The Danish National Bibliography as LOD

Presentation forCATALOGUING & INDEXING GROUP IN

SCOTLAND2nd Linked Open Data Conference

21st September 2012

Susanne Thorborg, Bibliographic consultant, DBC- Danish Bibliographic Centre

• DBC is a public limited company owned by the by Local Government Denmark and the state

• DBC produces the maily parts of The Danish National Bibliography (books, articles, audio, recorded music, images and movies) – the rest is produced by The Royal Library.

• DBC’s part of the national bibliography is produced according to a contract between the The Ministry of Culture and DBC

• operates and develops DanBib – the Danish Union Catalogue and superstructure system for the entire Danish library service

• operates and develops bibliotek.dk - the citizens’ OPAC to the Union Catalogue

DBC also …

Why do DBC take an interest in LOD?

Because

bibliographic development is a strategic goal for DBC

LOD has great perspectives for the library community

DBC's LOD project

The project's aim

Learning more about Linked Open Data

– in particular in the libraries

Getting practical experiences with publishing

bibliographic data as LOD

The approach

Learning by doing

Complete appplication - but in a small scale

Technical platform and tools "whatever means

available"

Reuse and test others experiences – not reinventing

the wheel

Agile process (Pragmatism rather than "100%" )

The preliminaries – some questions

Which licence?

How to go from MARC to RDF? (the data model)

Reuse of relevant vocabularies and element sets – which to

choose?

Serialization – what are we going to choose?

Converting – how, and with which tools?

Dereferenceable URIs – how?

Bridging and mapping – how do we find the "good" links?

How to publish our own data?

Which technical platform?

What we have done – the challenges

The data

The data model

Converting data from danMARC2 to RDF

Making outgoing links

Dereferenceable URIs

Publishing– Choice of licence– Basic RDF/XML on DBCsite– Load in triplestore (Mulgara)– Set up SPARQL interface

The data

Bibliographic records:– National bibliography, books 2010-

(Aprox. 47.000 records)

Authority records (names of persons):– Corresponding authority records

(Aprox. 27.000 records) NB! Test records!

The data model

Design a simpel RDF-data model for "books"

Choose suitable element sets

- and vocabularies

We looked at BL – but we could also have usedOpen metadata registry http://metadataregistry.org/

The data model version 2.0

Converting data from danMARC2 to RDF

Mapping danMARC2 to RDF

Converting tools

Publishing

Choice of licence

Basic testfiles (RDF/XML and turtle) on oss.dbc.dk

besides general information about the project

Link to Mulgara triplestore on lod.dbc.dk

Default SPARQL interface

What we haven't completed yet

Outgoing links– Choosing suitable dataset

• Viaf• DBpedia

– Tools for establishing links to other datasets wanted!

Dereferenceable URIs

Output from triple store in various formats

What's next?

Make URIs derefenceable

Outgoing links, outgoing links and outgoing links!

Expand the data model

Refining conversion to RDF

Automation of processes

Find another tripple-store

Share data on the Data Hub

… still a long way to go

Some lessons learned

Therefore

there is a great need for guidelines and recommendations

for best practice

stable and solid tools for linking between datasets are

wanted

it's a huge landscape and it's very easy to get lost

we also learned….

to appreciate other people's results and experiences

to break with our "100% syndrome"

Thank you for your attention!

Contact: Susanne Thorborg – mail: st@dbc.dk