The Linked Open British National Bibliography
Neil WilsonHead, Metadata Services
Making the Most of MetadataFebruary 12 2014
© The British Library Board
2014
www.bl.uk 2
BL Metadata Provision
• The BL Act records our role as “ a national centre for reference, study and bibliographical and other information services”
• Metadata Services:
• Originally offered priced services for national & international libraries
• Evolved through many changes in format & delivery technologies
• Offered free services from 2010 as part of the BL’s new open metadata strategy
www.bl.uk 3
BL Open Metadata Strategy
Aims:
• Enable innovation - without unnecessary barriers
• Break from library - formats & use cross domain standards
• Obtain attribution - while offering permissive licensing
Offerings for:
• Libraries - MARC21/Z39.50
• Researchers - RDF/XML & .CSV
• Linked data developers - RDF Triples/SPARQL
www.bl.uk 4
BL Open Metadata
• Over 1040 organisations in 98 countries now use BL Open Data services
• Collaborated with Microsoft Research, W3C, UK Government, & developers on technical, standards & license challenges
• Linked Open BNB• Cabinet Office best practice exemplar
• Selected for inclusion in UK National Information Infrastructure (NII)
• Open Data Institute certification
• 2 million transactions monthly
www.bl.uk 5
What is the British National Bibliography?
The BNB:
• Covers books & new journals published or distributed in the UK & Ireland since 1950
• Describes popular and research level publications:
• For adults & children
• On all subjects
• In all languages of publication
• Includes nearly 3.5 million entries
© Waldir/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA-3.0
www.bl.uk 6
Why Create the Open BNB?
A reusable dataset of published items & not an institutional catalogue
Permissive License – can offer as CC0
Includes information on: People Places Dates Subjects
Consistent format & structure
Reflects over 60 years of contemporary UK interests
www.bl.uk 7
Linking
To give BNB data broader context we linked to:
• General resources:• GeoNames
• Lexvo
• RDF Book Mashup
• Library resources:• LCSH
• VIAF
• Dewey.info
www.bl.uk 8
RDF Vocabularies
Bibliographic Resource• Dublin Core• Bibliographic Ontology• ISBD• British Library Terms
Event• Event Ontology• British Library Terms
Place• WGS84 Geo Positioning
Person/Organization• FOAF: Friend of a Friend• Bio: a Vocabulary for
Biographical Information• Org: an Organisation
Ontology• RDA
Concept• SKOS• British Library Terms
www.bl.uk 9
BNB Data Model Publication as Event
@prefix dc:<http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix dcterms:<http://purl.org/dc/terms> .
<BibResource> dc:publisher “Publisher” ;
dcterms:issued “Date” ;
?:placeOfPublication “Place” .
@prefix blt:<http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#> .
@prefix event:<http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#> .
<BibResource> blt:publication <PublicationEvent> .
<PublicationEvent> event:place <Place> ;
event:agent <Publisher> ;
event:time <Year> .
Usual approach
Event-based approach
www.bl.uk 10
BNB Data Model Books
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/pdfs/bldatamodelbook.pdf
www.bl.uk 11
BNB Access Options
• BNB Basic RDF/XML DC dumps
• BNB Linked Open Datasets: • BNB Books• BNB Serials
…with VoID descriptions
• Updated monthly
• Outputs available:• RDF/XML• N-Triples• JSON
“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”
www.bl.uk 12
BNB Access Options
.
BNB 1950-2012 3.5 Million Records
98 Million Unique Triples
• bnb.data.bl.uk/sparql
• thedatahub.org/dataset/bluk-bnb-basic
• www.bl.uk/bibliographic/download.html
• bnb.data.bl.uk
www.bl.uk 13
Sample Querieshttp://bnb.data.bl.uk/getting-started
.
www.bl.uk 14
Uses of BNB Data
www.bl.uk 15
More info…
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html
http://bnb.data.bl.uk/faqs
http://bnb.data.bl.uk/getting-started
http://bnb.data.bl.uk/docs
http://twitter.com/#!/BLMetadata
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html
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