Is this the kind of thing you mean?
VIAFbot and the Integration of Library Data on Wikipedia
by Maximilian Klein and Alex Kyrios
URL:http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8964
This article presents a case study of a project, led by Wikipedians in Residence at OCLC and the British Library, to integrate authority data from the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) with biographical Wikipedia articles. This linking of data represents an opportunity for libraries to present their traditionally siloed data, such as catalog and authority records, in more openly accessible web platforms. The project successfully added authority data to hundreds of thousands of articles on the English Wikipedia, and is poised to do so on the hundreds of other Wikipedias in other languages. Furthermore, the advent of Wikidata has created opportunities for further analysis and comparison of data from libraries and Wikipedia alike. This project, for example, has already led to insights into gender imbalance both on Wikipedia and in library authority work. We explore the possibility of similar efforts to link other library data, such as classification schemes, in Wikipe!
dia.
kc
On 10/13/13 9:54 PM, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> Hiya,
>
>> And wouldn't it be great if that was the case?
> James Weinheimer <weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> The answer is decidedly no.
> Hehe, I was reading through your answer and then I figure that you
> were talking about the scenario if people used these resolvable
> identifiers now instead of other things. No, no, of course people
> wouldn't use them, not then nor now; they're mostly rubbish,
> satisfying very little, even if they probably could work just fine for
> strict identity markers.
>
> In a sort of roundabout way I was talking about how it would be great
> to have the library namespace there instead of any other, playing with
> the utopian dream that the library world actually had something
> marvelous to present there (even if, in a strict way, for Linked Data
> and semantic web and web ontology work it doesn't actually need to
> resolve to anything useful; that's an added bonus).
>
> When people should look up some question they just asked you, and what
> do you tell them? "Google it." It would be great to have ontologists
> and systemics say "IdLib it" in the same way to questions of
> identifier markers. That's the lost opportunity.
>
>> I want it clear that I am *not* saying that some kind of tool should not be
>> built, because it definitely should be built
> I'm not so sure anymore. Building a tool like that requires library
> land to get together and agree to its importance (a rather large
> hurdle) as well as paying for its maintenance. I see libraries across
> nations agree to some basic library values (access, collections,
> buildings) but as soon as it gets abstract, not so much (FRBR, RDA,
> models, ontologies, knowledge management, usability, openness of data
> and meta data, collaborations within and outside of library land, and
> so on).
>
>> but we must look at it through
>> the eyes of the person consuming it.
> Well, the consumers of persistent global identifiers are often
> technical people that libraries never have catered to in the past, and
> I doubt they can cater to in the future, at least not without some
> larger shift in thinking which I don't think is going to happen.
>
>> This is why I say that linked data *may*
>> create something useful for the public, but it just as well confuse them
>> more than ever.
> Linked Data makes it somewhat simpler for libraries to share what
> they've got at the time a spider collects the data, but after that
> they have no control of what happens to the data, no control over
> edits, no control over reuse, and I suspect most librarians hate that
> thought?
>
>
> regards,
>
> Alex
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Mon Oct 14 2013 - 19:55:40 EDT