Last year we received 96 responses to the OCLC Research “International Linked Data Survey for Implementers” reporting 172 linked data projects or services in 15 countries, of which 76 were described. Of the 76 projects described, 27 (36%) were not yet implemented and 13 (17%) had been in production in less than a year.
So we were curious – what might have changed in the last year? OCLC Research decided to repeat its survey to learn details of specific projects or services that format metadata as linked data and/or make subsequent uses of it. We’re curious to see whether the projects that had not yet been implemented have now been, whether any of last year’s respondents would have any different answers, and whether we could encourage linked data implementers who didn’t respond to last year’s survey to respond to this year’s.
The questions are the same so we can more easily compare results. (Some multiple-choice questions have more options taken from the “other” responses in last year’s responses, and some open-ended questions are now multiple-choice, again based on last year’s responses.) The target audiences are staff who have implemented or are implementing linked data projects or services-either by publishing data as linked data or ingesting linked data resources into their own data or applications, or both.
The survey is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LinkedDataSurvey2015
We are asking that responses be completed by 17 July 2015. As with last year’s survey, we will share the examples collected for the benefit of others wanting to undertake similar efforts, wondering what is possible to do and how to go about it. We summarized last year’s results in a series of blog posts here: 1) Who’s doing it; 2) Examples in production; 3) Why and what institutions are consuming; 4) Why and what institutions are publishing; 5) Technical details; 6) Advice from the implementers.
What do you think has changed in the last year?
Karen Smith-Yoshimura, senior program officer, topics related to creating and managing metadata with a focus on large research libraries and multilingual requirements. Karen retired from OCLC November 2020.
