ViafProject
The "Virtual International Authority File" (VIAF) project is an interesting candidate for LinkedData.
The participating LibraryOfCongress says: "The VIAF ... holds long-term promise as a basic building block of the SemanticWeb... The arrival of the WorldWideWeb makes authority control on a global scale both feasible and essential." source.
The ViafProject currently exposes data via HTML (example: TimBernersLee: http://viaf.org/viaf/79454736), RDF (http://viaf.org/viaf/79454736.rdf) or other formats, but until now there is no SPARQL endpoint and no RDF dump available.
It could enrich the LinkedData landscape with several million person data sets with a relatively high quality of author identities.
It might allow a straightforward "SameAs"-identification with DbPedia/WikiPedia via the Personennamendatei (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personennamendatei) which is included in Person-articles in the german WikiPedia. The Personennamendatei-ID (PND) has a 1-to-1 relationship to the VIAF ID. Duplicates with other national libraries should successively be removed.
Example: The german article http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee has both machine readable language InterWiki to
- the english WikiPedia article: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee (and therewith to DbPedia)
- the PND|121649091
- VIAF allows automated search for the corresponding VIAF record which results in the correct VIAF ID:79454736.