Looking Inside the Library Knowledge Vault

How do we ascertain truth on the web? That's a question being pursued by researchers at Google who have articulated a flow of data that generates discrete statements of fact from countless web sources, relates those statements to previously assembled stores of knowledge, and fuses these mathematically to identify which statements may be more "truthful" than others. They describe this assembly of scored statements as a "Knowledge Vault." As OCLC Research works with data from library, archive, and museum sources, we may benefit by taking a closer look at the Google Knowledge Vault idea, to see how it applies to a vault of library knowledge. In this discussion we will describe how OCLC Research is:

• extracting simple statements about entities and their relationships from bibliographic and authority records,
• establishing a relevant score for similar statements provided by different sources,
• viewing the Library Knowledge Vault data using a prototype application,
• and testing how statements contributed by users of that prototype can find their way back to the Vault.