Other editions of this work: An experiment with OCLC's LOD work identifiers
2014-09-23 by Joachim Neubert
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.
