German National Library announces “GND ontology”

A while ago, we blogged about the German National Library releasing more open data under a more open license. Now they have gone a step further and announced their own “GND ontology”

GND stands for “Gemeinsame Normdatei” (Integrated Authority File) and offers a broad range of elements to represent authorities.

The ontology aims to transfer the experiences made by libraries to the web community by providing a vocabulary for the description of conferences or events, corporate bodies, places or geographic names, differentiated persons, undifferentiated persons (name of undifferentiated persons), subject headings, and works.

To ensure compatibility, the GND ontology aligns with already established vocabularies such as the FOAF vocabulary as well as with new ones like the RDA Vocabularies.

The present results have to be considered as work in progress. Gradually, we will integrate additional information, such as the descriptions for each element and alignments to a number of additional vocabularies and ontologies.

GND is a Linked Data system, in that it based around the idea of linking together a Web of decentralised descriptions. A GND document, unlike a traditional Web page, can be combined with other GND documents to create a unified database of information. It also allows it to be combined with other vocabularies and ontologies and to be used usable with the wide variety of generic tools and services that have been created for the Semantic Web.

For more info click here.