data.bnf.fr : a first version is now online

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (French national Library, BnF) just 
released a first version of "data.bnf.fr": http://data.bnf.fr

Data.bnf.fr is a web application, aiming at publishing and sharing our 
library data in new ways.
Our project is to gather data from our different databases, so as to 
create Web pages about Works and Authors, together with a RDF view on the 
extracted data.

To do so, we extracted and gathered records from our library catalogue, 
authority files, manuscripts catalogue and digital library (
http://gallica.bnf.fr). The legacy data was injected (from MARC, EAD and 
OAI-DC) into a FRBR-like model, focusing on the author and work concepts.

Following the principles of linked data, we make available our data on the 
web as structured data, in open formats, with URL identifiers, and links 
to external resources. We explained it in the W3C "Library and Linked 
Data" use case http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/Use_Case_Data_BNF
.. The application was built from the open source software CubicWeb.

As a result, you can browse a first corpus of around 1500 authors and 3500 
works of French litterature (as yet), such as :
http://data.bnf.fr/12413832/jules_verne_la_chasse_au_meteore
whose RDF is :
http://data.bnf.fr/12413832/jules_verne_la_chasse_au_meteore/rdf.xml
The same page can be accessed in RDF-XML, NT or N3. We also provide 
content negociation.
There are links to id.loc.gov for languages and nationalities, dewey.info 
for subjects, DCMI type for types.

Of course, this is still an evolving application. In particular, please 
keep in mind that we are working on the data model, and that it is refined 
as we get feedback from our early users.

Feel free to contact us at data@bnf.fr, any feedback is very welcome.

All best,

Romain Wenz
Département de l'Information Bibliographique et Numérique
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Quai François Mauriac
75706 Paris cedex 13
33 (0)1 53 79 37 39
To contact the team: data@bnf.fr
Exposition  Enluminures en terre d?Islam entre abstraction et figuration  - jusqu'au 25 septembre 2011 - BnF - Richelieu / Galerie Mansart Avant d'imprimer, pensez à l'environnement.