WorldCat Works Linked Data – Some Answers To Early Questions by Richard Wallis.
The most interesting question Richard answers:
Q Is there a bulk download available?
No there is no bulk download available. This is a deliberate decision for several reasons.
Firstly this is Linked Data – its main benefits accrue from its canonical persistent identifiers and the relationships it maintains between other identified entities within a stable, yet changing, web of data. WorldCat.org is a live data set actively maintained and updated by the thousands of member libraries, data partners, and OCLC staff and processes. I would discourage reliance on local storage of this data, as it will rapidly evolve and become out of synchronisation with the source. The whole point and value of persistent identifiers, which you would reference locally, is that they will always dereference to the current version of the data.
I will give you one guess on who is deciding on the entities, identifiers and relationships to be maintained.
Hint: It’s not you.
Which in my view is one of the principal weaknesses of Linked Data.
In order to participate, you have to forfeit your right to organize your world differently than it has been organized by Richard Wallis, WorldCat and others.
I am sure they all have good intentions and WorldCat will come close enough for most of my purposes, but I’m not interested in a one world view, whoever agrees with it. Even me.
If you are good with graphics, take the original Apple commercial:
and reverse it.
Show users and screen of vivid diversity and show a Richard Wallis look alike touching the side of the projection screen and the uniform grayness of linked data starts to spread across it. As it does, the users in the audience who have been in traditional dress start to look like the starting audience in Apple’s 1984 commercial.
That’s the intellectual landscape that linked data promises. Do you really want to go there?
Nothing against standards, I have helped write one or two them. But I do oppose uniformity for the sake of empowering self-appointed guardians.
Particularly when that uniformity is a tepid grey that doesn’t reflect the rich and discordant hues of human intellectual history.