On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 7:14 AM, James Bridle <[email protected]> wrote: > Ruminating on this, and data harmonisation: > > http://blog.foursquare.com/2011/03/14/1up-the-importance-of-platforms-and-how-we%E2%80%99re-extending-ours/
I loved this quote: "we have one of the largest ‘rights-free’ databases in the world." Apparently they were using HUGE finger quotes around the "rights-free" piece, because when you read the terms and conditions, it's COMPLETELY proprietary with absolutely no ability to reuse the data. >> Are there many other third party ids for works? The only other one I can >> think of is a Wikipedia URL - but that's perhaps a link rather than an ID? >> (though again it'd be useful to be able to do reverse-lookups from links). >> Most ids seem to be at the edition level. > > LibraryThing work numbers are a good existing thing - I tried to use them on > bkkeepr. OL can certainly do better. Not sure about links. In addition to LibraryThing and OpenLibrary, there's also Freebase. I'm sure OCLC has something too, although their primary products are based around traditional library cataloging (ie editions). Of course all four of these sources, plus the others that I'm sure exist, have derived their works data independently and without coordination. A wasteful practice if there ever was one. Freebase books (works) have Wikipedia IDs for the small fraction of books which are in Wikipedia. They are not linked to OL works because all the OL works creation was done later, and separately. Freebase book editions have OL IDs and ISBNs. Freebase authors have IDs for Wikipedia, OL, VIAF, NYT, IMDB, NNDB, U.S. Congress (THOMAS), Library of Congress (LCNA), MusicBrainz (audio books/narrations), and more. Look at the right hand "Web IDs" section of this example http://www.freebase.com/edit/topic/en/ted_kennedy OpenLibrary data can be freely reused, Freebase requires attribution, and LibraryThing is restricted to non-commercial uses (meaning it can't be mixed into either of the previous two). Tom _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
