Comparing Methodologies

Abstract

This paper reports the outcomes of the conversation moderated by Anna Maria Tammaro, which took place in Bologna during the third AIUCD (Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale) conference, between Karen Coyle and Gianmaria Silvello about convergences and divergences of Cultural Heritage (CH) and Computer Science (CS) communities about digital libraries and the Linked Open Data (LOD) paradigm. The conversation has been stimulated in the context of the community of Digital Humanities (DH) scholars, in order to actively engaging them in the linked data and digital libraries services. The LOD is a promising technology not only for opening up digital libraries resources, but also for augmenting the discoverability, re-use, enrichment and sharing of their resources on the Web. For the digital libraries LOD can represent a quite significant shift from a closed paradigm where the domain expert (e.g. the librarian) has the control of the resources to an open paradigm where the resources are free to circulate and evolve without explicit control of domain experts. In this paper we report some existing positive experiences of integration of the LOD in the digital library context where the LOD has been used as a publishing paradigm. We also discuss some limitations of the current approach by presenting some problems that should be investigated to fully realize the LOD potentialities.