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Overview

The Linked Data Service of the German National Library provides access to national bibliographic data and authority data in the Standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) free of charge.
This data service acts as a contribution to the worldwide information infrastructure and is a prerequisite for modern commercial and non-commercial web services.

Our high-quality metadata, most of which is administrated intellectually, is bringing about decisive improvements in the stability and reliability of the “linked data cloud", and our goal is to become one of the supporting pillars of the semantic network.
We have been making our data available in RDF through the Linked Data Service since 2010. By offering RDF as an export format, we facilitate subsequent use of our data for users and user groups with no knowledge of bibliographic formats. The Linked Data Service is continually being developed further and optimised at technical, content-related and organisational levels. We are also actively involved in the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME).

Integrated Authority File (GND)

The GND data is currently provided in two profiles as RDF data:

Some geographic entities have contained unchanged coordinates from the database GeoNames since the end of January 2014.

Entity Facts

Entity Facts is a data service provided by the German National Library that provides machine-readable “fact sheets” on entities in the Integrated Authority File (GND).
This service makes it possible to use information from the GND with no prior knowledge of bibliographic data formats or cataloguing conventions.
The data is delivered in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

Cross-concordances

GND mappings to external thesauri (only available in German) (LCSH, RAMEAU, EMBNE, NSogg, AGROVOC, MeSH, STW, TheSoz) as separate terminology data sets have been available for download since July 2023 and can be used in a wide range of ways. The mappings are updated annually in October/November.

The mappings are curated on an ongoing basis by terminology experts. The mappings are created and maintained in line with the rules for GND cross-concordances (only available in German) and with regard to the international thesaurus norm ISO 25964-2 "Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies / Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies".

Bibliographic data

The bibliographic data is currently provided in two profiles as RDF data:

The software Metafacture, developed by culturegraph.org is used to convert the data to RDF.
Please note that a conversion into RDF format is not available for all bibliographic data.

Some bibliographic data contains class information from the thema book classification; this has been the case since October 2015.

Address data (ISIL and Library Code Directory)

In 2013, the Linked Data Service of the DNB and ZDB was expanded to include the data of the German ISIL- and Library Code Directory. Address data (including information on packages of electronic resources (virtual library)) is available in various RDF serialisations.

Data access (access options)

An overview of all available metadata as well as the different options of obtaining data is given here. All formats are offered in UTF-8 decomposed character encoding.

Direct access (URI schema and HTTP content negotiation)

Further access options:

Terms of Use and provision

Detailed information on terms of use and provision is given here.

Further development and service information

The service is continually being expanded as part of the Import/Export releases. RDF vocabularies are updated independently of this since August 2024. Documentation is provided in two GitHub repositories: GND ontology and LDS vocabularies (both only available in German). Find out about pending changes and other services from Linked Data Service mailing list. Your questions and suggestions are also welcome here.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Is there a retrieval interface?

The SRU and OAI-PMH interfaces can be used for retrieval. A SPARQL interface is currently not offered.

Further processing

If you are just getting started with processing metadata, useful programmes include the software suite Catmandu, OpenRefine or Metafacture, while data can be analysed with "Konstanz Information Miner" (KNIME) or the Metadata Quality Assurance Framework. A more detailed overview is provided in the presentation slides "Open Source Software zur Verarbeitung und Analyse von Metadaten" (available only in German) and the article "Survey of Tools for Linked Data Consumption".

Why are there no links to data source X?

For this, we enrich the data of the service Entity facts with links from various data sources. New data sources are added as required. An overview of the sources and links can be found here (only available in German). GND authority data of the profile GND ontology contains a partial excerpt of these links.

What should I take note of with regard to character encoding?

RDF data is provided in UTF-8 decomposed character encoding, which is also known as Normalization Form Decomposed (NFD). Here diacritics are for example treated as separate characters (Unicode segment “Combining Diacritics”), and this may have to be taken into account when processing data (e.g. indexing). Depending on the application context, it may be advisable to convert the data into the normal form NFC before processing.

Who can I contact if I have any queries or suggestions?

If the question is not answered by the documentation (see below) or our FAQ, you may use the Linked-Data Service mailing list for questions, remarks, feedback and discussions.

What changes have been made in the Linked Data Service so far?

The Linked Data Service version history (only available in German) describes the changes that have been made in the releases issued to date.

Documentation

Contact

metadatendienste@dnb.de

Last changes: 16.08.2024
Short-URL: https://www.dnb.de/EN/lds
Contact: metadatendienste@dnb.de

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