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

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Sample Querieshttp://bnb.data.bl.uk/getting-started

.

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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

metadata@bl.uk

http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html