The Semantic Web Is Made of People

The presentations from last year’s Semantic Web in Libraries (SWIB13) held in Hamburg, Germany, were posted a few months ago. Lots of great stuff relating to linked data, metadata, classification mapping and ontologies, including a few case study reports (e.g. Europeana updates).

I recommend to you Dorothea Salo’s presentation, “Soylent SemWeb Is People! Bringing People to Linked Data.” * Drawing on a rather stretched analogy to the Charleton Heston movie Solyent Green she explores this question:

“… how do we best invite people — including skeptical people, reluctant people, less-technical people, people committed to different data structures — to learn about, contribute to, and use Linked Data?”

It’s an interesting presentation in which she expresses the frustration that many people have when they try to participate and contribute to the linked data movement. She speaks about the feelings of alienation that many librarians have when the “people making the technology forgot about the people who will use this technology.”

Librarians, and especially cataloguing and digital librarians, have many skills that are applicable in this linked data context. And she suggests that when we lose cataloguers we have a serious problem.

“… as I talk to librarians about linked data, what I hear back is that they feel ground up into hamburger — sorry, sorry, I had to — by the whole thing, because the way it’s usually explained to them, it’s so abstract and so divorced from the actual library work they know. The linked data movement can show them graphs, but it can’t show them interfaces for doing their work. It can tell them about triples, but it’s not telling them how the catalog will work if their Internet connection fails. It can explain ontologies, but not how they’ll navigate them.

After one explanatory talk I gave, I had one cataloger tell me with immense frustration, ‘I just don’t see how this will WORK!’ And I didn’t have a good answer for her. Because I don’t see that either.”

Her frustration is palpable and resonates with many of my own experiences trying to negotiate how we will work in this new environment. I agree with her when she recommends that we need “well-documented linked-data tools … linked-data workflows, based on real-world problems and real-world solutions … linked-data systems that do REAL LIBRARY WORK, right out of the box. … code that lets real live people do real-world work with linked data.”

It’s a challenge that we continue to confront. The potential of linked data is amazing but we need, as Dorothea Salo says, to connect development efforts to the people. She reminds us that, like Solyent Green, the semantic web is “made of people.”

Her slides are available on Slideshare.