ALIADA, an Open Source Tool for Automatic Publication of Linked Data from Libraries and Museums

Abstract

ALIADA, Spanish word that means ‘ally’, is intended to be a tool to help librarians and curators from cultural heritage institutions to automatically publish their high quality data in the Linked Data Cloud. Traditionally, data from libraries and museums have been stored as ‘silos’ of information because their metadata are codified using their own schemes and formats, not accessible by machines and applications more general public-focused. In addition, these information professionals create rich data from their collections, but they are not expert enough to face the coming technologies required to take advantage of the opportunities that the information and open knowledge era provides. To overcome these limitations, ALIADA EC-funded Project has developed an open source tool compliant with libraries and museums standards that automatically converts library and museum metadata into structured data ready to be published in the Linked Data Cloud, according to the Linked Data paradigm. Thus, heritage and cultural data are also open and available to be queried and reused by machines, innovative applications, search engines and other cultural and research institutions to generate more open knowledge.