2019 LD4 Conference: Technical Focus session. Lynette Rayle, Dave Eichmann
Channel: LD4
Date: 07/06/2019

LD4 Conference on Linked Data in Libraries, Boston, Massachusetts, May 11, 2019
https://wiki.duraspace.org/x/6IZ7Bg
Technical Focus session. 
Slides: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KeP9T9ggZthyJuHEGjef2Y8Q0jInGTFe
Lynette Rayle & Dave Eichmann. Authority data - the good, the dirty and the semantic 
The Mellon Foundation-funded Linked Data for Production (LD4P) project is exploring the library community transition to Linked Open Data. Authority and identity lookups are integral to cataloging workflows and provide excellent opportunities for exploring how to leverage the power of linked data for reconciliation and more effective lookups.
Central questions in this work include the implementation, performance and reliability of lookup services; what multiple authority lookups mean with respect to reconciliation; and user interface design. Much of our work to date has focused on addressing a number of issues inherent in the current maturity, not of the technology, but in its use. This includes most significantly for this project remarkable variability in the quality of the data. RDF and SPARQL as a query language lack an ability to rank results and to provide a relevance score (rather than just match or no match on predicates). Hence we have created a multi-tier approach layered on a foundation of a standard triple store overlaid with a Lucene search interface. Questioning Authority (QA) then functions as a intermediary, providing a uniform interface for consuming platforms. This has allowed us to address a number of data issues including missing or inaccurate language tags; systemic misuses of character sets, and problematic transformations from original MARC into RDF.
We will demonstrate recent extensions in authority search and lookup that build on efforts from previous grant cycles. Recent work extending search results to include additional context allows UIs to go beyond simple auto-complete fields to lookups providing sufficient context for accurate selection. We are also exploring ways to use linked data results for a single term to copy significant portions of a resource from an external source (e.g., LC, ShareVDE, etc.) to serve as the basis of a newly created resource.