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This editorial underscores the importance of linked data and linked open data (LD/LOD) in contemporary librarianship and information science. It aims to present the motivation for this special issue of Library High Tech (LHT), specifically the theme of linking and opening vocabularies (LOV) as a component of the LOD landscape. The editorial also seeks to describe the content of the papers and their contributions in the areas of current practice, trends, and R&D (research and development).

The editorial is organized into four main sections: Introductory aspects about linking open data; the context and inspiration for this special issue of LHT; a description of the accepted papers highlighting their contribution for LOV; and a conclusion.

The editorial presents several reflective insights for advancing LOD and LOV practices that may lead toward a more integrated semantic web.

The editorial presents a synthesis of the three editors' views on approaching the subject of linking open vocabularies. The framework for the editorial is reflected in the original call for papers that supported this special issue.

This paper reports on a quantitative study of data gathered from the Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) catalogue, including the use of network analysis and metrics. The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into the structure of LOV and the use of vocabularies in the Web of Data. It is important to note that not all the vocabularies in it are registered in LOV. Given the de-centralised and collaborative nature of the use and adoption of these vocabularies, the results of the study can be used to identify emergent important vocabularies that are shaping the Web of Data.

The methodology is based on an analytical approach to a data set that captures a complete snapshot of the LOV catalogue dated April 2014. An initial analysis of the data is presented in order to obtain insights into the characteristics of the vocabularies found in LOV. This is followed by an analysis of the use of Vocabulary of a Friend properties that describe relations among vocabularies. Finally, the study is complemented with an analysis of the usage of the different vocabularies, and concludes by proposing a number of metrics.

The most relevant insight is that unsurprisingly the vocabularies with more presence are those used to model Semantic Web data, such as Resource Description Framework, RDF Schema and OWL, as well as broadly used standards as Simple Knowledge Organization System, DCTERMS and DCE. It was also discovered that the most used language is English and the vocabularies are not considered to be highly specialised in a field. Also, there is not a dominant scope of the vocabularies. Regarding the structural analysis, it is concluded that LOV is a heterogeneous network.

The paper provides an empirical analysis of the structure of LOV and the relations between its vocabularies, together with some metrics that may be of help to determine the important vocabularies from a practical perspective. The results are of interest for a better understanding of the evolution and dynamics of the Web of Data, and for applications that attempt to retrieve data in the Linked Data Cloud. These applications can benefit from the insights into the important vocabularies to be supported and the value added when mapping between and using the vocabularies.

This study aims to conduct performance and clustering analyses with the help of Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL) v16.6 database examining the role of emerging technologies (ETs) in public services delivery.

VOSviewer and SciMAT techniques were used for clustering and mapping the use of ETs in the public services delivery. Collecting documents from the DGRL v16.6 database, the paper uses text mining analysis for identifying key terms and trends in e-Government research regarding ETs and public services.

The analysis indicates that all ETs are strongly linked to each other, except for blockchain technologies (due to its disruptive nature), which indicate that ETs can be, therefore, seen as accumulative knowledge. In addition, on the whole, findings identify four stages in the evolution of ETs and their application to public services: the “electronic administration” stage, the “technological baseline” stage, the “managerial” stage and the “disruptive technological” stage.

The output of the present research will help to orient policymakers in the implementation and use of ETs, evaluating the influence of these technologies on public services.

The research helps researchers to track research trends and uncover new paths on ETs and its implementation in public services.

Recent research has focused on the need of implementing ETs for improving public services, which could help cities to improve the citizens’ quality of life in urban areas. This paper contributes to expanding the knowledge about ETs and its implementation in public services, identifying trends and networks in the research about these issues.

One of the most important categories in linked open data (LOD) quality models is “data accessibility.” The purpose of this paper is to propose some metrics and indicators for assessing data accessibility in LOD and the semantic web context.

In this paper, at first the authors consider some data quality and LOD quality models to review proposed subcategories for data accessibility dimension in related texts. Then, based on goal question metric (GQM) approach, the authors specify the project goals, main issues and some questions. Finally, the authors propose some metrics for assessing the data accessibility in the context of the semantic web.

Based on GQM approach, the authors determined three main issues for data accessibility, including data availability, data performance, and data security policy. Then the authors created four main questions related to these issues. As a conclusion, the authors proposed 27 metrics for measuring these questions.

Nowadays, one of the main challenges regarding data quality is the lack of agreement on widespread quality metrics and practical instruments for evaluating quality. Accessibility is an important aspect of data quality. However, few researches have been done to provide metrics and indicators for assessing data accessibility in the context of the semantic web. So, in this research, the authors consider the data accessibility dimension and propose a comparatively comprehensive set of metrics.

Measuring the similarity between two resources is considered difficult due to a lack of reliable information and a wide variety of available information regarding the resources. Many approaches have been devised to tackle such difficulty. Although content-based approaches, which adopted resource-related data in comparing resources, played a major role in similarity measurement methodology, the lack of semantic insight on the data may leave these approaches imperfect. The purpose of this paper is to incorporate data semantics into the measuring process.

The emerged linked open data (LOD) provide a practical solution to tackle such difficulty. Common methodologies consuming LOD mainly focused on using link attributes that provide some sort of semantic relations between data. In this work, methods for measuring semantic distances between resources using information gathered from LOD were proposed. Such distances were then applied to music recommendation, focusing on the effect of various weight and level settings.

This work conducted experiments using the MusicBrainz dataset and evaluated the proposed schemes for the plausibility of LOD on music recommendation. The experimental result shows that the proposed methods electively improved classic approaches for both linked data semantic distance (LDSD) and PathSim methods by 47 and 9.7%, respectively.

The main contribution of this work is to develop novel schemes for incorporating knowledge from LOD. Two types of knowledge, namely attribute and path, were derived and incorporated into similarity measurements. Such knowledge may reflect the relationships between resources in a semantic manner since the links in LOD carry much semantic information regarding connecting resources.

The purpose of this paper is to detail a low-cost, low-maintenance publishing strategy aimed at unlocking the value of Linked Data collections held by libraries, archives and museums (LAMs).

The shortcomings of commonly used Linked Data publishing approaches are identified, and the current lack of substantial collections of Linked Data exposed by LAMs is considered. To improve on the discussed status quo, a novel approach for publishing Linked Data is proposed and demonstrated by means of an archive of DBpedia versions, which is queried in combination with other Linked Data sources.

The authors show that the approach makes publishing Linked Data archives easy and affordable, and supports distributed querying without causing untenable load on the Linked Data sources.

The proposed approach significantly lowers the barrier for publishing, maintaining, and making Linked Data collections queryable. As such, it offers the potential to substantially grow the distributed network of queryable Linked Data sources. Because the approach supports querying without causing unacceptable load on the sources, the queryable interfaces are expected to be more reliable, allowing them to become integral building blocks of robust applications that leverage distributed Linked Data sources.

The novel publishing strategy significantly lowers the technical and financial barriers that LAMs face when attempting to publish Linked Data collections. The proposed approach yields Linked Data sources that can reliably be queried, paving the way for applications that leverage distributed Linked Data sources through federated querying.

The paper seeks to analyze the health of the vocabulary ecosystem in terms of requirements, addressing its various stakeholders such as maintainers of linked open vocabularies, linked data providers who use those vocabularies in their data and memory institutions which, it is hoped, will eventually provide for the long-term preservation of vocabularies.

This paper builds on requirements formulated more tersely in the DCMI generic namespace policy for RDF vocabularies. The examination of requirements for linked open vocabularies focuses primarily on property-and-class vocabularies in RDFS or OWL (sometimes called metadata element sets), with some consideration of SKOS concept schemes and Dublin Core application profiles. It also discusses lessons learned through two years of development of the linked open vocabularies (LOV), of which main features and key findings are described.

Key findings about the current practices of vocabulary managers regarding metadata, policy and versioning are presented, as well as how such practices can be improved to ensure better discoverability and usability of RDF vocabularies. The paper presents new ways to assess the links and dependencies between vocabularies. It also stresses the necessity and importance of a global governance of the ecosystem in which vocabulary managers, standard bodies, and memory institutions should engage.

The current paper is focused on requirements related to a single type of vocabulary but could and should be extended to other types such as thesauri, classifications, and other semantic assets.

Practical technical guidelines and social good practices are proposed for promotion in the Vocabulary Ecosystem (for example, by vocabulary managers).

This paper brings together the research and action of several important actors in the vocabulary management and governance field, and is intended to be the basis of a roadmap for action presented at the Dublin Core conference of September 2013 in Lisbon (DC 2013).

Citation data needs to be recognised as a part of the Commons – those works that are freely and legally available for sharing – and placed in an open repository. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The Open Citation Corpus is a new open repository of scholarly citation data, made available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 public domain dedication and encoded as Open Linked Data using the SPAR Ontologies.

The Open Citation Corpus presently provides open access (OA) to reference lists from 204,637 articles from the OA Subset of PubMed Central, containing 6,325,178 individual references to 3,373,961 unique papers.

Scholars, publishers and institutions may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the open citation data for any purpose, without restriction under copyright or database law.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the global progress and explore research areas and development trends of open government data (OGD) field from the Web of Science (WOS) database by applying the bibliometric visualization approach.

This paper conducted a bibliometric mapping study on OGD scientific research publications based on WOS from six aspects.

There are six research perspectives on OGD research. European countries and developed countries pay more attention to OGD movement. The 20 most cited and highly influential research documents were identified. What’s more, the analysis of journals level highlights the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary characteristics of OGD research. Current six research topics for OGD research that have been formed and two major emerging research priorities in OGD research fields were identified.

The limitation is that data retrieval result which decided to include only 180 publications in the WOS-indexed publications produced a bias against research publications published in non-WOS publication sources. A fuller research trend would be obtained with the more extensively used electronic databases.

By dint of bibliometric analysis, this paper may be able to quantify research patterns on OGD, to analyze what has been done in this field and to identify the main research hotspots. Therefore, it can aid academic researchers and practicing professionals in contributing to the field more effectively and advancing scientific progress in the field of OGD research.

The results can also promote the study on OGD movement in academia, government and industry and also enrich the theory of OGD and provide some new perspectives for research on OGD.

This is the first study to quantify and evaluate global research patterns and development trends in OGD research based on WOS database, which provides a quantitative perspective on OGD studies that may assist in advancing the development of the field.

Linked data is gaining great interest in the cultural heritage domain as a new way for publishing, sharing and consuming data. The paper aims to provide a detailed method and MARiMbA a tool for publishing linked data out of library catalogues in the MARC 21 format, along with their application to the catalogue of the National Library of Spain in the datos.bne.es project.

First, the background of the case study is introduced. Second, the method and process of its application are described. Third, each of the activities and tasks are defined and a discussion of their application to the case study is provided.

The paper shows that the FRBR model can be applied to MARC 21 records following linked data best practices, librarians can successfully participate in the process of linked data generation following a systematic method, and data sources quality can be improved as a result of the process.

The paper proposes a detailed method for publishing and linking linked data from MARC 21 records, provides practical examples, and discusses the main issues found in the application to a real case. Also, it proposes the integration of a data curation activity and the participation of librarians in the linked data generation process.