The Ontology Engineering Group, within the context of its Linked Data projects, is pleased to announce that the datos.bne.es initiative has been launched. datos.bne.es is an initiative of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) whose aim is to enrich the Semantic Web with library data. The SPARQL endpoint is available in the following link.

The RDF generation from MARC 21 records was done using our tool MARiMbA, which allows non-technical users to work on the mappings from MARC21 metadata to RDF using different RDFS/OWL vocabularies.

This initiative is part of the project “Linked data at the BNE”, supported by the BNE in cooperation with the Ontology Engineering Group (OEG).  With this initiative, the BNE takes the challenge of publishing bibliographic and authority data in RDF, following the Linked Data Principles and under the CC0 (Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication) open license. Thereby, Spain joins the initiatives that libraries from countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany have recently launched.

Approximately 2.4 million bibliographic records have been transformed into RDF. They are modern and ancient monographies, sound-recordings and musical scores. Besides, 4 million authority records of persons, corporate names, uniform titles and subjects have been transformed. The transformation process has generated around 58 million RDF triples and about 600K owl:sameAs links to other datasets such as DBPedia and VIAF. More information can be found in the DataHub entry.

The initiative was presented in the auditorium of the BNE on 14th December 2011 by Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Professor at the UPM and Daniel Vila-Suero, Project Lead (OEG-UPM), and by Ricardo Santos, Chief of Authorities, and Ana Manchado Mangas, Chief of Bibliographic Projects, both from the BNE. The attendant audience enjoyed the invaluable participation of Gordon Dunsire, Chair of the IFLA Namespace Group.

More information about this initiative is available here.