New linked data set from North Carolina State University Libraries

[Eric Hanson]

NCSU Libraries has published its first linked data set, NCSU Organization Name Linked Data, at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/ld/onld/. This data set is based on the NCSU Organization Name Authority, a tool maintained by the Acquisitions and Discovery department since 2009 to manage the variant forms of name for serial and e-resource publishers, providers, and vendors in E-Matrix, our locally-developed electronic resource management system.  
 
The names chosen as the authorized form reflect an acquisitions, rather than bibliographic, orientation. For example, in the Library of Congress Name Authority File, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is represented by its full name, whereas in the NCSU Organization Name Linked Data, it appears as "IEEE, " which is how it is generally known among acquisitions staff.  Also, there many subsidiary units with valid headings in the LC Name Authority File but for the purpose of managing journals and electronic resources they are simply considered to be variant forms of name for the parent organization that manages acquisitions and licensing-related functions for the subsidiaries.
 
The data in the NCSU Organization Name Linked Data is represented as RDF triples using properties from the SKOS, RDF Schema, FOAF and OWL vocabularies. Where possible, we included links to descriptions of the organizations in other linked data sources, including the Virtual International Authority File, the Library of Congress Name Authority File, Dbpedia, Freebase, and International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). These types of links are encouraged in Tim Berners-Lee's description of 5 Star Open Data and will enable users of the data to easily incorporate properties from these other linked data sources in future applications.
 
The data set is made freely available with the Creative Commons CC0 License and can be downloaded as RDF-XML, N3/Turtle, N-Triples, JSON-LD or through RDFa embedded in the HTML page for each organization. We plan on periodically updating this data set with new organizations from our E-matrix system. 

 This data set will also be the seed data for organizations in the Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) (http://gokb.org/), a freely available data repository with key publication information about electronic resources that will have its public release in September.  As a part of NCSU’s lead role in the GOKb project, we are collaborating with the GOKb developers on future linked data initiatives involving title, package and platform data.
 
For questions or reporting broken or incorrect links, please contact:
 
Eric Hanson
emhanso2 at ncsu.edu
Electronic Resources Librarian
Acquisitions & Discovery
NCSU Libraries

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2014-07-09