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Connecting library metadata with linked data 'in the wild' is a central goal of the LD4L project. To that end much of the ontology team's work has focused on identifying external authorities, stable identifiers (preferably URIs), and sources and services capable of linking the people, places, organizations, events, and subject headings in library metadata to real world entities. In some cases existing metadata in both MARC and non-MARC metadata includes references to local or external authorities, but the vast majority of potentially identifiable entities are represented only as strings of characters. Some of our catalog records have been linked to Library of Congress, OCLC (including the VIAF international authority file), or ISNI identifiers through contracts or internal record enhancement projects, and an unrelated project at Harvard has focused on entity recognition within Encode Archival Description collections. A need to extend from authority file links or a registry of named entities to resolvable URIs compatible with linked data has motivated several LD4L investigations, with some focusing on quality and others more on the efficacy of existing services.
- Common Ground: Exploring Compatibilities Between the Linked Data Models of the Library of Congress and OCLC / Jean Godby and Ray Denenberg. This provides a high-level comparison between the LoC BIBFRAME approach and the work that OCLC has been doing on expressing bibliographic metadata in Schema.org.
- The Relationship between BIBFRAME and the OCLC's Linked-Data Model of Bibliographic Description: A Working Paper. Carol Jean Godby, Senior Research Scientist, OCLC Research, September, 2013. PDF
- ISNI
- Library of Congress
- VIAF
Converting MARC to RDF
For MARC metadata, the team has worked with the Library of Congress BIBFRAME converter as a central component in a workflow that may include pre-processing to address variations in local MARC cataloging practice and in most cases will also require post-processing to produce data ready for consumption and interoperability with other linked data on the Web. While the conversions to BIBFRAME of a range of some 30 record types have been explored in concert with technical services staff at our three libraries, the ontology team has focused primarily on the availability and representation of data pertinent to the LD4L use cases rather than analyzing converter output across the board to ascertain completeness and correctness.
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