Graham,

I'd advocate using WorldCat Identities to get to the appropriate url
for dbpedia. Each Identity record has a wikipedia element in it that
you could use to link to either Wikipedia or dbpedia.

If you want to see an example of this in action you can check out the
Author Info demo I did for code4lib 2010 here -
http://www.librarywebchic.net/mashups/author_info/info_about_this_author.php?OCLCNum=32939031

The code for this demo is available for download at -
http://www.worldcat.org/devnet/code/devnetDemos/trunk/

You'll want the author_info folder and identity_info.php

Karen

Karen A. Coombs
Product Manager
OCLC Developer Network
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On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 4:40 AM, graham <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I need to be able to take author data from a catalogue record and use it
> to look up the author on Wikipedia on the fly. So I may have birth date
> and possibly year of death in addition to (one spelling of) the name,
> the title of one book the author wrote etc.
>
> I know there are various efforts in progress that will improve the
> current situation, but as things stand at the moment what is the best*
> way to do this?
>
> 1. query wikipedia for as much as possible, parse and select the best
> fitting result
>
> 2. go via dbpedia/freebase and work back from there
>
> 3. use VIAF and/or OCLC services
>
> 4. Other?
>
> (I have no experience of 2-4 yet :-(
>
>
> Thanks
> Graham
> * 'best' being constrained by:
> - need to do this in real-time
> - need to avoid dependence on services which may be taken away
> or charged for
> - being able to justify to librarians as reasonably accurate :-)
>