LOD Platform technology, towards the production environment. Since the last update shared via this mailing list a few months ago, important advancements have been made particularly to the system infrastructure and to the features that leverage the API layer orchestrating the query of SVDE data.

Having a system capable of hosting union catalogs that integrate catalogs from many libraries producing a rich and articulated structure of linked data entities imposes the challenge of having adequate technological and infrastructural resources to support the connected complexity and amount of data. For this reason, SVDE has recently adopted AWS - Amazon Web Services which will better support system scalability to make it more robust and meet high availability expectations.

Obviously, this further enhancement of infrastructure meant a lot of work in setting up the AWS backbone and integrating it with the pre-existing components, in particular the clustering module and algorithms that are constantly refined and enriched based on the input of the SVDE community itself, particularly through the work of the SEI - Sapientia Entity Identification group.

In light of this, in March we processed an initial set of approximately 42 millions bibliographic and authority MARC records that were converted to create 98 millions of clusters of linked data entities. This process is iterative until all components of the system are stable; therefore in the next few weeks we will continue with the data uploads and the final numbers will be much higher.

A similar process is in course to be replicated also for the other branches and portals housed by the Share Family, that is: the portal dedicated to National Bibliographies which hosts the data of the British National Bibliography, with the British Library being the first institution participant in this tenant; the open pool of PCC-quality BIBFRAME; the portal of the Kubikat-LOD project which aggregates the catalogs of the four German art history libraries of the Kubikat group.

The SVDE staff is testing the results of loading the data on the various portals through a structured method that will be useful for making constant optimizations to the functioning of the system. (Please note a caveat: because of this reprocessing work, during this and the next week you might experience intermittent outage or downtimes of the Share Family portals due to the re-load of the data. If some of the links included in this message do not work properly, that’s for this reason.)

In parallel with the infrastructure improvement, a number of advancements have been developed, including clustering and search algorithm refinements. Those enhancements are beneficial to all Share Family tenants, and the new processing run of library catalogues in progress these weeks is a prerequisite to activate the new functions.

Just to mention some of the most relevant new features involved:

1. Improvements and refinements to the search functions, including:

Publication simple search, including the default simple search on Publications and the ability to filter for Language, Year, Type, Library, Electronic / Print, Auctions / Exhibitions. The default simple search on Publications will be enabled only on some tenants of the Share Family. As soon as it will be available, we’ll be able to show you more on this.

The search mechanism and search features like facets are configurable at tenant level.

Support for the federated search and integration of data from external sources (es. JSTOR for the Kubikat-LOD portal).

2. Initial version of Subject management, including subject strings linked in the Subject tab of the Publication page and the display of concepts; currently this is visible for example on Kubikat-LOD, and will be displayed soon on the other Share Family portals. There will also be an improvement of the current feature in future versions of the system.

3. User interface functions that enable connections with local library environments or connected services, including the link to the local OPACs and in the future interactive features like circulation request buttons (e.g. see an example of the button “Available at”). Other similar functions are being analysed for further enhancements of the actions available for end users. 4. Link to resources connected with the records (e.g. table of content, review, publisher website etc.). 5. Data representation in different formats including JSON, MARC, MARCXML, RIS (other linked-data based representation formats are in progress, including JSON-LD, RDF XML, N-triples, N3, Turtle, N-Quads, TriX, TriG). 6. Management of the Provenance of library resources: the system can be queried via API to return the bibliographic records of a given Provenance (= institution) connected to an Instance, and also to show which institutions have contributed to a given linked data cluster (through the Provenance itself). This is crucial to support the editing of linked data entities that will be enabled by the J.Cricket editor that is under development. See more on Provenance in a recent presentation.

Concerning other work strands, the developments for the J.Cricket linked data entity editor are moving forward: a lot of work is going on behind the scenes for the implementation of the back-end features that will support the editing of the data in the Cluster Knowledge Base. For example, federated authentication and authorization to manage J.Cricket users; entity status mechanism to rule concurrent editing and cluster variations; notification management.

Much work is also being done to optimise the general performance of the system and in particular of the indexing process, which is a key part of the data load to the web portals. This is not a trivial task when it comes to the very large size of SVDE tenant, which supports an exponential number of clusters created from the original library records. It is critical to have a responsive system and we are doing our best to provide the best user experience possible.

Developments are also ongoing to complete customised skin portals and SVDE localisations, starting from the University of Pennsylvania dedicated portal. From the community work standpoint, the SEI - Sapientia Entity Identification working group has concluded the work on the definition of the Instance entity and how it should be clustered among the other SVDE entities, and defined the rules to model the relationships between entities in order to relate them appropriately. This represents a significant contribution to the BIBFRAME based SVDE ontology that is also compatible with IFLA LRM. Moreover, we are very happy with the progress of the National Bibliographies working group. After the initial discussion phase opened in the first months of the group’s work, we are now structuring the use cases for a tenant hosting a collective global catalogue of national bibliographies in linked open data, thanks to the input of the participating libraries. Starting from this input, we have distilled a first set of high-level use cases that the group is analyzing; the next step is for the group to define priority use cases, that is, those that will be transformed into functions that libraries want to be developed first in the National Bibliographies tenant.

It’s also worth mentioning that the involvement in the discussions stemming from the PCC BIBFRAME Data Exchange meeting will be of great value for the advancement of interoperability and cooperation within the community, and for the Share Family itself. This focus on interoperability among BIBFRAME nodes will also be beneficial to the harmonisation of SVDE - LD4P3 interaction, and the connection with the Sinopia environment.

Share-VDE and Share Family New Year update (January 2022)

As 2022 has started, we are happy to look at the results achieved within the Share-VDE initiative over the past year and share with you the goals for the next period.

Since the release of Share-VDE 2.0 new version in September available at www.svde.org, other advancements have been done particularly to the system infrastructure and to the features that leverage the API layer orchestrating the query of SVDE data. Among others, the content negotiation mechanism used for serving different representations of a resource, and the Provenance that supports the tracking of the data source. More information is available, don’t hesitate to ask for details about API queries.

To provide feedback on the new version of www.svde.org, do report bugs and suggestions reaching out through the forum https://forum.svde.org/.

The new year is very promising as far as upgrades to the Share-VDE 2.0 linked data management system and discovery portal.

We are working on several important objectives and it may be useful to anticipate some that we hope will be of interest to the members of Share-VDE and to the wider community of the Share Family of initiatives.

The recent huge improvements to the system infrastructure will support the operations for the incremental import of SVDE libraries catalogues that will populate the entity discovery.

J.Cricket, the module for the editing of linked data entities, will be developed throughout 2022 and will benefit from the developments done for SVDE 2.0. Also, the functional analysis done by the SVDE dedicated working groups has framed the interaction with external data sources to be incorporated into J.Cricket, and we look forward to start working on the inclusion of Wikidata and ISNI data, after the main features of the editor will be completed.

The working group devoted to entity modeling will consolidate the definition of Share-VDE Instance entity properties and will review clustering and conversion rules to optimise system processes, as part of the regular group activities. This is one of the added values to the management of a union catalogue such as Share-VDE.

Developments will continue to complete customised skin portals and SVDE localisations.

After the analysis done by the SVDE working groups dedicated to authority management, the initial release of the authority control features (through both automated and manual processes) for MARC-based environments is being refined, and Stanford University Libraries is early adopter. The next step will be the implementation of BIBFRAME-based authority workflows.

We are very happy about the progress of the new working group dedicated to National Bibliographies that has been meeting regularly since early September. The involvement of SVDE members and external institutions enriches the discussion of interesting input for the creation of an ad hoc Share Family tenant hosting national bibliographies data.

Connected to this, we will be working to the Share Family tenant infrastructure that allows configurability and flexibility of the data grouped and presented according to each specific library or library consortia domain needs.

Various strands of cooperation have been continued and new ones have been activated within the community of institutions that adopt linked data.

Our commitment with the PCC is proceeding to feed the open pool of PCC-quality BIBFRAME data available as a trusted data source for cataloguers.

The collaboration with LD4P3 continues to be an important part of SVDE community work, e.g. as far as the harmonisation of SVDE conversion vs. Sinopia data and connection with Sinopia environment is concerned.

Working Groups involving the Library of Congress, Stanford, OCLC and SVDE stemmed from the PCC BIBFRAME Data Exchange meeting held in September 9-10 2021: the output of this activity will be crucial to reinforce the role of the BIBFRAME nodes in the library community and to foster interoperability among them.

Among the other initiatives and projects based on the same LOD Platform technology framework as Share-VDE, it’s worth mentioning the Kubikat-LOD project where important components emerged that serve the whole Share Family infrastructure. Work is currently progressing for the release of the specific Kubikat tenant.

The Share-Catalogue project is working on the alignment of their processes to SVDE, for example through the update of UNIMARC - BIBFRAME conversion.

All the results achieved and the forthcoming ones are possible also thanks to library members of Share-VDE and Share Family Working Groups and parallel projects that support this initiative and are constantly contributing with the competences of their Subject Matter Experts.

The input that we gather from the linked data community as a whole is also very precious to improve our work.

For further information on any of the above, do not hesitate to contact us at info@svde.org or consult this wiki site.

Share-VDE and Share Family periodic update (October 2021)

The new version Share-VDE 2.0 is live at https://svde.org with an enhanced Entity Discovery Portal and Linked Data Management System. The previous version at https://share-vde.org/ will be active in parallel to Share-VDE 2.0 until the migration of libraries’ data on the new system will be completed. The load of Share-VDE libraries’ data is being done progressively and currently the new web portal hosts a subset of the data available on the previous version.

If you want to discover the advanced functions of Share-VDE 2.0, the web portal at https://svde.org is the place to go.

To provide feedback on the new version, report bugs and suggestions reach out through the forum https://forum.svde.org/.

This news has also been published in a dedicated Share-VDE press release.

An important aspect to underline is that the Share-VDE and Share Family components are supported by the LOD Platform technology framework. Among these components, it’s relevant to mention the services for the authority control, that we have developed based on the analysis carried on by the Share-VDE working groups, and the Share Family tenant infrastructure that allows configurability and flexibility of the data grouped and presented according to each specific library or library consortia domain needs.

The Share-VDE Statement has been distributed widely to give context on Share-VDE position in the linked data ecosystem. In light of the work that Share-VDE is carrying on and of its involvement in several international initiatives, the SVDE Advisory Council has approved and published an official statement that is the explanation of position of the initiative in the broader context of Library Linked Open Data.

Several events over the last weeks have marked significant steps for Share-VDE and for knowledge sharing in the library community:

• the NLN – National Libraries Now 2021 conference on 16th – 17th September was a fruitful event where Tiziana Possemato delivered a speech about Experience of International Cooperation: Towards a Collective and Global Catalog of National Bibliographies.
• On the subject of national libraries, a new working group has been formed in Share-VDE and in the Share Family of initiatives dedicated to practical cooperation among institutions managing National Bibliographies. Considering the important presence of several National Libraries in the Share-VDE community and in the broader network of institutions that follow the progress of this initiative and of other Linked Open Data projects, this working group has been launched in order to study and address the needs of National Libraries and institutions that hold National Bibliographies in the framework of a shared entity discovery environment such as the Share Family of initiatives.

If you are interested in this new group, don’t hesitate to contact us at info@svde.org. The materials of the first meeting are available: agenda and notes https://bit.ly/SVDE_National-Bib-WG_2021-Sep-01 and meeting recording National_bibliographies_WG_2021-09-01.mp4.

• The semi-annual SVDE workshop on 20th September was the occasion where the new version of the system was presented. The major achievements are included in the SVDE Workshop agenda https://bit.ly/SVDE_workshop_2021-Sep-20. Among the workshop materials:
  • SVDE workshop 2021-Sep-20_progress_status.pdf (this presentation was delivered also at the BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe on September 21st);
  • as mentioned above, the new SVDE 2.0 is now live at https://svde.org, you are welcome to have a tour of the beta system (some information about it is available at https://www.svde.org/about/about-share-vde);
  • the recording of the SVDE Workshop can be useful to see a thorough demo of the new systemShare-VDE Workshop September 20 2021.mp4.

• The BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe from September 21st to 23rd engaged a large community of BIBFRAME adopters and professionals working in the transition from MARC to Linked Data using the BIBFRAME model. The first afternoon was focused on implementations (including Share-VDE), the second afternoon on new developments, and the third one on a vast data exchange topic including a panel on RDA/RDF. The presentations and links to the recordings of the sessions are available at https://2021.bfwe.eu/.

Share-VDE periodic update (November 2020)

As the year comes to an end, several important updates on Share-VDE in 2020 are worth sharing. Those of you who follow the initiative very closely are already informed about the major achievements so far, but I am pleased to share our progresses with the whole Share-VDE community.

This year has been complex for everyone because of the consequences of the COVID pandemic, but that didn’t stop us from moving forward: as announced earlier this month, Casalini Libri and its technological partner @Cult joining forces is the most recent of many steps taken on the Share-VDE path.

From the modelling of Share-VDE entities, to the outline of the main functions of the Cluster Knowledge Base editor J.Cricket, we feel that the outcomes of the intense activities carried on with the Share-VDE working groups are of high scientific value for the advancement of Linked Open Data for the library community and the cultural heritage sector. In the same time, we are working with complete dedication to the technical enhancement of the Share-VDE back-end and front-end components and we are eager to apply the tools that we have designed with your precious contribution and collaboration.

We are confident that the results will greatly increase the benefits that linked data offer to libraries, and the progress report attached is an attempt to sketch the development strands that are running simultaneously and the main accomplishments (the report is also available at https://bit.ly/SVDE_WG_progress).

For the future, we hope that the Share family will expand and we are very grateful to every single institution involved and to Linked Data for Production for the fruitful and constant cooperation.

Share-VDE achievements in 2019

The following document includes the most relevant achievements of the Share-VDE initiative over the 2019: Share-VDE major achievements in 2019.