Break On Through to the Other Side: The Library and Linked Data

This article will discuss the barriers that exist between our bibliographic data and other data available on the World Wide Web. The isolation of this bibliographic data is a problem that impacts on the successful integration of the library catalogue into the potential semantic Web of the future. It will look at two available data models for bibliographic data and introduces the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which has emerged as the preferred data model for enabling linked data on the Web. The article concludes with a brief look at some current activities related to linked data that are occurring as part of the development of Resource Description and Access (RDA).