Concordance, Reconciliation, and shared identifiers

Hi,

The announcement of that the Guardian has begun cataloguing other
identifiers (e.g. ISBN, Musicbrainz) within its API [1] is a nice
illustration that the importance of cross-linking between datasets is
starting to become more generally accepted. Setting aside the debate
about what constitutes "linked data", I think its important that this
community tracks these various initiatives to help explore the
trade-offs between different approaches, as well as to build bridges
with the wider developer community.

A great project would be for someone to produce a Linked Data wrapper
for the Guardian API, that allows linking *in* to their data, based on
ISBNs and MusicBrainz ids. Its on my TODO list, but then so is a lot
of other stuff ;)

If we look back a few months we can see signs of the importance of
cross-linking appearing in other projects. Google Refine (nee Freebase
Gridworks) has the notion of a "reconcilication service" that is used
to build and set links [2]. Yahoo meanwhile have their "concordance"
service [3, 4] which is basically a sameAs.org service for building
cross-links between geo data.

Again, it would be interesting to build bridges between different
communities by showing how one can achieve the same effects with
Linked Data, as well as integrating Linked Data into those services by
providing gateways services, e.g. implementing the same API but backed
by RDF. This is what I did for the Gridworks, but the same could be
extended to other services.

Cheers,

L.

[1]. http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/blog/linked-data-open-platform
[2]. http://www.ldodds.com/blog/2010/08/gridworks-reconciliation-api-implementation/
[3]. http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/04/05/yahoos-new-geo-concordance-a-geographic-rosetta-stone/
[4]. http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/guide/api-reference.html#api-concordance

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Programme Manager, Talis Platform
Talis
leigh.dodds@talis.com
http://www.talis.com

Received on Friday, 22 October 2010 15:47:54 UTC