Old wine, new bottle? Principles and methods for a true innovation in LIS perspectives. The view of Marshall Breeding, Mauro Guerrini, David Weinberger, Paul Gabriele Weston, Maja Žumer

Abstract

This article consists of interviews with Marshall Breeding, Mauro Guerrini, David Weinberger, Paul Gabriele Weston e Maja Žumer, realized asking three questions to these internationally recognized scholars. Through this essay, the AIB Study group on Cataloging, indexing, linked open data and semantic web (CILW) wants to review current development of information and resources description and organization, in order to generate a fruitful debate and a necessary comparison also with disciplines neighbor to LIS.
Questions developed by the group are intended to call attention to some fundamental questions: first, the role a catalog may still have in front of the semantic Web, the linked data methodology, and the need to open up to other communities, in order to be the preferred tool for users; second, what might be a definition for the new object of the catalog, the resources of knowledge, very different from each other and from the classical ‘document’, identified according to users’ interests, and that are placed in multiple webs of meaning and multiple contexts; finally, what are desirable policies and methodologies for the treatment of resources, information and data, if description should be decentralized and shared, fostering integration in the semantic Web, but without losing the data credibility.
If the underlying principles are not adequate, up-to-date and at the same time durable, it’s no use proposing a new methodology to try to present them as a real innovation.