Content-Negotiation for WorldCat by Richard Wallis.
From the post:
I am pleased to share with you a small but significant step on the Linked Data journey for WorldCat and the exposure of data from OCLC.
Content-negotiation has been implemented for the publication of Linked Data for WorldCat resources.
For those immersed in the publication and consumption of Linked Data, there is little more to say. However I suspect there are a significant number of folks reading this who are wondering what the heck I am going on about. It is a little bit techie but I will try to keep it as simple as possible.
Back last year, a linked data representation of each (of the 290+ million) WorldCat resources was imbedded in it’s web page on the WorldCat site. For full details check out that announcement but in summary:
- All resource pages include Linked Data
- Human visible under a Linked Data tab at the bottom of the page
- Embedded as RDFa within the page html
- Described using the Schema.org vocabulary
- Released under an ODC-BY open data license
That is all still valid – so what’s new from now?
That same data is now available in several machine readable RDF serialisations. RDF is RDF, but dependant on your use it is easier to consume as RDFa, or XML, or JSON, or Turtle, or as triples.
In many Linked Data presentations, including some of mine, you will hear the line “As I clicked on the link a web browser we are seeing a html representation. However if I was a machine I would be getting XML or another format back.” This is the mechanism in the http protocol that makes that happen.
I use WorldCat often. It enables readers to search for a book at their local library or to order online.