National Library of Latvia Subject Headings as Linked Open Data

Mārīte Apenīte, Uldis Bojārs

Keywords: Authority control, linked data, SKOS, National Library of Latvia subject headings (NLLSH)

TL;DR: This paper presents the linked data representation of the National Library of Latvia authority data.

Abstract: This paper presents the linked data representation of the National Library of Latvia (NLL) authority data consisting of topical, geographic name and form/genre thesauri. It is an important step from a data silo (MARC 21 data) to linked open datasets, represented using SKOS, that can be reused both within and outside the library domain. The datasets are converted to SKOS using mc2skos and are published as linked data using the Skosmos application for publishing SKOS datasets. The paper describes the datasets, including information about their external links. The NLL topical terms dataset, in particular, contains many external links – 85% of its concepts have links to the Library of Congress subject headings dataset that is available as linked open data. The published datasets can be applied to interconnecting Latvia's cultural heritage information by describing museum and archive items with URIs from these datasets.