2024-04-04 Meeting notes

5 min

Announcements

All

• Deadline for WOLFCon has been extended to the end of April 2024.

25 min

Linked data app planning

@Gloria Gonzalez

@Doug Loynes

Presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hj5VzM3s-ACghXF27F5kY-fCguK43bwM/view?usp=sharing

Doug Loynes is the PO for linked data in FOLIO. The development team is Team Citation. The goal is to deploy a new FOLIO application to allow libraries to create, manage, and catalog collections as linked data and that is fully compliant with LC’s BIBFRAME 2 linked data model. The roll out will initially be for Lib. of Congress and then the rest of the community.

The aim is to develop a cost effective solution for linked data. Other libraries consulted is Grand Valley State University (Michigan), University de Concepcion (Chile), and Spokane Public Library (hosted by IndexData). Discussions are ongoing with National libraries of Sweden and Australia, Smithsonian Institute and ARL libraries.

Linked Data allows you to create assertions about a subject. Triples are the building blocks of linked data. The value of linked data is to build out, then enhance the data, share the data, and expose the data on the semantic web.

Currently in the market, there’s a lot of activity and FOLIO needs to be part of this.

First we need to transform marc records into linked data and also output marc records. The team is ensuring support for BIBFRAME 2 rdf, support for multiple vocabularies (lcnaf, lcsh, etc.), integration of MARVA, data administration (evolution of data model, emerging ontologies).

Linked Data Module looks like FOLIO Apps. There will be basic and advanced search and search results. For Edit, there will be work and instances side by side. The intent is to limit scrolling.

Uniqueness is transforming MARC records into linked data, creating new resource descriptions, transforming linked data into MARC records, viewing data graph properties in the aggregate.

MARVA is embedded with search, has clustering instances around works, data graph view.

Questions/Comments:

What about showing the connections to other apps like Orders, Receiving, Circulation? The item and holdings level information will still be managed in Inventory. All of this will be pulled together in Inventory. Currently there are no specific plans to display connections of the instance to other apps.

In regards to synchronization, does it happen from the instance or the srs marc? It synchronizes from both. Do you have to have MARC to be in the linked data able? MARC will be supported out of the gate. The srs marc record will be preserved for distribution. The srs marc record will be used for data exchanged and you won’t be able to edit it.

Will the authority control in MARVA interact with the existing MARC Authority app? It will rely on it but not interact 100%. If there is a message that something new happened, then this will be transformed linked data. It’s indirect. For authority control, you don’t need both the MARC Authorities app and MARVA.

Can you clarify that the linked data app will be stand alone? Will it be part of the FOLIO platform? Stand alone means that libraries can use the app without MARVA.

Will the stored linked data be in essence closed? Will the linked data storage and flows offer us anything new in terms of re-use and sharing between institutions? There is one module, linked data. There will be APIs that will be open. Potentially these channels can be re-used. Every graph will be available for a tenant. If it is to share graph between multiple tenants will be investigated. There will be consistent ids across tenants. There’s no limit on how libraries choose to share their data.

25 min

API Overview

@Brooks Travis

@Maccabee Levine

Presentation Slides. APIs are one piece of software talking to another piece of software. You can use APIs to get information from GitHub to display in Slack for instance.

Demo with Postman: With Postman, you can save different type of calls or create a new type of call. JSON is returned and you can take that and do work with it.

Questions/Comments:

Can you give an example of a breaking change? Breaking changes are any changes that alter the schema.

Is there a way to track those breaking changes? Technical Council is working on this.

5 min

Wrap up/Future Topics

All