German National Library releases more Linked Open Data under a more Open License

Good news from Germany: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB), the German National Library, has launched a Linked Data version of the German National Bibliography under Creative Commons Zero meaning that the information can be re-used without legal restriction.

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Julia Hauser, from the DNB, explains in an email to the World Wide Web Consortion (W3C):

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“In 2010 the German National Library (DNB) started publishing authority data as Linked Data. The existing Linked Data service of the DNB is now extended with title data. In this context the licence for linked data is shifted to “Creative Commons Zero.

The bibliographic data of the DNB’s main collection (apart from the printed music and the collection of the Deutsches Exilarchiv) and the serials (magazines, newspapers and series of the German Union Catalogue of serials (ZDB) have been converted. This is an experimental service that will be continually expanded and improved.”

The release of the bibliographic data as Linked Open Data means that the DNB joins a host of other cultural heritage institutions such as the British Library and the Swedish National Library who have taken a similar course.

Linked Open Data makes sure that information from one cultural dataset can be linked with information from another dataset in a meaningful way. This could be two datasets from different institutions, or, indeed, two datasets from the same organisation. The possibilities are endless as long as everybody uses unique URI’s for their data. More information about how Linked Open Data works can be found here.

Now that more and more cultural institutions see the importance of Linked Open Data, Richard Wallis, from the Data Liberate blog, predicts that this will be the first of many such announcements this year.