Category: WorldCat

Schema.org – Extending Benefits

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I find myself in New York for the day on my way back from the excellent Smart Data 2015 Conference in San Jose. It’s a long story about red-eye flights and significant weekend savings which I won’t bore you with, but it did result in some great chill-out time in Central Park to reflect on the week.

In its long auspicious history the SemTech, Semantic Tech & Business, and now Smart Data Conference has always attracted a good cross section of the best and brightest in Semantic Web, Linked Data, Web, and associated worlds. This year was no different. In my new role as an independent working with OCLC and at Google.

I was there on behalf of OCLC to review significant developments with Schema.org in general – now with 640 Types (Classes) & 988 properties – used on over 10 Million web sites.

Is There Still a Case for Aggregations of Cultural Data

Posted on by Richard Wallis

A bit of a profound question – triggered by a guest post on Museums Computer Group by Nick Poole CEO of The Collections Trust about Culture Grid and an overview of recent announcements about it. Broadly the changes are that: The Culture Grid closed to ‘new accessions’ (ie. new collections of metadata) on the 30th April The existing index and API will continue to operate in order to ensure legacy support Museums, galleries, libraries and archives wishing to contribute material to Europeana can still do so via the ‘dark aggregator’, which the Collections Trust will continue to fund Interested parties …

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 …

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

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 …