Linked Data Activities at OCLC Ralph LeVan Senior Research Scientist OCLC Research

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/20112 Brief Overview of Linked (Open) Data Its about the Links Its about the Openness Its about the Data And there are some infrastructure requirements too

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/20113 Its about the Links Books Classification numbers People Subject headings

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/20114 Its about the Openness What sort of license is the data available in?

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/20115 Its about the Data <rdf:Description rdf:about=" <rdf:type rdf:resource= " <rdf:type rdf:resource= " Mozziconacci, Jean-Franc ̧ ois

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/20116 infrastructure Real World Objects 303 (See Other) redirects to Generic Objects Content negotiation from Generic Objects RDF available

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/20117 Dewey It should be simple: Browsers get redirected to: RDF clients get redirected to:

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/20118 But the DDC has a long complex history What language did you want? What edition did you want? In what language? In what format?

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/20119 Virtual International Authority File: VIAF It is blissfully simple compared to Dewey! Generates a 303 redirect to: Where content negotiation will get you either:

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ Elegant (but incomplete) Data <rdf:Description rdf:about=" <rdf:type rdf:resource= " <rdf:type rdf:resource= " Mozziconacci, Jean-Franc ̧ ois

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ Mozziconacci, Jean-Franc ̧ ois

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ FAST Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, subject headings Another elegant URI pattern

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ But, a work in progress No RDF (but existing SKOS shows it wont be hard) Camped on the tspilot.oclc.org domain

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ Not WorldCat Identities Why not? Limited product development resources No customer demand What do you mean no customer demand?!?! Our library customers prefer MARC or simple XML instead of RDF The potential consumers who want Identities as linked data expect to get it for free

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group Andy Houghton Tod Matola Michael Panzer Jeff Young The mission of the group is to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web, by bringing together people involved in Semantic Web activitiesfocusing on Linked Datain the library community and beyond

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ Open Source Infrastructure Our VIAF interface technology is available as Open Source at It provides the ability to expose records stored in Lucene (or a similar database) as Linked Data Other technologies (such as D2R) are available for data in relational databases

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ Turning Content into Links If Linked Data is about links, then how do you turn your content into links? Google Refine and the ReconciliationServiceAPI Refine takes spreadsheets of data and supplements that data with links It uses the ReconciliationServiceAPI to query a database and get back links Think of OpenURL for the Linked Data world

Ralph LeVan – ALAO TEDSIG – 5/27/ Poised for success OCLC has the data, the infrastructure and the knowledge to participate in the Linked Data world.