Two Huge Linked Data Announcements

This week we have announced two major initiatives that are now providing significant library linked data resources to the world. First was the announcement yesterday that all of the 23rd Edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification has been released on the web as linked data. From the announcement:

All assignable classes from DDC 23, the current full edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification, have been released as Dewey linked data. As was the case for the Abridged Edition 14 data, we define “assignable” as including every schedule number that is not a span or a centered entry, bracketed or optional, with the hierarchical relationships adjusted accordingly. In short, these are numbers that you find attached to many WorldCat records as standard Dewey numbers (in 082 fields), as additional Dewey numbers (in 083 fields), or as number components (in 085 fields).

Second was today’s announcement that we have now added Schema.org descriptive markup. as well as draft set of library extensions, to all of WorldCat. From the press release:

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.

For more information, see “Linked Data at OCLC”. Please keep in mind that these efforts are beginning steps. We will be reviewing the feedback we receive and likely making changes as opportunities to improve present themselves. For example, we are working to pull together a group of institutions that can collaborate on establishing a set of extensions to the Schema.org elements. A very beginning draft is available, but it will likely go through many changes as others become more closely involved. We welcome your participation.

Follow-up addendum: We’ve had several folks ask about data dumps relative to the WorldCat.org linked data announcement. Adding Schema.org linked data to WorldCat.org is, for the time being, an experiment that we’re putting out there in order to garner feedback and get some early usage results. We expect our model to change; because of that, we’re not publishing any bulk downloads of the data at this time.

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