In a long interview on the state of the semantic web, Tim Berners-Lee (if you don’t recognize the name, you should really read this) briefly discussed DataPortability, the ability to move information freely and easily from one site to another:
“So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, ‘Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.’ Or, ‘You should all know who my colleagues are. I shouldn’t have to tell you again.'”
“So, the users are saying, ‘Give me my data back. That’s my data.’ That was one of the cries originally behind XML, it was a desktop application. Don’t store it in a format which I can’t reuse. So, now it’s, ‘Give it to me using the idea of standards. If you do that, then I can do things with it.'” (around 42 minutes into the interview)
Libraries are still playing catch-up in the social data area. We are starting to implement tagging and book recommendations, but we are not all that far along with implementing things. What this quote reminds me is that we should also be keeping an eye towards making it easy to export data out of our systems. Easy to use formats (like xml) and open standards and interfaces should become the norm for libraries.
This isn’t suggesting that we open all our data… it is not our place to provide patron reading or personal information. We shouldn’t make it difficult for patrons to do that themselves, if they so choose (although I feel we should make an effort to let them know the potential negative effects of placing information on the web).
We should, however, be using that data to generate social links between books (people who checked out “A” also tended to check out “B”, with A and B being books, authors, videos, etc.) and make it easy to access the patterns that result from any informational web site use.
Just something to keep in mind when we select our online tools and software…
interview found via TechCrunch
