Tag: Open Data

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Free Data for 2.4 Million European Culture Heritage Items

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Europeana recently launched an excellent short animation explaining what Linked Open Data is and why it’s a good thing, both for users and for data providers.  They did this in support of the release of a large amount of Linked Open Data describing cultural heritage assets held in Libraries, Museums, Galleries and other institutions across Europe. The significant elements in the press release, from Europeana Professional (Europeana’s professional knowledge-sharing platform), are that they are releasing data for 2.4 million items, under a CC0 open data license, and it is Linked Data in RDF. This is a wonderful resource, and example …

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