Europeana just released their first white page, “Knowledge = Information in Context.”
The paper covers the importance of data standards, clean data, linked data, and tools and ways to link data (more standards and APIs). The paper is an excellent paper on the importance of making digitized materials useful by creating context.*
The article as a whole discusses different standards and principles (RDF triples, Linked Data, FOAF, SKOS, semantic connections), all of which are integral parts of the web but which are not necessarily part of many cultural heritage collections. Open Library has been intensively working on issues related to linked data, as has the Library of Congress, and the University of Florida Digital Collections are connecting more metadata in the database for linked subject terms, citation fields, and facets, and much more is in the works.
* The paper appears to have been written for translatability – sometimes odd language usage is necessary for ease of translating, and this is common in technical manuals for ubiquitous software – so some of the wording is a bit unusual, but the overall shape of the argument is accurate.
2010-06-02