Hi Richard, On 31 August 2013 10:47, Richard Light <[email protected]> wrote: > I'll chip in here, rather than adding to your page, because I would like to > get some feedback from the list as to whether I'm out on a limb here (given > the lack of response to my last couple of posts).
Not trying to be annoying, but I only found one recent post by you, which got response on the ol-tech list (since the topic was a bit technical). > > I would like the author information in OL to be better, and to be > better-connected. Authors are people too (allegedly) and they offer a > possibility, maybe the only possibility, of cross-linking OL to other > (non-bibliographic) Linked Data resources. Obviously there's a trade-off > here, in that we don't want to put contributors off by being too demanding, > but: Authors in OL may also be corporate entities (government bodies, corporations, NGOs), conferences or group pseudonyms (although those are more rare). There is no difference in the data yet, except for a few records. > > the RDF provided for authors could make better use of the information > currently available. For a start, it should include a list of "is author of > X" statements to link them to their works within OL. Agreed. In the Work RDF there are links to Editions, so it's possible. I already proposed some changes to the RDF output some time ago: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/pull/136 but this was not in it. > It should also include > Wikipedia identifiers where these are present in the data By 'identifiers', did you mean URLs? There are Wikipedia URLs ("Links") for some people. Some records include a special "wikipedia" field. > with a little gentle encouragement, we could make the author birth and death > date information usable in a machine-processing sense. Most dates are > already useful as entered, despite the lack of guidelines > we could enable the (structured) recording of place of birth and death. > There are a handful of these in the data already, crammed in on the end of > the date field A bot should try to parse the dates and put these in the records in a separate field (e.g. "date_of_birth_parsed"). The contents of this field can then be transformed to an xsd:date value in RDF. > > Author names could be looked up on dbpedia, and if there is an existing > entry (a) the link can be included in the OL data and (b) details like > DoB/PoB can be copied from that source into the OL data. It is debatable whether that is allowed in accordance with the CC-BY-SA licence that Wikipedia and DBpedia use, although we're not too strict on the enforcement and don't use a less strict licence on the OL data. Looking up a name in DBpedia could be challenging, but experimenting is easy when you already have both datasets downloaded in dump files. > > Richard Ben _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list - [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
