Presentation given at the 'Making the Most of Metadata' BL Labs event at the British Library, London in February 2014. Provides an update on the BNB LOD service.

1. The Linked Open British
National Bibliography
Neil Wilson
Head, Metadata Services
Making the Most of Metadata
February 12 2014
© The British
Library Board
2014

2. www.bl.uk 2
BL Metadata Provision
• The BL Act records our role as “ a
national centre for reference, study and
bibliographical and other information
services”
• Metadata Services:
• Originally offered priced services for
national & international libraries
• Evolved through many changes in format &
delivery technologies
• Offered free services from 2010 as part of
the BL’s new open metadata strategy

3. www.bl.uk 3
BL Open Metadata Strategy
Aims:
• Enable innovation - without unnecessary barriers
• Break from library - formats & use cross domain
standards
• Obtain attribution - while offering permissive
licensing
Offerings for:
• Libraries - MARC21/Z39.50
• Researchers - RDF/XML & .CSV
• Linked data developers - RDF Triples/SPARQL

4. www.bl.uk 4
BL Open Metadata
• Over 1040 organisations in 98
countries now use BL Open Data
services
• Collaborated with Microsoft
Research, W3C, UK Government, &
developers on technical, standards & license
challenges
• Linked Open BNB
• Cabinet Office best practice exemplar
• Selected for inclusion in UK National
Information Infrastructure (NII)
• Open Data Institute certification
• 2 million transactions monthly

5. www.bl.uk 5
What is the British National
Bibliography?
The BNB:
• Covers books & new journals
published or distributed in the UK &
Ireland since 1950
• Describes popular and research
level publications:
• For adults & children
• On all subjects
• In all languages of publication
• Includes nearly 3.5 million entries
© Waldir/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA-3.0

6. www.bl.uk 6
Why Create the Open BNB?
 A reusable dataset of published items
& not an institutional catalogue
 Permissive License – can offer as
CC0
Includes information on:
 People
 Places
 Dates
 Subjects
Consistent format & structure
Reflects over 60 years of
contemporary UK interests

7. www.bl.uk 7
Linking
To give BNB data broader
context we linked to:
• General resources:
• GeoNames
• Lexvo
• RDF Book
Mashup
• Library resources:
• LCSH
• VIAF
• Dewey.info

8. www.bl.uk 8
RDF Vocabularies
Bibliographic Resource
• Dublin Core
• Bibliographic Ontology
• ISBD
• British Library Terms
Event
• Event Ontology
• British Library Terms
Place
• WGS84 Geo Positioning
Person/Organization
• FOAF: Friend of a Friend
• Bio: a Vocabulary for
Biographical Information
• Org: an Organisation
Ontology
• RDA
Concept
• SKOS
• British Library Terms

9. www.bl.uk 9
BNB Data Model
Publication as Event
@prefix dc:<http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix dcterms:<http://purl.org/dc/terms> .
<BibResource> dc:publisher “Publisher” ;
dcterms:issued “Date” ;
?:placeOfPublication “Place” .
@prefix blt:<http://www.bl.uk/schemas/bibliographic/blterms#> .
@prefix event:<http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#> .
<BibResource> blt:publication <PublicationEvent> .
<PublicationEvent> event:place <Place> ;
event:agent <Publisher> ;
event:time <Year> .
Usual
approach
Event-based
approach

10. www.bl.uk 10
BNB Data Model
Books
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/pdfs/bldatamodelbook.pdf

11. www.bl.uk 11
BNB Access Options
• BNB Basic RDF/XML DC dumps
• BNB Linked Open Datasets:
• BNB Books
• BNB Serials
…with VoID descriptions
• Updated monthly
• Outputs available:
• RDF/XML
• N-Triples
• JSON
“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard
Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”

12. www.bl.uk 12
BNB Access Options
.
BNB 1950-2012
3.5 Million Records
98 Million Unique Triples
• bnb.data.bl.uk/sparql
• thedatahub.org/dataset/bluk-bnb-basic
• www.bl.uk/bibliographic/download.html
• bnb.data.bl.uk

13. www.bl.uk 13
Sample Queries
http://bnb.data.bl.uk/getting-started
.

14. www.bl.uk 14
Uses of BNB Data

15. www.bl.uk 15
More info…
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html
http://bnb.data.bl.uk/faqs
http://bnb.data.bl.uk/getting-started
http://bnb.data.bl.uk/docs
http://twitter.com/#!/BLMetadata
metadata@bl.uk
http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html