On Friday, February 8, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Eric Franzon, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about libraries, an area that has seen a great deal of activity in the Linked Data space recently.

“The Linkers” were joined by a very special guest to discuss what’s been happening in the library world: Karen Coyle.
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Karen Coyle recently analyzed a new release of OCLC metadata records. She writes, “OCLC recently released a file of 1.2 million metadata records for the most widely held items in its catalog. These are all items with 250 library holdings or more. I created a list on WorldCat of the top 50, mostly out of curiosity. I was quite surprised at the results, however. Here’s how it breaks down: 16 periodicals, with Time and Newsweek being numbers 1 and 2, respectively; 29 kid and YA books, four of which (and very high even in this small list) from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series; 5 adult books.”

Coyle goes on, “The five adult books are: (1) McCullough, D. G. (1992). Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster. (2) Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci code: A novel. New York: Doubleday. (3) Johnson, S. (1998). Who moved my cheese?: An a-mazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life. New York: Putnam.  (4) Haley, A. (1976). Roots. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.  (5) Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence: Lessons from America’s best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row. This small set gives me many ideas of things to investigate in the full set.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy OCLC

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It continues, “You may have already seen the bookmarklet developed by OCLC Developer Network staff that show how to extract schema.org markup to send information to Goodreads or to a Patron Drive Acquisitions system that accepts data via OpenURL, or the bookmarklet that extracts author URIs and uses those to query VIAF for links to DBPedia. If not, you should definitely check those out.” continued…

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Created over the last four decades with the participation of thousands of member libraries, WorldCat is the world’s largest online registry of library collections. As the official press release states, “WorldCat.org now offers the largest set of linked bibliographic data on the Web. With the addition of Schema.org mark-up to all book, journal and other bibliographic resources in WorldCat.org, the entire publicly available version of WorldCat is now available for use by intelligent Web crawlers, like Google and Bing, that can make use of this metadata in search indexes and other applications.”

On the heels of the announcement earlier this week about Dewey Decimal Classifications also being available as Linked Data, this certainly marks an exciting week in the world of library information and the Semantic Web. However, this should also prove to be exciting for non-librarians, as these resources are now available beyond the world of library sciences.

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The OCLC has as a major asset Worldcat, a global catalog comprising the collections of more than 10,000 libraries and adding up to more than 258 million records and 1.8 billion-plus holdings, in traditional library metadata format. WorldCat.org is the publicly searchable view of their core data in library format based upon library records (Marc records). More semantic web-oriented is other work the OCLC been doing over the last couple of years, Wallis explains, including experiments with using RDF/Linked Data at viaf.org, where the Virtual International Authority File publishes authoritative descriptions of names or organizations, and something similar for the Dewey Decimal Classification system at dewey.info.

In his new role, Wallis will collaborate with members and facilitate projects with OCLC teams as libraries and the cooperative drive efforts to expose WorldCat data as linked data, and will represent OCLC and WorldCat to the global library and web/IT leader communities. The VIAF and Dewey projects certainly provided an opportunity for OCLC to see the benefit of linking things together. On top of that, “the climate for Linked Data and libraries has changed dramatically over the last 12 months,” Wallis says.

Interest was evident at the Linked Data in Libraries event he ran for Talis this past summer, for example, and efforts like the W3C’s Linked Data in Libraries interest group, the Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums work, the British Library’s work on the British National Bibliography as Linked Open Data, and the Library of Congress’s   Bibliographic Framework Initiative General Plan all are adding fuel to the fire.

The opportunity is there for the OCLC to take the lead on Linked Data in the somewhat fragmented library world as those organizations start to hear more and more about the concept. “Linked Data is starting to be something talked about in the library world, but like any other world, it’s still a bit of an enthusiast environment,” Wallis says. As he evangelizes to the library community what Linked Data is about – and to the web community about what the OCLC is doing with its chunk of data that is relevant to the wider Linked Data and Web of Data world – he hopes “to be in at the beginning of a process where those two communities come together to help come up with the best way of applying Linked Data principles to library data.”

In a statement announcing the appointment, Robin Murray, OCLC Vice President, Global Product Management, said, “Richard Wallis is a leader in Semantic Web and Linked Data technology, and we believe he will help the OCLC cooperative extend our efforts to help libraries move to Webscale.”

Data Liberate, the consultancy Wallis began upon leaving Talis, will continue as a personal blogging site. “I still have interest wider than the library community and I believe that those interests can keep me up to date with the wide world and advise my advice into the OCLC,” he says.

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