Worldcat does have the "basic" API, which is "more" "open" (assuming your
situation qualifies). At any rate, it's free and open to (non-commercial)
non-subscribers.

http://oclc.org/developer/documentation/worldcat-basic-api/using-api

Searching isn't terribly sophisticated, but might suit your need. And the
schema.org data will be much richer than what you'd normally get back from
the Basic API.

-Ross.


On Tuesday, July 10, 2012, Karen Coyle wrote:

> On 7/10/12 4:02 PM, Richard Wallis wrote:
>
>>
>> But is it available to everyone, and is the data retrieved also usable as
>> ODC-BY by any member of the Web public?
>>
>> Yes it is, and at this stage it is only available from within a html page.
>>
>
> The "it" I was referring to was the API. Roy is telling me that people
> should use the API, as if that is an obvious option that I am overlooking.
> I am asking if the general web public can use the API to get this data. I
> believe that should be a yes/no question/answer.
>
> kc
>
>
> This experiment is the first step in a process to make linked data about
> WorldCat resources available.  As it will evolve over time other areas such
> as API access, content-negotiation, search & other query methods,
> additional RDF data vocabularies, etc., etc., will be considered in concert
> with community feedback (such as this thread) as to the way forward.
>
> Karen I know you are eager to work with and demonstrate the benefits of
> this way of publishing data.  But these things take time and effort, so
> please be a little patient, and keep firing off these use cases and issues
> they are all valuable input.
>
> ~Richard.
>
>
> kc
>
>
>   Roy
>
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Kevin Ford <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>  The use case clarifies perfectly.
>
> Totally feasible.  Well, I should say "totally feasible" with the caveat
> that I've never used the Worldcat Search API.  Not letting that stop me,
> so
> long as it is what I imagine it is, then a developer should be able to
> perform a search, retrieve the response, and, by integrating one of the
> tools advertised on the schema.org website into his/her code, then
> retrieve
> the microdata for each resource returned from the search (and save it as
> RDF
> or whatever).
>
> If someone has created something like this, do speak up.
>
> Yours,
>
> Kevin
>
>
>
>
>
> On 07/10/2012 04:48 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>
>  Kevin, if you misunderstand then I undoubtedly haven't been clear (let's
> at least share the confusion :-)). Here's the use case:
>
> PersonA wants to create a comprehensive bibliography of works by
> AuthorB. The goal is to do a search on AuthorB in WorldCat and extract
> the RDFa data from those pages in order to populate the bibliography.
>
> Apart from all of the issues of getting a perfect match on authors and
> of manifestation duplicates (there would need to be editing of the
> results after retrieval at the user's end), how feasible is this? Assume
> that the author is prolific enough that one wouldn't want to look up all
> of the records by hand.
>
> kc
>
> On 7/10/12 1:43 PM, Kevin Ford wrote:
>
>  As for someone who might want to do this programmatically, he/she
> should take a look at the "Programming languages" section of the
> second link I sent along:
>
> http://schema.rdfs.org/tools.****html<http://schema.rdfs.org/tools.**html>
> <http://schema.rdfs.org/**tools.html <http://schema.rdfs.org/tools.html>>
>
> There one can find Ruby, Python, and Java extractors and parsers
> capable of outputting RDF.  A developer can take one of these and
> programmatically get at the data.
>
> Apologies if I am misunderstanding your intent.
>
> Yours,
>
> Kevin
>
>
>
> On 07/10/2012 04:34 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>
>  Thanks, Kevin! And Richard!
>
> I'm thinking we need a good web site with links to tools. I had
> already
> been introduced to
>
> http://www.w3.org/2012/pyRdfa/
>
> where you can past a URI and get ttl or rdf/xml. These are all good
> resources. But what about someone who wants to do this
> programmatically,
> not through a web site? Richard's message indicates that this isn't
> yet
> available, so perhaps we should be gathering use cases to support the
> need? And have a place to post various solutions, even ones that are
> not
> OCLC-specific? (Because I am hoping that the use of microformats will
> increase in general.)
>
> kc
>
>
> On 7/10/12 12:12 PM, Kevin Ford wrote:
>
>  is there an open search to get one to the desired records in the
> first
>
>  place?
>
>  -- I'm not certain this will fully address your question, but try
> these two sites:
>
> Website: <http://www.google.com/**webmasters/tools/richsnippets>
>
>