Today’s announcement about WorldCat and linked data follows Monday’s news that DDC 23 (Dewey Decimal Classification had been released as linked data.
Now, today’s news.
OCLC is taking the first step toward adding linked data to WorldCat by appending Schema.org descriptive mark-up to WorldCat.org pages. WorldCat.org now offers the largest set of linked bibliographic data on the Web. With the addition of Schema.org mark-up to all book, journal and other bibliographic resources in WorldCat.org, the entire publicly available version of WorldCat is now available for use by intelligent Web crawlers, like Google and Bing, that can make use of this metadata in search indexes and other applications.
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Commercial developers that rely on Web-based services have been exploring ways to exploit the potential of linked data. The Schema.org initiative—launched in 2011 by Google, Bing and Yahoo! and later joined by Yandex—provides a core vocabulary for markup that helps search engines and other Web crawlers more directly make use of the underlying data that powers many online services.
OCLC is working with the Schema.org community to develop and add a set of vocabulary extensions to WorldCat data. Schema.org and library specific extensions will provide a valuable two-way bridge between the library community and the consumer Web. Schema.org is working with a number of other industries to provide similar sets of extensions for other specific use cases.
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“Schema.org introduces an important new standard,” said Richard Wallis, OCLC Technology Evangelist. “Making library information compatible with the rich data sources now being published widely on the Web will establish libraries as a major hub in the linked data universe. This enhancement demonstrates the WorldShare Platform vision by exposing rich bibliographic and authority data on behalf of OCLC member libraries.”
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OCLC sees Schema.org as a timely and significant development toward linked data technology adoption that will provide recognizable benefits for libraries. “OCLC Research has been a lead participant in putting semantic structure in the Web for many years,” according to Jeff Young, OCLC Software Architect. “Schema.org gives us a search engine-friendly vocabulary to describe our complex data environment. It conveniently allows various communities to join authoritative sources on the web, such as Dewey, VIAF and FAST headings, using the same structures.”
Read the Complete Announcement
Direct to OCLC Linked Data Page
Example of Linked Data From WorldCat.org For Bossypants by Tina Fey (Click to Go to WorldCat Record)
About Gary Price
