Dr. Katherine Thornton from Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut, US visited the SDA group on November 28, 2018.
Katherine Thornton is an information scientist at the Yale University Library working on creating metadata as linked open data. Katherine earned a PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington in 2016 and works on the Scaling Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) project describing the software and configured environments in Wikidata. Katherine has been a volunteer contributor to the Wikidata project since 2012.
Dr. Thornton was invited to give a talk on “Sharing RDF data models and validating RDF graphs with ShEx“ and “Documenting and preserving programming languages and software in Wikidata” at the SWIB conference (Semantic Web in Libraries). SWIB conference is an annual conference, being held for the 10th time, focusing on Linked Open Data (LOD) in libraries and related organizations. It is well established as an event where IT staff, developers, librarians, and researchers from all over the world meet and mingle and learn from each other. The topics of talks and workshops at SWIB revolve around opening data, linking data and creating tools and software for LOD production scenarios. These areas of focus are supplemented by presentations of research projects in applied sciences, industry applications, and LOD activities in other areas.
At the bi-weekly “SDA colloquium presentations” she gave a talk on “Wikidata for Digital Preservation” and describe the workflow of creating the metadata for resources in the domain of computing using the Wikidata platform. While reusing these URIs in metadata to describe pre-configured emulated computing environments in which users can interact with legacy software. She introduced this project in the context of current work at Yale University Library to provide Emulation as a Service. Afterwords, she discussed her data curation work in Wikidata as well as the Wikidata for Digital Preservation portal available at wikidp.org. WikiDP is a streamlined interface for the digital preservation community to interact with Wikidata. The system is available online at http://wikidp.org.
The goal of Dr. Thornton’s visit was to exchange experience and ideas on digital preservation using RDF technologies. In addition to presenting various use-cases where these technologies have applied, Dr. Thornton shared with our group future research problems and challenges related to this research area. During the meeting, SDA core research topics and main research projects were presented and we investigated suitable topics for future collaborations with Dr. Thornton and her research group.