Richard Wallis of DataLiberate recently wrote, “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 summer 2012 was a bit of a watershed for Linked Data in the library world.  Over the preceding few years we have had various national libraries publishing linked data (British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Deutsche National Bibliothek, National Library of Sweden, to name just a few). 

He goes on, “We have had linked data published versions of authority files such as LCSH, RAMEAU, National Diet Library, plus OCLC hosted services such as VIAF, FAST, and Dewey.  These plus many other initiatives have lead me to conclude that we are moving to the next stage – for instance the British Library and Deutsche Nationalbibliothek are starting to cross-link their data, and the Library of Congress BIBFRAME initiative is starting to expose some of its [very linked data] thinking. Of course the other major initiative was that publication of Linked Data, using Schema.org, from within OCLC’s WorldCat.org, both as RDFa embedded in WorldCat detail pages, and in a download file containing the 1.2 million most highly held works.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Schema.org