BookVocabularies
I was wondering how books, booklists, and book reviews should be represented in RDF. Here's what I found:
- DublinCore has most of the essentials
- ISBN is an official URN namespace. So "urn:isbn:1234567890" refers to a book with that ISBN.
- There are problems using these URNs in linked data:
- Firstly, they don't resolve to machine-readable data about the book.
- Secondly, and I think more importantly, they have no agreed meaning - that is, does urn:isbn:1234567890 represent a book? Or does it represent an ISBN number that belongs to a book?
- Hyphens may be included at any point in these URNs which violates the AWWW guideline that "a URI owner should not associate arbitrarily different URIs with the same resource."
- Also, RFC 3187 only defines ISBN-10 URNs. Newer 13-digit ISBNs are occasionally used as URNs in the wild, but technically they are outside the scope of the URN namespace registration.
- Because of these problems I've created some purl.org URIs for books. e.g. http://purl.org/NET/book/isbn/0596000278#book - just plug in an ISBN number and it should work. These use Amazon.com's API to supply RDF/XML data.
- There are problems using these URNs in linked data:
- Leigh Dodds made a reading list schema at http://purl.org/net/schemas/book/. He also made an XSLT to transform AllConsuming booklists into this RDF format. Here's an example FOAF file with book lists.
- A.M. Kuchling created a book review schema
- Ideagraph's RDF review vocabulary
- FRBR is a bibliographic model of works and editions
- Decimalised Database of Concepts is a list of topics that can be used to classify the subject of a book.
- RDF Book Vocabulary 0.1 can be used to describe books and the reading of books.
- Open Archives Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE). See also LDOW2009 paper
The Library Linked Data XG has also written a report on available metadata element sets in the library domain.