Category: Linked Data

WorldCat Works Linked Data – Some Answers To Early Questions

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Since announcing the preview release of 194 Million Open Linked Data Bibliographic Work descriptions from OCLC’s WorldCat, last week at the excellent OCLC EMEA Regional Council event in Cape Town; my in-box and Twitter stream have been a little busy with questions about what the team at OCLC are doing. Instead of keeping the answers within individual email threads, I thought they may be of interest to a wider audience: Q  I don’t see anything that describes the criteria for “workness.” “Workness” definition is more the result of several interdependent algorithmic decision processes than a simple set of criteria.  To …

OCLC Preview 194 Million Open Bibliographic Work Descriptions

Posted on by Richard Wallis

demonstrating on-going progress towards implementing the strategy, I had the pleasure to preview two upcoming significant announcements on the WorldCat data front: 1. The release of 194 Million Linked Data Bibliographic Work descriptions. 2. The WorldCat Linked Data Explorer interface

Getty Release AAT Vocabulary as Linked Open Data

Posted on by Richard Wallis

The Getty Research Institute has announced the release of the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)® as Linked Open Data. The data set is available for download at vocab.getty.edu under an Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC BY 1.0). The Art & Architecture Thesaurus is a reference of over 250,000 terms on art and architectural history, styles, and techniques.  I’m sure this will become an indispensible authoritative hub of terms in the Web of Data to assist those describing their resources and placing them in context in that Web. This is the fist step in an 18 month process to release …

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 …

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 …