linked-data

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.

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.

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 available under a free license and usable for others. Often, these two aspects are mixed and referred to as Linked Open Data.

As said in the above response about the license, we aim for free data. With this service, we are concerned about the technical aspects of linked data and we want to try different things with it and experiment with this technology.

However, the presentation of the data is could definitely be improved further, so we assume that there is no serious demand for a use in a production system at this point of time.