Category: Web

Something For Archives in Schema.org

Posted on by Richard Wallis

The recent release of the Schema.org vocabulary (version 3.5) includes new types and properties, proposed by the W3C Schema Architypes Community Group, specifically target at facilitating the web sharing of archives data to aid discovery. When the Group, which I have the privilege to chair, approached the challenge of building a proposal to make Schema.org useful for archives, it was identified that the vocabulary could be already used to describe the things & collections that you find in archives.  What was missing was the ability to identify the archive holding organisation, and the fact that an item is being held …

Baby Steps Towards A Library Graph

Posted on by Richard Wallis

It is one thing to have a vision, regular readers of this blog will know I have them all the time, its yet another to see it starting to form through the mist into a reality. Several times in the recent past I have spoken of the some of the building blocks for bibliographic data to play a prominent part in the Web of Data.  The Web of Data that is starting to take shape and drive benefits for everyone.  Benefits that for many are hiding in plain site on the results pages of search engines. In those informational panels …

WorldCat Works – 197 Million Nuggets of Linked Data

Posted on by Richard Wallis

They’re released! A couple of months back I spoke about the preview release of Works data from WorldCat.org.  Today OCLC published a press release announcing the official release of 197 million descriptions of bibliographic Works. A Work is a high-level description of a resource, containing information such as author, name, descriptions, subjects etc., common to all editions of the work.  The description format is based upon some of the properties defined by the CreativeWork type from the Schema.org vocabulary.  In the case of a WorldCat Work description, it also contains [Linked Data] links to individual, OCLC numbered, editions already shared …

Visualising Schema.org

Posted on by Richard Wallis

One of the most challenging challenges in my evangelism of the benefits of using Schema.org for sharing data about resources via the web is that it is difficult to ‘show’ what is going on. The scenario goes something like this….. “Using the Schema.org vocabulary, you embed data about your resources in the HTML that makes up the page using either microdata or RDFa….” At about this time you usually display a slide showing html code with embedded RDFa.  It may look pretty but the chances of more than a few of the audience being able to pick out the schema:Book …

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 …

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 …

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 …