Book review: Linked data for cultural heritage

Abstract

Linked data has been a hot topic in the library world, and this book provides a good overview of the topic. The contributors present theoretical and practical information to help readers understand linked data concepts and its purpose. The first chapter, by Thorson and Pattuelli, presents institutional projects experimenting with linked data, including Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC), and more. They also present a detailed description of the Linked Jazz project. In the second chapter, Stahmer presents the migration process of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) from MARC to linked data and potential benefits that migration presents. The author provides a great explanation of the triplestore data model, a discussion of tagging and controlled vocabularies, and social cataloging.