December 5, 2012
Ex Libris joins the W3C Schema Bib Extend Community Group Jerusalem, Israel—December 5, 2012. Ex Libris® Group, a world leader in the provision of library automation solutions, is pleased to announce that it has become a member of the W3C Schema Bib Extend Community Group. This community group brings together diverse library organizations and individuals who are creating proposals for extending schemas to improve the representation of bibliographic information on the Internet. The group operates under the umbrella of the schema.org initiative. As a member of the group, Ex Libris will work toward making the data managed by Ex Libris solutions more accessible to others in the scholarly community and, similarly, making data from other systems available to libraries that use Ex Libris solutions. Membership in the community group is part of the Company’s ongoing initiative to take advantage of linked data for the benefit of its customers and the wider library community. Linked data is a method of Internet publishing that enables data to be linked to automatically, rendering the data more accessible and hence more valuable. Shlomo Sanders, Ex Libris chief technology officer, commented: ”This is an important step in harnessing the benefits of linked data techniques for library users. By employing recognized schemas, we can improve the ability of library systems around the world to read the data captured in other systems and make it available to their users.” ”Our customer community is very keen to take advantage of linked data methodology,” remarked Oren Beit-Arie, chief strategy officer at Ex Libris. ”At our recent international user meeting, a special interest working group on linked open data was established and members wrote a manifesto in support of linked open data. We have already begun discussing with the working group various ways in which we can use linked data in our solutions.” About Schema.org Schema.org is platform where the Web community can come together and share structured schemas that improve the ability for search engines to understand the content of Web pages. Launched just over a year ago, the Schema.org initiative, backed by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Yandex, and others, has been very successful in encouraging the sharing of structured data on the Web. Within a year, search engines were already seeing more than 7% of pages crawled containing Schema.org markup. For more information, see the schema.org blog at http://blog.schema.org/. About Ex Libris Ex Libris is a leading provider of automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries. Offering the only comprehensive product suite for electronic, digital, and print materials, Ex Libris provides efficient, user-friendly products that serve the needs of libraries today and will facilitate their transition into the future. Ex Libris maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 80 countries on six continents. Dedicated to developing creative solutions in close collaboration with customers, Ex Libris enables libraries to maximize productivity and efficiency and, at the same time, greatly enhance the user experience. By empowering users to discover and obtain the information they need, libraries ensure their position as the bridge to knowledge. For more information about Ex Libris Group, see our Web site, join us on Facebook, view our videos, and follow our Twitter page.
