Zepheira

In recent projects Zepheira has worked with clients to apply the benefits of modern Web technology and Linked Data to Content Strategy as well as general Business Strategy for product refinement and customer support.

Zepheira is working on an ongoing basis with Cisco Systems, Inc to further their content strategy, and with John Deere Worldwide to lead in the application of Linked Data technology in that company’s product and customer support strategy.

If you have strategic needs for managing product content and information-driven strategy in general, contact Zepheira for more information on our commercial solutions.

On January 23, Eric Miller lead a webinar, “Translating the Library Catalog from MARC into Linked Data: An Update on the Bibliographic Framework Initiative” to report on progress the initiative, starting with an analysis of the translation problem and concluding with potential migration scenarios for a broad-based transition from MARC to a new bibliographic framework.

An overview of the webinar and slides are now available here: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/bibframework

Eric Miller will be speaking on two panels at American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Seattle January 26 and 27th to provide updates to the BIBFRAME initiative. A major focus of the initiative is to determine a transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format to Web based, Linked Data model. Zepheira and The Library of Congress are working together to develop a Linked Data model, vocabulary and enabling tools / services for supporting this Initiative. A full list of all BIBFRAME presentations, locations and times at ALA Midwinter is available here: http://www.loc.gov/ala/mw-2013-bibframe.html

Two years ago, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress in partnership with Zepheira launched Viewshare, a free, easy-to-use web application for creating dynamic visual interfaces to cultural heritage collections (viewshare.org). Through Viewshare, an archivist, curator, scholar, or student can create visualizations that allow her to explore a collection in ways not possible via a simple text search. Viewshare empowers users to uncover collection-wide relations not always evident through traditional item-by-item browsing or searching.

The Library recently posted “A Viewshare Roundup”, which provides a collection of recent papers, presentations and blog posts with examples of how Viewshare is being used by over 1500 users from all over the world. Check out the exciting progress that’s been made!

Uche Ogbuji has been working through Zepheira’s participation in the W3C’s Community Groups program and in particular is chairing the MicroXML Community Group.  This initiative is as a result of much informal discussion among XML experts to determine how best to improve XML technology through simplification.  After consolidation work by John Cowan and James Clark (who are now MicroXML spec editors) Ogbuji wrote an article and a follow-up, which led to coverage in SD Times, and stimulated creation of the Community Group, which has completed its first draft specification.  Ogbuji is also working on an open-source implementation of MicroXML for Python 3.

The webcast of a presentation made by Eric Miller in July at the Library of Congress can now be accessed here: “Library of Congress New Bibliographic Framework Initiative: Update Forum“.

The Library of Congress contracted with Zepheira to help accelerate the launch of the New Bibliographic Framework Initiative in June 2012. Zepheira is providing both a model to serve as a starting point for discussion and an analysis of related initiatives and efforts such as RDA, FRBR, ONIX, Schema.org and linked data projects from the British Library, German National Library and OCLC.

This presentation was recorded on July 16, 2012 describes Zepheira’s progress as of July 2012.

The presentation is also now available on YouTube

Eric Miller from Zepheira will be giving the opening keynote at the LITA Linked Data Pre-Conference at the ALA 2012 Annual Conference on Friday, June 22 in Anaheim, California.

This preconference event is positioned to take advantage of the growing interest in the library community to work to transform the wealth of quality, library-created metadata – billions of bibliographic records, finding aids, descriptions of digital content – into linked data. Eric will describe an overview of these technologies, current trends, and demonstrate practical tools and techniques that will help link library data to the greater linked data cloud.

Eric will also be presenting at the Library of Congress Bibliographic Framework Transition Update Forum on Sunday, June 24 where he will be providing an update on the MARC21 linked data modeling effort recently launched by the Library of Congress.