Aaron,

there has been talk about exposing the data in Open library as LOD, but 
the project is currently focused more on creating an interactive site 
for humans rather than a manipulable data store, although ideally those 
two could co-exist. Right now there is some linking to Wikipedia 
personal names but not to dbpedia (as far as I know, but things change 
quickly...) although as you know the Wikipedia link is just one short 
step away from dbpedia. The number of names in Wiki/db is relatively 
small, and the programmer working on the data manipulation, Edward 
Betts, has found about 80K matches. Compared to the number of names in 
the LC name authorities file that is really small. I would like to make 
the link from the names in the bib records to the LCNA records to pick 
up those record numbers as identifiers. No one wants to use the "library 
form" in name displays, so without those identifiers we will lose the 
uniqueness that name authority provides. Presumably, LCNA will 
eventually be online and the data could be linked, thus picking up 
alternative name forms. Similar experimentation is being done with place 
names from subject headings.

The OL group has talked about linking to id.loc.gov, but in fact  the 
project folks are mainly interested in getting away from the LCSH 
structuring of subjects. I admit that I find it hard to defend LCSH in 
the discussions about subjects and subject searching. ;-) I wish that we 
had better access to both LC and Dewey classifications: the class 
numbers, what they mean in words, and how they link to subject headings.

For anyone who wants to use the OL as simply data, there is a full 
database dump done periodically, which you can find here:
   http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/jsondump

I don't know much about it, but there is work being done with these 
dumps at http://ol.dataincubator.org/

On another note, since the whole data set is quite large, one of the 
current efforts is to make it possible to identify collections that 
could be downloaded as sets of metadata or harvested using OAI. We might 
be able to find better uses for those collections than for the entire db 
which, as is the case with most large bibliographic databases, has a 
fair amount of chaff for any given definition of wheat.

kc

Aaron Rubinstein wrote:
> Thanks, Karen, this is a really exciting development.
>
> I was wondering, though, whether there is a plan to link any of the 
> Open Library data with existing linked data sets, for example: 
> dbpedia.org for authors/titles and id.loc.gov for subjects?  I realize 
> that exposing data in RDF and exposing linked open data do not 
> necessarily need to be synonymous but the richness of the Open Library 
> data set begs the question.
>
> Thanks again!
>
> Aaron
>


-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
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fx.: 510-848-3913
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