Slides and videos of presentations and Lightning Talks are available here.

Thank You All for Being a Part of ELAG 2018!

A big thank you to all the speakers, Bootcamp leaders, and participants for creating this year’s wonderful blend of knowledge, skill-sharing and friendly chats.

Recordings of the presentations as well as some photos from the event will be published soon on this website.

Theme of ELAG 2018: BLEND/DEBLEND

Nowadays we are used to data being dispersed in different locations, formats and environments. We reference data, linking and blending them to be useful to our users. We started re-using data by harvesting OAI repositories and we ended up copying everything as-is instead of blending data using standard web protocols. The vision is that merging distributed data using web services (microservices) will enable us to better blend and re-use data. Yet, we are still living in a world of monolithic data structures; we need to go forward and try to use standard web data-formats and reconsider library data description rules in light of this. On the other hand, we are faced with monolithic legacy systems which, though moving to the cloud, are pretty hard to ‘deconstruct’. Here we should deblend as well. Our local IT infrastructure is also moving to a blended environment where web services and enterprise service buses are supposed to orchestrate a universal information environment. It is not an easy task to use the existing library systems in this kind of environment.

Keynote speech The delicate dance of decentralization and aggregation by Ruben Verborgh, professor of Semantic Web technology at Ghent University, will open the Conference on June 5, 2018. You can find more information about Ruben´s work and ideas on his website.