On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Tim Spalding <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I think OL is torn between a number of ideas, one being a "web page
>  for every book, some with scans" and another being a free, open
>  fielded wiki for cataloging data.
>
>  I find the former pretty uninteresting. We don't need Wikipedia again.
>  And when it comes to scans, Google's different—and I think
>  correct—approach to scanning in-copyright works is the killer ap.

I think there is still a lot of potential to make machine readable
metadata available at the same URIs that provide human readable
bibliographic descriptions. For example if you could:

  curl --header "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://worldcat.org/oclc/122291427
  curl --header "Accept: application/rdf+xml"
http://www.librarything.com/work/2275491

and take the resulting graphs and merge them, compare them, etc... And
make assertions like:

  <http://worldcat.org/oclc/122291427> rdfs:seeAlso
http://www.librarything.com/work/2275491 .

I think this is an area where OpenLibrary can afford to experiment a
bit, and break new ground--without having to worry (like you and OCLC)
about a business model.

//Ed