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The Journal of Economic Literature Classification Scheme (JEL) was created and is maintained by the American Economic Association. The AEA provides this widely used resource freely for scholarly purposes. Thanks to André Davids (KU Leuven), who has translated the originally English-only labels of the classification to French, Spanish and German, we provide a multi-lingual version of JEL. It's lastest version (as of 2017-01) is published in the formats RDFa and RDF download files. These formats and translations are provided "as is" and are not authorized by AEA. In order to make changes in JEL tracable more easily, we have created lists of inserted and removed JEL classes in the context of the skos-history project.

Wikidata is a large database, which connects all of the roughly 300 Wikipedia projects. Besides interlinking all Wikipedia pages in different languages about a specific item – e.g., a person -, it also connects to more than 1000 different sources of authority information.

The linking is achieved by a „authority control“ class of Wikidata properties. The values of these properties are identifiers, which unambiguously identify the wikidata item in external, web-accessible databases. The property definitions includes an URI pattern (called „formatter URL“). When the identifier value is inserted into the URI pattern, the resulting URI can be used to look up the authoritiy entry. The resulting URI may point to a Linked Data resource - as it is the case with the GND ID property. This, on the one hand, provides a light-weight and robust mechanism to create links in the web of data. On the other hand, these links can be exploited by every application which is driven by one of the authorities to provide additional data: Links to Wikipedia pages in multiple languages, images, life data, nationality and affiliations of the according persons, and much more.

Wikidata item for the Indian Economist Bina Agarwal, visualized via the SQID browser

Authors: Timo Borst, Konstantin Ott

In recent years, repositories for managing research data have emerged, which are supposed to help researchers to upload, describe, distribute and share their data. To promote and foster the distribution of research data in the light of paradigms like Open Science and Open Access, these repositories are normally implemented and hosted as stand-alone applications, meaning that they offer a web interface for manually uploading the data, and a presentation interface for browsing, searching and accessing the data. Sometimes, the first component (interface for uploading the data) is substituted or complemented by a submission interface from another application. E.g., in Dataverse or in CKAN data is submitted from remote third-party applications by means of data deposit APIs [1]. However the upload of data is organized and eventually embedded into a publishing framework (data either as a supplement of a journal article, or as a stand-alone research output subject to review and release as part of a ‘data journal’), it definitely means that this data is supposed to be made publicly available, which is often reflected by policies and guidelines for data deposit.

Authors: Timo Borst, Nils Witt

Since their beginnings, libraries and related cultural institutions were confident in the fact that users had to visit them in order to search, find and access their content. With the emergence and massive use of the World Wide Web and associated tools and technologies, this situation has drastically changed: if those institutions still want their content to be found and used, they must adapt themselves to those environments in which users expect digital content to be available. Against this background, the general approach of the EEXCESS project is to ‘inject’ digital content (both metadata and object files) into users' daily environments like browsers, authoring environments like content management systems or Google Docs, or e-learning environments. Content is not just provided, but recommended by means of an organizational and technical framework of distributed partner recommenders and user profiles. Once a content partner has connected to this framework by establishing an Application Program Interface (API) for constantly responding to the EEXCESS queries, the results will be listed and merged with the results of the other partners. Depending on the software component installed either on a user’s local machine or on an application server, the list of recommendations is displayed in different ways: from a classical, text-oriented list, to a visualization of metadata records.

Author: Arne Martin Klemenz

EconBiz – the search portal for Business Studies and Economics – was launched in 2002 as the Virtual Library for Economics and Business Studies. The project was initially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is developed by the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) with the support of the EconBiz Advisory Board and cooperation partners. The search portal aims to support research in and teaching of Business Studies and Economics with a central entry point for all kinds of subject-specific information and direct access to full texts [1].

As an addition to the main EconBiz service we provide several beta services as part of the EconBiz Beta sandbox. These service developments cover the outcome of research projects based on large-scale projects like EU Projects as well as small-scale projects e.g. in cooperation with students from Kiel University. Therefore, this beta service sandbox aims to provide a platform for testing new features before they might be integrated to the main service (proof of concept development) on the one hand, and it aims to provide a showcase for relevant project output from related projects on the other hand.

Wir freuen uns mitteilen zu können, dass wir den EconStor LOD-Datenset aktualisiert haben. Damit umfasst der Datenset mehr als 108k an mit URIs versehenen und teilweise mit externen Datensets verknüpften Metadaten, vor allem zu den STW- und JEL-Klassifikationen.

The "Integrated Authority File" (Gemeinsame Normdatei, GND) of the German National Library (DNB), the library networks of the German-speaking countries and many other institutions, is a widely recognized and used authority resource. The authority file comprises persons, institutions, locations and other entity types, in particular subject headings. With more than 134,000 concepts, organized in almost 500 subject categories, the subjects part - the former "Schlagwortnormdatei" (SWD) - is huge. That would make it a nice resource to stress-test SKOS tools - when it would be available in SKOS. A seminar at the DNB on requirements for thesauri on the Semantic Web (slides, in German) provided another reason for the experiment described below.

“What’s new?” and “What has changed?” are questions users of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), such as thesauri or classifications, ask when a new version is published. Much more so, when a thesaurus existing since the 1990s has been completely revised, subject area for subject area. After four intermediately published versions in as many consecutive years, ZBW's STW Thesaurus for Economics has been re-launched recently in version 9.0. In total, 777 descriptors have been added; 1,052 (of about 6,000) have been deprecated and in their vast majority merged into others. More subtle changes include modified preferred labels, or merges and splits of existing concepts.

Since STW has been published on the web in 2009, we went to great lengths to make change traceable: No concept and no web page has been deleted, everything from prior versions is still available. Following a presentation at DC-2013 in Lisbon, I've started the skos-history project, which aims to exploit published SKOS files of different versions for change tracking. A first beta implementation of Linked-Data-based change reports went live with STW 8.14, making use of SPARQL "live queries" (as described in a prior post). With the publication of STW 9.0, full reports of the changes are available. How do they work?

SPARQL queries are a great way to explore Linked Data sets - be it our STW with it's links to other vocabularies, the papers of our repository EconStor, or persons or institutions in economics as authority data. ZBW therefore offers since a long time public endpoints. Yet, it is often not so easy to figure out the right queries. The classes and properties used in the data sets are unknown, and the overall structure requires some exploration. Therefore, we have started collecting queries in our new SPARQL Lab, which are in use at ZBW, and which could serve as examples to deal with our datasets for others.

A major challenge was to publish queries in a way that allows not only their execution, but also their modification by users. The first approach to this was pre-filled HTML forms (e.g. http://zbw.eu/beta/sparql/stw.html). Yet that couples the query code with that of the HTML page, and with a hard-coded endpoint address. It does not scale to multiple queries on a diversity of endpoints, and it is difficult to test and to keep in sync with changes in the data sets. Besides, offering a simple text area without any editing support makes it quite hard for users to adapt a query to their needs.

And then came YASGUI, an "IDE" for SPARQL queries. Accompanied by the YASQE and YASR libraries, it offers a completely client-side, customable, Javascript-based editing and execution environment. Particular highlights from the libraries' descriptions include:

Large library collections, and more so portals or discovery systems aggregating data from diverse sources, face the problem of duplicate content. Wouldn't it be nice, if every edition of a work could be collected beyond one entry in a result set?

The WorldCat catalogue, provided by OCLC, holds more than 320 million bibliographic records. Since early in 2014, OCLC shares its 197 million work descriptions as Linked Open Data: "A Work is a high-level description of a resource, containing information such as author, name, descriptions, subjects etc., common to all editions of the work. ... In the case of a WorldCat Work description, it also contains [Linked Data] links to individual, oclc numbered, editions already shared in WorldCat." The works and editions are marked up with schema.org semantic markup, in particular using schema:exampleOfWork/schema:workExample for the relation from edition to work and vice versa. These properties have been added recently to the schema.org spec, as suggested by the W3C Schema Bib Extend Community Group.

ZBW contributes to WorldCat, and has 1.2 million oclc numbers attached to it's bibliographic records. So it seemed interesting, how many of these editions link to works and furthermore to other editions of the very same work.