Projects in progress
The CoBiS Linked Open Data (LOD) Project
The CoBiS (Coordinamento delle Biblioteche Speciali e Specialistiche di Torino i.e. Coordination Committee of Special and Specialized Libraries of Turin) is an informal network formed by 65 libraries collaborating to provide continuing professional development and to offer a better service to their users.
In 2016 six libraries started a Pilot Project for Piedmont, aiming to provide the Committee with an infrastructure for LOD publishing, creating a triplification pipeline designed to be easy to automate and replicate.
This was realized with open source technologies, such as the TARQL and JARQL tools that use SPARQL queries to describe the conversion of tables (CSV) or trees (JSON) into graphs (RDF data).
The first challenge consisted in making possible the dialog of heterogeneous data sources, coming from four different library applications (Clavis, Erasmo, SBNWeb and BIBLIOWin5.0Web) and different types of data (bibliographic, multimedia, and archival).
As a second step, the information contained in the catalogs was progressively interlinked with external data sources, such as Wikidata/Wikipedia, VIAF, LoC and BNF authority files, and the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.
During the graph building, we also enriched data with external sources; we used both automatic algorithms and manual approaches.
In order to minimize false positive, automatic matches proceed mostly through SBN
identifiers: in this way, the newly created graph was interlinked with VIAF and Wikidata.
Due to the size of the VIAF database and to the absence of a public SPARQL end-point, we had to recreate locally a Linked Data graph from the VIAF RDF dump.
In order to support manual matches, we exploited OLAF (Open Linked Authority File), our
crowd-sourcing interface for creating an authority file.
Exploiting the power of Open Data, we are also able to read the Internet Archive digital copy of the book.
Partners of the CoBiS LOD Project are:
The technical realization of the project is entrusted to
Synapta srl, and it is supported by Piedmont Region.