OCLC Exposes Bibliographic Works Data as Linked Open Data

– Blog post by Roy Tennant, OCLC Research

At the OCLC Europe, Middle East and Africa Regional Council (EMEARC) Meeting today in Cape Town, South Africa, my colleagues Richard Wallis and Ted Fons made an announcement that should make all library coders and data geeks leap to their feet. I certainly did, and I work here. However, viewed from our perspective this is simply another step along a road that we set out on some time ago. More on that later, but first to the big news:

1. We have established "work records" for bibliographic records in WorldCat, which bring together the sometimes numerous manifestations of a work into one logical entity.
2. We are exposing these records as linked open data on the web, with permanent identifiers that can be used by other linked data aggregations.
3. We have provided a human readable interface to these records, to enable and encourage understanding and use of this data.

Read the full blog post here.