Re: Brainstorming: Key Issues

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 5:46 PM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote:
> To answer the question on bulk access to VIAF, the current policy is that
> somebody needs to request it. So far, there hasn’t been significant demand
> for the RDF representation.

Where would be a good place to request it? I've had some offline
conversations with Thom Hickey where he said there were potentially
some licensing things to sort out before dumps could be made available
generally. I realize it can sometimes be computationally challenging
to dump a changing dataset like VIAF, and that there can be
significant costs to making dumps available.

An alternative could be something like a sitemap, like what OCLC uses
to provide access to crawlers of WorldCat [1]. This would make it
possible for crawlers to keep synchronized views of the data. We use
Atom in a similar way at id.loc.gov [2] since it has some facilities
for paging, indicating when records have been deleted, and linking out
to different representations (similar to how libraries have
traditionally used oai-pmh).

A nice side effect of a sitemap solution is that people will find
these troves of author information when they search for them [3]. As a
result the VIAF URLs will hopefully get referenced more in places like
Wikipedia, OpenLibrary, Freebase, etc. For me, this is what Library
Linked Data is all about ... using URLs as identifiers for the things
we care about in libraries.

//Ed

[1] http://www.worldcat.org/robots.txt
[2] http://id.loc.gov/robots.txt
[3] http://www.google.com/#q=site:viaf.org

Received on Monday, 28 February 2011 09:54:21 UTC