ebyblog students and information

DBpedia and URIs

Found quite a few new things today via Planet RDF which included a post about using URI’s to identify music items:

The question I had: what URI should I use for J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier? This is a non-trivial question if one wants to use, say, the Music Ontology in cataloging one’s music: indeed there is [...]

Financial API Lessons

Speaking of Wesabe and their Firefox Toolbar, one of the other benefits of the add-on is that it allows you to automate the uploading of bank exports if the bank allows downloading of Money/Quicken files even if they don’t support automatic downloads. There’s a recent article on O’reilly Radar about some of the benefits of [...]

Data Bill of Rights

I’ve mentioned Wesabe’s Data Bill of Rights before. John Battelle has now posted on his formulation of a bill of rights:

So, I submit for your review, editing and clarification, a new draft of what rights we, as consumers, might demand from companies making hay off the data we create as we trip across the web

Some [...]

Machine Tag Metadata

Once referred to as “tripletags” supposedly but now called Machine Tags, due to Flickr’s adoption of their use for geocoding, etc. From machinetags.org:

Machine tags, or triple tags, are tags that are made up of three parts (namespace:predicate=value) in order to give extra information. Machine tags have been in use for a while now on sites [...]

Avoiding a digital dark age

Another article worth reading. Still playing catchup.

Being able to preserve digital data is a must for a golden age of research information, and a major risk is therefore the rapid obsolescence of digital objects. File formats, software, and hardware are constantly being superseded, so the curation of digital objects involves regularly migrating files into currently [...]

The growing importance of Open *

While I still haven’t gotten time to fully grok dchud’s Open Data is not the point, some more posts regarding the importance of open data have come about. While I agree with dchud that it’s definitely not the whole story, it is an important one.

Alf over at Hublog posts some of the replies he’s gotten [...]

Vendors, Silos and Sharing

I met some Talis people at code4lib and was rather impressed by their presentations. Here is one you should watch.

ILS Data: Unicorn

Here’s another in the series.

Unicorn

Export
Built in. MARC21 or flat file formats. Unicode support is available as an extra.
Database Access
Mixed. No access to the embedded Informix database by default; API training is necessary for read-only access. Oracle is an extra option, but that only gives you a read-only license. For write access, you need a full [...]

ILS Data Series

So I got a few posts in the ILS Data series out. I’m not trying to cover many details, provide spec sheets or serve as comparison shopping. I’m just documenting some ILS users’ experiences using their data to see what the landscape looks like. Here are the posts so far:

ILS Data: Evergreen
ILS Data: Voyager
ILS Data: [...]

ILS Data: Koha

Here’s another installment.

Koha

Export
Built in. Can export/dump Marc, MODS and DC.
Database Access
Built in. Multiple databases are supported such as MySQL, Postgres and Oracle. The tables are documented.
API’s and Web Services
Built in. SRW/SRU and Z39.50 are offered. OpenSearch is also built in.

There is now a resource sharing site available to assist in the sharing of library built [...]

ILS Data: Millenium (III)

I thought Millenium was the client but from the website it appears to be the entire suite now. Again this info comes from people who work with the system.

Millenium

Export
Built In. Can dump Marc or CSV files of specific field data
Database Access
Extra. There is a Oracle option with an additional cost with the default being a [...]

ILS Data: Voyager

Again this info is from users/customers and not press releases so may be different for various versions:

Voyager

Export
Built in. Can export Marc with bib, holdings and authorities records, though marc is often mangled.
Database Access
Built in. Uses Oracle and also provides entity-relationship diagrams and some pre-build “views” to help in development. I believe the oracle license is [...]

ILS Data: Evergreen

A first post in hopefully a series. Access to data from the ILS has been a common thorn in #code4lib’ers sides. I’m hoping here to post some of the ILS’s that are out there, what data access options they offer and whether they are built in the base or are extra products. I won’t bother [...]