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Frequently Asked Questions
What's that?
Via the Linked Data Service, you can search the inventory of the Mannheim University Library, similar to our Online Catalog.
The difference is, that each element of the inventory is assigned a world-wide unique URI that can be used to access the bibliographic information of that element.
Additionally, it is possible to access this data in a machine-readable format and use it in own appllications. For more details, please refer to our documentation.
Under which license am I allowed to use the data?
The Mannheim University Library aims for publishing as much bibliographic data as possible under a as free as possible license.
But as many different institutions were and are involved in the creation of this data, we could not finally decide for a suitable license.
So the provided data initially only contains the inventory data of the Mannheim University Library, that means, only data that are also accessable via the online catalog.
We encourage and permit experiments with our Linked Data Service, i.e. the inclusion of the data in own applications and the linking with own data.
However, we ask for a consultation, if you include the data in publicly available or productively used applications. The dissemination or permanent storage of the data, as well as any commercial use are currently not allowed.
Update: Recently, we loaded also the data of the USB Köln, which are available under the CC0 license. The processed data is provided also under the CC0 license, that means all triple that have a subject URI within the range of <http://data.bib.uni-mannheim.de/data/hbz/…>.
How to provide such licensing information together with the data is by the way very interesting and subject of the DC-Provenance task group of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, in which we are taking part.
Why are the data not freely available as Linked Open Data?
Linked Data and Open Data are two different aspects, hardly related in the first place. Linked Data describes the technical aspect of providing data in RDF and thus making them embeddable in linked data applications. Open Data means that data - in arbitrary formats - is made availabe under a free license and usable for others. Often, these two aspects are mixed and refered to as Linked Open Data.
As said in the above response about the license, we aim for free data. But currenty we are mainly interested in the technical aspects of linked data and this service is intended to experiment with this technology. Legal issues in the context of linked data are also very interesting, but have no priority for us at this early stage.
Free bibliographic data is already available, by the way, but not (yet) as linked data: Open Data Website of the HBZ.