xISBN improvements, and FRBR relationships
Eric Hellman, an OCLC chap, sent ISBN Linking to Wikipedia to web4lib on Monday.
Last week, we quietly announced the addition of a Wikipedia article lookup facility to OCLC’s Worldcat xISBN service. The xISBN service groups ISBNs into works based on the entire Worldcat data set. This means that the service will connect Wikipedia citations to any of the ISBNs associated with the cited work. xISBN is an XML-based “grid service” designed to help libraries plug into the data without worrying too much about the wiring.
For more information on using the Worldcat xISBN service to get Wikipedia articles, see http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/doc/api.htm
Here’s an example of how to access the service: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9789574760442?method=getEditions&format=xml&library=wikipedia&fl=*
The example is a Chinese expression of Alice in Wonderland. xISBN looks up ISBNs of related manifestations — in this case expressions of the book in the original English and in other languages, and Martin Gardner’s annotated version, which is actually a work of its own, a derivative one, but let’s not quibble — and then looks through Wikipedia to find which pages mention any of those ISBNs.
This is pretty neat. All you know about the Wikipedia entry is that it mentions a given ISBN, so there’s some mystery about it. Is it a page about the author, the book, the publisher, something mentioned in the book, or what? The relation is unknown. You can deduce, or infer, or possibly both, some details, however, based on, for example, some of the structured or semi-structured information on the Wikipedia pages.
The Annotated Alice doesn’t have one of Wikipedia’s infoboxes done for WikiProject Novels, but David Lodge’s Small World does. Structured user-contributed metadata! Talk about it!
Now, xISBN doesn’t match the ISBN of my item of this work with any others, so this isn’t the best example, but it’s late and I have to get up early, so it’s hard cheese for you, chum. Imagine it did, and that some of the Wikipedia pages linked therein were to pages with infoboxes and structured metadata, and from them you could infer relationships between all the various FRBR entities involved.
And once this kind of thing gets started, and if LibraryThing’s metadata (see Small World at the ‘Thing) were involved, then there would be more reason for sites to encourage people to add (semi-)structured relations between things, which could then be mined, which would enrich things, which would then feed back and encourage the specifying of more relations.
FRBR is an entity-relationship model. The entities we know well, except for some debate about the details of expressions. The relationships are the really fascinating part. We can grab a lot of them from MARC records, but the more tools to get them other sources, especially sources built by regular people, the better.