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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 > -- ----------------------------------- Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant [log in to unmask] http://www.kcoyle.net ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet fx.: 510-848-3913 mo.: 510-435-8234 ------------------------------------