******************Please excuse the cross postings******************

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:: Title: "How to pick the low hanging fruits of Linked Data"

:: Presenters: Seth van Hooland & Ruben Verborgh

:: Date: Wednesday, 21 May 2014

:: Time: 10:00am EDT (World Clock: 14:00 UTC http://bit.ly/1qLSeq1)

:: Registration: http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_Handbook/webinars#vanHooland

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The concept of Linked Data has gained momentum over the past few years, but the understanding and the application of its principles often remain problematic. This webinar offers a short critical introduction to Linked Data by positioning this approach within the global evolution of data modeling, allowing an understanding of the advantages but also of the limits of RDF. After this conceptual introduction, the fundamental importance of data quality in the context of Linked Data is underlined by applying data profiling techniques with the help of OpenRefine. Methods and tools for metadata reconciliation and enrichment, such as Named-Entity Recognition (NER), are illustrated with the help of the same software. This webinar will refer to case-studies with real-life data which can be re-used by participants to continue to explore OpenRefine at their own pace after the webinar. The case-studies have been developed in the context of the handbook "Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums", which will be published by Facet Publishing in June 2014 (http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=9641&category_code=102).

Seth van Hooland is an assistant professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he leads the Master in Information Science. After a career in the private sector for a digitization company, he obtained his PhD in information science at ULB in 2009. He is currently teaching a special course on linked data at the Information School of the University of Washington. He is also active as a consultant for both public and private organizations.

Ruben Verborgh is a researcher in semantic hypermedia at Ghent University – iMinds, Belgium, where he obtained his PhD in computer science in 2014. He explores the connection between semantic web technologies and the web's architectural properties, with the ultimate goal of building more intelligent clients. Along the way, he has become fascinated by linked data, REST/hypermedia, web APIs and related technologies. He is the co-author of a book on OpenRefine and several publications on web-related topics in international journals.