Thanks Karen! I've got no shortage of ideas, but rather time to implement them. :-)
Richard - can you refresh our memory as to which topics you brought up that didn't attract attention/comment? The only recent one I see is merging authors and I replied to that. As for enhancing author records, I think that's a great idea, but, in my mind, cleaning them up first is a higher priority. We still have tens of thousands of duplicate records. If you look at the activity for yesterday http://openlibrary.org/recentchanges/merge-authors you can see the hundreds of author records I got rid of. In many cases they don't even show up easily in search because our search engine hasn't been taught to do diacritic folding. Linking authors to Wikipedia is a great idea, but we've got a much more direct way of doing that than looking them up by name. There are hundreds of thousands of them already linked to Freebase -- and from there to VIAF, Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, NY Times, etc. We can simply look them up by OL ID in Freebase to get all this information. Tom p.s. If author/work links aren't included in the RDF, that sounds like just a plain bug that should be added to the issue tracker. On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 4:47 AM, 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). > > 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: > > - 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. It > should also include Wikipedia identifiers where these are present in the > data > - 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 > > 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. > Richard > > > On 31/08/2013 04:40, Karen Coyle wrote: > > I added a new community page for ideas: > http://openlibrary.org/community/ideas > > I have seeded it with two of my favorites: > 1) making it easy to add new books (similar to LibraryThing's book add) > 2) ideas for keeping OL up to date with Library of Congress > > kc > > > -- > *Richard Light* > > _______________________________________________ > 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] >
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