Jason Kovari
Director, Cataloging and Metadata Services
Cornell University
Andrew K. Pace
Executive Director, Technical Research
OCLC
Cornell University, the University of California, Davis, and the Montana State Library have joined OCLC in joint research project prototyping a new suite of linked data services. This unique project uses the out-of-the-box services from WikiBase and a high-quality set of name entities available from FAST, VIAF, and Wikidata to prototype services to 1) reconcile names for people, organizations, concepts, places, and events against an index based on entities, returning language-tagged headings and persistent identifiers; and 2) create, edit, and share and edit entity descriptions while also allowing for the contribution of additional contextual relationships between entities, beyond those that can be found by mining structured data in bibliographic and authority data. This briefing will cover: the implementation and scalability of the Wikibase technology, as well as insights into the partnership with the Wikibase community; analysis of the improved reconciliation of legacy bibliographic data to linked data entities; discussion of the efficacy and efficiency of introducing linked data tools in metadata management workflows; use cases driving development and potential production implementation of the tools.