Ex Libris® Group, a world leader in the provision of library automation solutions, is pleased to announce that it has become a member of the W3C Schema Bib Extend Community Group. This community group brings together diverse library organizations and individuals who are creating proposals for extending schemas to improve the representation of bibliographic information on the Internet. The group operates under the umbrella of the schema.org initiative.
As a member of the group, Ex Libris will work toward making the data managed by Ex Libris solutions more accessible to others in the scholarly community and, similarly, making data from other systems available to libraries that use Ex Libris solutions. Membership in the community group is part of the Company’s ongoing initiative to take advantage of linked data for the benefit of its customers and the wider library community. Linked data is a method of Internet publishing that enables data to be linked to automatically, rendering the data more accessible and hence more valuable.
Shlomo Sanders, Ex Libris chief technology officer, commented: “This is an important step in harnessing the benefits of linked data techniques for library users. By employing recognized schemas, we can improve the ability of library systems around the world to read the data captured in other systems and make it available to their users.”
“Our customer community is very keen to take advantage of linked data methodology,” remarked Oren Beit-Arie, chief strategy officer at Ex Libris. “At our recent international user meeting, a special interest working group on linked open data was established and members wrote a manifesto in support of linked open data. We have already begun discussing with the working group various ways in which we can use linked data in our solutions.”
