So in an effort of putting my money (or, I suppose, data) where my
mouth is, I made a stab at Jim's challenge that linked library data
wasn't going to be a short term achievement.
Inspired by Toby Inkster's wrapper around Amazon's API for books
(http://purl.org/NET/book/isbn/0553804367#book), I started working on
something similar to LoC's LCCN Permalink service
(http://lccn.loc.gov/) -- it just takes the existing LCCN and starts
to turn the MARC data into linked data.
It's definitely a work in progress, but here are some examples:
http://lccn.heroku.com/2005042949
http://lccn.heroku.com/94510751
http://lccn.heroku.com/36029351
http://lccn.heroku.com/92751476
These relate to id.loc.gov/authorities, dbpedia, the dbtune rdfication
of musicbrainz, the openlibrary and rdfication of the data that used
to be available from LibraryThing.
The nice part of this is that it's entirely created dynamically, so
instead of having to know all of the data sources and data you want to
model before you run some batch conversion over all of LC's data, you
can instead add changes when they come to you. The added bonus is
that by basing it on LCCN, it's useful to many people immediately
(even though LCCNs certainly aren't universal, they are common enough
to be useful).
The source code for this is here:
http://github.com/rsinger/LinkedLCCN
And much of the modeling is coming from:
http://github.com/rsinger/marc2rdf-modeler
Any and all recommendations welcome.
-Ross.
On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 3:45 AM, James Weinheimer <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu> wrote:
> All,
>
> Here is a very interesting interview with Tim Berners-Lee, who talks about
> the Semantic web.
> http://fora.tv/2009/10/08/Next_Decade_Technologies_Changing_the_World-Tim-Berners-Lee.
> He gives some fascinating examples of the benefits of simply placing your
> information on the web in whatever format you have (as he said, even just a
> comma-separated value) because if people want it, they wil take it and
> rework it to their own benefit.
>
> One of the basic ideas he discusses is that, while you may work to put up a
> site that works the way you want it to, that isn't what others want today.
> Others want to have the same information but want to use it in other ways
> that you, as the initial creator, haven't even dreamed of.
>
> There are several consequences to the library community from his talk,
> ranging from formats to sharing. I am trying to imagine how the library
> catalog will fit into the scenario he describes, a scenario that is working
> itself out right now. The catalog records (the actual data) are obviously of
> prime importance (format as well), and while I think the catalog itself can
> play a highly important role, I'm still not sure how.
>
> I suggest it to all.
>
> Jim Weinheimer
>
Received on Sat Oct 31 2009 - 15:09:59 EDT