Re: Wikidata book schema

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

>
> I've looked at musicbrainz, which is more structured than many
> crowd-sourced sites. I also want to look at GoodReads and Librarything.
> I've done Open Library. Any other suggestions? Especially other non-book
> databases? I guess I should look at Europeana... ? what else?


I like the sites like GoodReads and Librarything as examples because
they've generally been modeled from scratch to meet a specific need without
a lot of preconceptions about what the right answer is.  They also strike a
different balances between detail/fidelity and work required by users.

Some other more specialty book sites include:

http://www.isfdb.org/ <http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi>
https://www.smalldemons.com/
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/<http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/fantasy/>

It's also interesting to see people attempt to support specific uses cases
which aren't well catered for by current bibliographic systems such as
books in series sites: http://nlc.nebraska.gov/ref/booksinseries2.aspx or
http://www.esequels.com/

In other media IMDB is an obvious choice for movies http://www.imdb.com/ but
I'd also investigate other more specialized schemas if you have time
(opera, theatre, etc).  (yes, I know this could be a never ending task!)

Another thing worth noting is that these things generally aren't static.  I
think MusicBrainz is on something like v3 of their schema.  Freebase
started with ISBNs on book editions, but split it off onto a separate type
after seeing the problems that it caused, and has done a number of similar
refactorings over the years.

If that doesn't keep you busy enough, here's a smattering of links for
different media cataloging (operas, scores, Broadway shows, etc)

http://www.classical.net/music/links/database.php
http://www.operabase.com/
http://imslp.org/
http://www.ibdb.com/
http://www.aria-database.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/programmes/2009-09-07.shtml

It seems like one day these specialty sites should be able to be built
using the standard cataloging schema(s).

Tom