I'm a one man shop and sometimes go to these conferences where many of you brilliant people are making these brilliant solutions making these ubiquitous black box data services that talk to one another using a standardized query language and I felt inspired and thought maybe I have been doing patch work on a job that really ought to be done a better way. I'm all about the bubble gum and duct tape stuff but I was at a point where it would have been a good time to migrate to something a little more robust. I'm getting the impression that for the size of the projects I'm working on linked data and other similar solutions are very much overkill. I'll have a PHP script output some custom xml that can be ingested on the other end and call it a day. Done :-)

This is also, at least for me, a challenge I have with being a wear-a-lot-of-hats-and-sometimes-write-code person at a small institution. Most of the time I'm not sure what I am supposed to be doing so I just make a solution that works without having others to bounce ideas off of. Thanks for the support.

Mike Beccaria
Systems Librarian
Head of Digital Initiative
Paul Smith's College
518.327.6376
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Become a friend of Paul Smith's Library on Facebook today!


-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Riley-Huff, Debra
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2014 11:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Creating a Linked Data Service

I agree with Roy. Seems like something that could be easily handled with PHP or Python scripts. Someone on the list may even have a homegrown solution (improved duct tape) they would be happy to share. I fail to see what the project has to do with linked data or why you would go that route.

Debra Riley-Huff
Head of Web Services & Associate Professor JD Williams Library University of Mississippi University, MS 38677
662-915-7353
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On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 9:33 PM, Roy Tennant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I'm puzzled about why you want to use linked data for this. At first 
> glance the requirement simply seems to be to fetch data from your ILS 
> server, which likely could be sent in any number of simple packages 
> that don't require an RDF wrapper. If you are the only one consuming 
> this data then you can use whatever (simplistic, proprietary) format 
> you want. I just don't see what benefits you would get by creating 
> "linked data" in this case that you wouldn't get by doing something 
> much more straightforward and simple. And don't be harshing on duct 
> tape. Duct tape is a perfectly fine solution for many problems.
> Roy
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Michael Beccaria 
> <[log in to unmask]
> >
> wrote:
>
> > I have recently had the opportunity to create a new library web page 
> > and host it on my own servers. One of the elements of the new page 
> > that I
> want
> > to improve upon is providing live or near live information on 
> > technology availability (10 of 12 laptops available, etc.). That 
> > data resides on my ILS server and I thought it might be a good time 
> > to upgrade the bubble
> gum
> > and duct tape solution I now have to creating a real linked data 
> > service that would provide that availability information to the web server.
> >
> > The problem is there is a lot of overly complex and complicated 
> > information out there onlinked data and RDF and the semantic web 
> > etc. and I'm looking for a simple guide to creating a very simple 
> > linked data service with php or python or whatever. Does such a 
> > resource exist? Any advice on where to start?
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Mike Beccaria
> > Systems Librarian
> > Head of Digital Initiative
> > Paul Smith's College
> > 518.327.6376
> > [log in to unmask]
> > Become a friend of Paul Smith's Library on Facebook today!
> >
>