2024-09-25

Housekeeping

• Additional agenda topics – none

• Announcements – none

• Intros for any new attendees 

• Review action items from last meeting – all done

OCLC's Meridian Entity Editor

Anne Washington, OCLC

• Anne's role in OCLC

  • Product analyst → she would define as user's advocate – meeting with users, learning about their needs and bring them back to the development team to make sure they are met.

• OCLC linked data strategy

  • What they have been hearing from libraries during the past few years is that libraries are managing more diverse collections (not just traditional library collections described in MARC) which comes with the management of a more diverse set of identifiers

  • Need to have more robust systems to bridge across different platforms (ILS, CMS, DAMS...) – they hope OCLC Entities could be that  link

  • Linked data is a  means to an end. The end goal is to build rich workflows and improve discoverability across library systems and outside of the library

  • Main areas of focus

    • Expertise

      • Focused on growing the community around use – hoping to leverage the expertise of Meridian users to build up best practices

      • Anne is part of the PCC Identity Management Advisory Group (IMAC)

        • IMAC's current effort is to add entities from sources other than LoC to MARC records. PROJECT - Entity Management Cooperative (EMCO). This would be something like NACO but for entity management outside of LoC. They are trying to build up different community of practices across groups that are using different platforms for entity creation/management (e.g. ISNI, Wikidata, ORCID, OCLC Entities) to serve the needs of the PCC community.

    • Data

      • WorldCat Entities

    • Infrastructure

      • Rethinking WorldCat to support linked data workflows at scale

    • Tools

      • Meridian

      • Dewey linked data

      • WorldShare 

      • API's for these different services allow for connections to other systems

Meridian demo and Q/A:

• Meridian is an entity editor that sits on top of Worldcat entities. 

  • There is a primer document defining classes and properties - WorldCat ontology

  • Existing entities can be updated to add new statements that are key for entity disambiguation

  • New entities can be created – URIs are minted on the fly once the new entity is saved

  • FAST is the preferred source for concepts

  • Data quality features

    • Use of quality scores (algorithm that takes into account aspects like level of completeness and linked information)

    • With Meridian you can change relationships between entities, or ask for merging duplicates (OCLC will review before merging)

    • Detection of potential duplicates

  • Data privacy features

    • Properties can be locked so that if someone requests to remove personal information from an entity, the specific property is also removed from use

    • Entities can also be completely removed upon request

  • Data trust features

    • Allows to add references for statements

    • Has a creation/editing history with user information for each change

  • user roles in Meridian are not yet defined – Users can edit any entity they want – looking forward to get community of practices that would recommend appropriate workflows

  • Integration with other OCLC products and services

    • RecordManager  (they are planning to add this functionality to Connexion as well)

      • Adding existing URIs

        • Programatic – if the heading is controlled, add a URI if it exists in OCLC entities

        • Manually – insert WorldCat entity – add URI

      • Creating new entities

        • You can create a WorldCat entities right within the workflow in RecordManager – It creates a new WorldCat entity with minimal data without having to leave RM. The entity can be further fleshed out on Meridian

      • Since the RecordManager workflow is using Meridian APIs to read and write, these functionalities can eventually be added to other products

  • Service model for WorldCat Entities

    • FREE access

      • Website → https://entities.oclc.org/worldcat/entity 

      • Browser → Entity URI.jsonld retrieves the full json file for an entity in the browser

      • GET API

        • Without Key you can do a URI based search and get minimal data about the entity

        • With Key you can do a URI based search and get a fuller section of the graph (but all or still just a portion?) 

        • API keys can be requested by OCLC libraries (should be WorldShare or CONTENTdm, Connexion does not count) in the Developer Network. In order to request it, the user needs to create a WorldShare ID, but it is very straight forward.

    • SUBSCRIPTION FEE

      • Any other API (search, write, etc...)

      • Meridian

• Questions

  • Benn – Does OCLC have all the APIs sans keys loaded into a postman workspace customers can copy from?

  •  Yes. Anne will send a follow up email with the yaml files that can be used to set up the OCLC Postman workspace 

    • APIs documentation - https://www.oclc.org/developer/api/oclc-apis.en.html?

    • You can use the the APIs to query changes to the entities so to keep local catched data in synch

    • You can also query connections with a given entity (huge discovery potential)

    • There is a SPARQL endpoint, but since the use is very resource intensive, they are building all sort of APIs as needs are being identified 

  • Melanie – Is there a sandbox?

    • Not yet, but it is something that they are considering because it is being asked a lot

Questions/discussion topics sent to Anne in advance

Some of these have been addressed, but she will send an email with answers to those that have not come up, and she will also send the yaml files:

1. General comparison of Meridian to Wikidata (since we are a community of practice somewhat invested in Wikidata)

2. Reusability/interoperability - Ideas/use cases for how the data can be used outside the library system?

3. Who has access to contribute to it? What do access restrictions look like?

4. Governance/expectations of community contributions of Meridian entities

   1. Similar/different from OCLC community cataloging protocols and practices?

   2. More about the advisory group that helped with modeling WorldCat entities in an ethical way- is this group something that will continue, or was it a one-off during the design phase?

   3. Who decides how this works now and going forward?  

5. What does development (roadmap?) & support for Meridian look like? 

6. How is Meridian integrated with other traditional OCLC services/products and customer workflows?

7. Time permitting, how Meridian compares to Share-VDE’s J Cricquet editor

Updates from the field

OCLC updates: 

• WorldcCat Entities APIs

Alma/Primo feature updates: n/a

ELUNA community updates:

• LOD Community of Practice community survey on linked data (complete by 9/30)

• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:ExLibris-Primo - third-party documentation of the use of wikidata data by the commercial library search engine Primo by ExLibris, with examples of related SPARQL queries

Ex Libris updates:

• Webinar Thursday, September 26, 2024 - Freeing Librarians with Linked Open Data: What’s Available, In-Progress, and the Future, Presented by a panel of librarians, Americas and EMEA, 10:00-1100am CST | Register

• Webinar Wednesday, October 30. 2024 - Using Linked Open Data in Primo VE - Person Entity, 10:00-11:00am CST | Register

LD4 conference October 7-11

About | Register

BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe 2024 takeaways: (save for next meeting when Ann M. can join)

ELUNA LOD Community of Practice Survey

Melanie

• Review survey questions (local copy) and discuss responses with group

• HRC and UTSA will submit their own survey answers

Looking ahead

all

• Shift meeting time block forward 11am-12:30pm for last 2 meetings of 2024? shift to 2:30-4pm time block in Spring 2025? (these look relatively open on typical attendee calendars) 

• October 23 - share takeaways from Sept ExLibris webinar and LD4 conference; review Person entity feature in UTL Primo & brainstorm questions for Ex Libris webinar on 10/30

  • Discussion to also have a debrief about OCLC Entities and Meridian presentation, and look at the OCLC workspace in Postman

• December 4, 11, or 18 - retrospective review of 2024, brainstorm goals and ideas for 2025

• Update's from Hanlin research later in December