Category: Licensing

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 …

Get Yourself a Linked Data Piece of WorldCat to Play With

Posted on by Richard Wallis

You may remember my frustration a couple of months ago, at being in the air when OCLC announced the addition of Schema.org marked up Linked Data to all resources in WorldCat.org.   Those of you who attended the OCLC Linked Data Round Table at IFLA 2012 in Helsinki yesterday, will know that I got my own back on the folks who publish the press releases at OCLC, by announcing the next WorldCat step along the Linked Data road whilst they were still in bed. The Round Table was an excellent very interactive session with Neil Wilson from the British Library, Emmanuelle Bermes from Centre …

OCLC WorldCat Linked Data Release – Significant In Many Ways

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Typical!  Since joining OCLC as Technology Evangelist, I have been preparing myself to be one of the first to blog about the release of linked data describing the hundreds of millions of bibliographic items in WorldCat.org. So where am I when the press release hits the net?  35,000 feet above the North Atlantic heading for LAX, that’s where – life just isn’t fair. By the time I am checked in to my Anahiem hotel, ready for the ALA Conference, this will be old news.  Nevertheless it is significant news, significant in many ways. OCLC have been at the leading edge …

Libraries Through the Linked Data Telescope

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Linked Data and Linked Open Data have arrived on the library agenda. The consequence of this rise interest in library Linked Data is that the community is now exploring and debating how to migrate library records from formats such as Marc into this new RDF. In my opinion there is a great danger here of getting bogged down in the detail of how to represent every scintilla of information from a library record in every linked data view.

More Linked Open Data under a More Open License from German National Library

Posted on by Richard Wallis

The German National Library (DNB) has launched a Linked Data version of the German National Bibliography. The bibliographic data of the DNB’s main collection (apart from the printed music and the collection of the Deutsches Exilarchiv) and the serials (magazines, newspapers and series of the German Union Catalogue of serials (ZDB)) have been converted.  Henceforth the RDF/XML-representation of the records are available at the DNB portal. This is an experimental service that will be continually expanded and improved. This is a welcome extension to their Linked Data Service, previously delivering authority data.  Documentation on their data and modelling is available, …

Ookaboo Release 1,000,000 Free Images For 500,000 Topics + RDF Too

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Ookaboo “free pictures of everything on earth” have released nearly a million public domain and Creative Commons licensed stock images mapped with precision to concepts, instead of just words.

But there is more… They have released an RDF dump of the metadata behind the images, concept mappings and links to concepts in Freebase and Dbpedia

Will This Flood of Open Data Wash Past Us?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

 @ePISplatform features fairly prominently in the stream of tweets that waft across my desktop every day – it comes from the European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform (Europe’s One-stop Shop on PSI re-use) Working to stimulate and promote PSI re-use and open data initiatives. In amongst the useful pointers to news, comment, and documents, I have been recently conscious of an increasing flow of tweets like these: This is good news.  More and more city, local, national governments and public bodies releasing data as open data.  Of course the reference to open here is in relation to the licensing of …

What Is Your Data’s Star Rating(s)?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

The Linked Data movement was kicked off in mid 2006 when Tim Berners-Lee published his now famous Linked Data Design Issues document. Many had been promoting the approach of using W3C Semantic Web standards to achieve the effect and benefits, but it was his document and the use of the term Linked Data that crystallised it, gave it focus, and a label.

In 2010 Tim updated his document to include the Linked Open Data 5 Star Scheme

Will Europe’s National Libraries Open Data In An Open Way?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

A significant step towards open bibliographic data was made in Copenhagen this week at the 25th anniversary meeting of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) hosted by the Royal Library of Denmark. From the CENL announcement: …the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), has voted overwhelmingly to support the open licensing of their data. What does that mean in practice? It means that the datasets describing all the millions of books and texts ever published in Europe – the title, author, date, imprint, place of publication and so on, which exists in the vast library catalogues of Europe – …

Will Government Open Licence Extensions be a haven for the timid?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

National Archives announced today UK government licensing policy extended to make more public sector information available: Building on the success of the Open Government Licence, The National Archives has extended the scope of its licensing policy, encouraging and enabling even easier re-use of a wider range of public sector information. The UK Government Licensing Framework (UKGLF), the policy and legal framework for the re-use of public sector information, now offers a growing portfolio of licences and guidance to meet the diverse needs and requirements of both public sector information providers and re-user communities. On the surface this is move is …