Author: Richard Wallis

OCLC Declare OCLC Control Numbers Public Domain

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Little things mean a lot.  Little things that are misunderstood often mean a lot more. Take the OCLC Control Number, often known as the OCN, for instance. Every time an OCLC bibliographic record is created in WorldCat it is given a unique number from a sequential set – a process that has already taken place over a billion times.  The individual number can be found represented in the record it is associated with.  Over time these numbers have become a useful part of the processing of not only OCLC and its member libraries but, as a unique identifier proliferated across …

Content-Negotiation for WorldCat

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I am pleased to share with you a small but significant step on the Linked Data journey for WorldCat and the exposure of data from OCLC. Content-negotiation has been implemented for the publication of Linked Data for WorldCat resources. For those immersed in the publication and consumption of Linked Data, there is little more to say.  However I suspect there are a significant number of folks reading this who are wondering what the heck I am going on about.  It is a little bit techie but I will try to keep it as simple as possible. Back last year, a …

Putting Linked Data on the Map

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Show me an example of the effective publishing of Linked Data – That, or a variation of it, must be the request I receive more than most when talking to those considering making their own resources available as Linked Data, either in their enterprise, or on the wider web. Ordnance Survey have built such an example.

From Records to a Web of Library Data – Pt3 Beacons of Availability

Posted on by Richard Wallis

As is often the way, you start a post without realising that it is part of a series of posts – as with the first in this series.  That one – Entification, the following one – Hubs of Authority and this, together map out a journey that I believe the library community is undertaking as it evolves from a record based system of cataloguing items towards embracing distributed open linked data principles to connect users with the resources they seek.  Although grounded in much of the theory and practice I promote and engage with, in my role as Technology Evangelist …

From Records to a Web of Library Data – Pt2 Hubs of Authority

Posted on by Richard Wallis

As is often the way, you start a post without realising that it is part of a series of posts – as with the first in this series.  That one – Entification, and the next in the series – Beacons of Availability, together map out a journey that I believe the library community is undertaking as it evolves from a record based system of cataloguing items towards embracing distributed open linked data principles to connect users with the resources they seek.  Although grounded in much of the theory and practice I promote and engage with, in my role as Technology …

From Records to a Web of Library Data – Pt1 Entification

Posted on by Richard Wallis

The phrase ‘getting library data into a linked data form’ hides multitude of issues. There are some obvious steps such as holding and/or outputting the data in RDF, providing resources with permanent URIs, etc. However, deriving useful library linked data from a source, such as a Marc record, requires far more than giving it a URI and encoding what you know, unchanged, as RDF triples.

Forming Consensus on Schema.org for Libraries and More

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Back in September I formed a W3C Group – Schema Bib Extend.  To quote an old friend of mine “Why did you go and do that then?”  Well, as I have mentioned before Schema.org has become a bit of a success story for structured data on the web.  I would have no hesitation in recommending it as a starting point for anyone, in any sector, wanting to share structured data on the web.  This is what OCLC did in the initial exercise to publish the 270+ million resources in WorldCat.org as Linked Data. At the same time, I believe that …

The Correct End Of Your Telescope – Viewing Schema.org Adoption

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I have been banging on about Schema.org for a while.  For those that have been lurking under a structured data rock for the last year, it is an initiative of cooperation between Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex to establish a vocabulary for embedding structured data in web pages to describe ‘things’ on the web.  Apart from the simple significance of having those four names in the same sentence as the word cooperation, this initiative is starting to have some impact.  As I reported back in June, the search engines are already seeing some 7%-10% of pages they crawl containing Schema.org …

Putting WorldCat Data Into A Triple Store

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I can not really get away with making a statement like “Better still, download and install a triplestore [such as 4Store], load up the approximately 80 million triples and practice some SPARQL on them” and then not following it up. I made it in my previous post Get Yourself a Linked Data Piece of WorldCat to Play With in which I was highlighting the release of a download file containing RDF descriptions of the 1.2 million most highly held resources in WorldCat.org – to make the cut, a resource had to be held by more than 250 libraries. So here …