Goulash all round: Linked Data at NSZL

I meant to blog about this as soon as the news emerged in mid-April but University bureaucracy and research project demands prevented it: Adam Horvath (Director of Informatics) at the The National Széchényi Library (NSZL) (or National Library of Hungary, if you prefer) announced on the Semantic Web Linking Open Data Project email list that the NSZL have exposed their entire OPAC and digital library as Linked Data - that's correct, their entire OPAC and digital library has been published as Linked Data. This includes corresponding authority data, with all nodes represented using Cool URIs.

The RDF vocabularies used include Dublin Core RDF for bibliographic metadata, SKOS for subject indexing (in a variety of terminologies) and FOAF for name authority data. Incredible! Not only that, the FOAF descriptions include mapped owl:sameAs statements to corresponding dbpedia URIs. For example, here is FOAF data pertaining to Hungarian novelist, Jókai Mór:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:dbpedia="http://dbpedia.org/property/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"
xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:zs="http://www.loc.gov/zing/srw/">
<foaf:Person rdf:about="http://nektar.oszk.hu/resource/auth/33589">
<dbpedia:deathYear>1904</dbpedia:deathYear>
<dbpedia:birthYear>1825</dbpedia:birthYear>
<foaf:familyName>Jókai</foaf:familyName>
<foaf:givenName>Mór</foaf:givenName>
<foaf:name>Jókai Mór (1825-1904)</foaf:name>
<foaf:name>Mór Jókai</foaf:name>
<foaf:name>Jókai Mór</foaf:name>
<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/resource/M%C3%B3r_J%C3%B3kai"/>
</foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

Visit the above noted dbpedia data for fun.

Rich SKOS data is also available for a local information retrieval thesaurus. Follow this link for an example of the skos:prefLabel ' magyar irodalom'.

It's a herculean effort from the NSZL which must be commended. And before the Germans did it too! Goulash all round to celebrate - and a photograph of the Hungarian Parliament, methinks.