[open-bibliography] OCLC adds Linked Data to WorldCat.org | DDC 23 released as linked data at dewey.info

Sun Jun 24 14:01:56 UTC 2012

Peter, I assume that the "technical difficulty" is the size of the 
database -- something on the order of 180 million bibliographic records. 
... Ah, no, I just looked it up in their annual report:
235,822,950 records, of which 189,421,960 are for books. And that's from 
a year ago.

It would be very interesting to be able to slice-n-dice that database, 
which, perhaps except for the secret database that Google holds, is the 
largest bibliographic database in the world. For example, their records 
for some less-populous languages may constitute a more complete 
bibliography of the writings of that culture than even the relevant 
national library has.

I plan to write to some of the OCLC folks and ask if they will be 
setting up the needed index to encourage the re-spidering of this data 
by the major search engines. If so, I wonder if those search engines 
then can become an entry point to the data. I also have not seen mention 
of a SPARQL end point for searching the database, but I probably haven't 
encountered all of the technical information.

kc

On 6/24/12 6:22 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Mathias Schindler
> <mathias.schindler at gmail.com <mailto:mathias.schindler at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 5:08 AM, todd.d.robbins at gmail.com
>     <mailto:todd.d.robbins at gmail.com>
>     <todd.d.robbins at gmail.com <mailto:todd.d.robbins at gmail.com>> wrote:
>      > Just a few links to go with the fabulous news:
>      >
>      > http://www.oclc.org/us/en/news/releases/2012/201238.htm
>      >
>     http://dataliberate.com/2012/06/oclc-worldcat-linked-data-release-significant-in-many-ways/
>      > http://www.essepuntato.it/lode/http://purl.org/library/
>      > http://www.oclc.org/data.html
>      >
>
>     OCLC later released a statement that there won't be a data dump of the
>     ODC-by-licensed data for what they describe as technical reasons.
>
>
>  From (4) in the Open Defintions I quote:
>
>
>       4. Absence of Technological Restriction
>
> The work must be provided in such a form that there are no technological
> obstacles to the performance of the above activities. This can be
> achieved by the provision of the work in an open data format, i.e. one
> whose specification is publicly and freely available and which places no
> restrictions monetary or otherwise upon its use.
>
> I am not familiar with the details of what OCLC is releasing but it I
> would have thought the provider had a duty to make it possible to access
> all the content in some way (dumps and iterators are the two things that
> come to mind). Do OCLC give an indication of how to get all the data?
> Because simply saying "our data is Open but you can't get it" isn't
> really Open.
>
> I have some sympathy for data providers as I have had to create a set of
> crawlers to download Open Data that I have collected. It's a non-trivial
> problem.
>
>
>     Mathias
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     open-bibliography mailing list
>     open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
>     <mailto:open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org>
>     http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography
>
>
>
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-bibliography mailing list
> open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet