Linked Open Data offers the chance to freely use and link data from very heterogeneous sources. Where the library world once developed highly specialised formats for the exchange of title data and authority files, open standards and programming interfaces now allow simple re-use of our data by third parties. At the same time, library applications can directly integrate data from other communities, and general Semantic Web tools can be used to process them.
Standard Thesaurus for Economics (STW)
The ZBW published its Standard Thesaurus for Economics (STW) as Linked Data on the web as early as 2009 (as far as we know, it was the world’s first RDFa/SKOS application in regular operation). Since then, a number of mappings to other vocabularies are also freely available as Linked Data. Third parties can integrate the data into their own applications with Web Services for Economics, thus using the multilinguality of the STW and the supplementing synonyms from mapped vocabularies in their own retrieval components.
20th Century Press Clippings
The Linked Data version of the 20th Century Press Clippings assigns an individual citable web address to every dossier, article and page in the extensive collections of the biographical and company archives. It also shows how biographical information and photos from Wikipedia, geographical information, and whole pages from US press archives can be embedded by means of Linked Data technologies in order to support usage with context-sensitive information.
EconStor LOD
The ZBW repository for working papers in economics becomes a part of the World Wide Web of Data by means of EconStor LOD. It not only publishes title and author data as Linked Data, but also links to external datasets such as DBpedia. Mappings to the STW and the JEL classification supplement the contents and ensure that EconStor LOD is an interesting resource for research projects.
ZBW Labs
We also research how publication technologies (content management systems, blogs etc) can be developed in order to publish data on the web or generate other datasets by means of linked-data-based web services. First results can be seen at ZBW Labs.