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