Toward P lace B ased I n f o rma t i on O rgan i za t i on and Access

MARCY BIDNEYKEVIN CLAIR

Harnessing the Geospatial Semantic Web

How can we be innovative in making collections more accessible outside of the catalog?

What technologies exist to make this happen?

Research Questions

The problem space:

Catalog records have metadata

that we want to use for display on a map interface

connected to data services with linked open data interface capabilities

Linked open data in libraries

Community of users – how it came about

Some definitions:Open dataLinked dataLinked open data

Our example

Penn State University Libraries digital collections

10 years of digitization/metadata activity

Geospatial metadata (locations, lat/long coords) inconsistently applied

Want to be able to fetch a lot of coordinates on the fly and put them in a visualization tool someplace

CONTENTdm

GeoNames

GeoNames

GeoNames

http://api.geonames.org/searchJSON?formatted=true&q=Great+Sand+Dunes+National+Park&name_equals=Great+Sand+Dunes+National+Park&username=psul

XSLT + GeoNames API

<mods:subject><mods:cartographics>

<xsl:variable name="query"><xsl:value-of select="city"/><xsl:text>+</xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="state"/></xsl:variable><mods:coordinates>

<xsl:value-of select="document(concat('http://api.geonames.org/search?username=psul&amp;featureClass=P&amp;q=',$query))/geonames/geoname/lat"/>

<xsl:text>,</xsl:text><xsl:value-of

select="document(concat('http://api.geonames.org/search?username=psul&amp;featureClass=P&amp;q=',$query))/geonames/geoname/lng"/>

</mods:coordinates></mods:cartographics></mods:subject>

Google Refine

Visualizing the Data

Where are we now?

"Next Generation" Access

We want to be here

And here

Other visualization tools

View shareMapnikMany EyesGoogle MapsGoogle Earth

Final Thought

Desire to increase access to collections in innovative ways

+

linked data

______________

really cool opportunities for innovation