Hi Merilee,

thanks for the update.

A quick answer is: yes, they could be useful.

In Wikidata, we ended up dividing the Item of a book in 2 level: work and edition (it is a sort of manifestation-expression mashup).

In the Wikimedia world, we thought, we have work-level entities: the Hamlet article on Wikipedia is at work level, so is Pinocchio, etc. When you have a Wikipedia article about a book, often, is at work level. It's about the book in general, not a particular edition.

On the other hand, in Wikisource we speak about particular edition or translation of a book. It's a manifestation level (or expression, or both: never really understood the difference :-)

So, yeah:

in theory, in Wikidata we could import these IDs.

Aubrey

PS: these kind of distinctions are quite subtle and difficult, if you want to discuss them please refer to the https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Books_task_force page.

On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 10:50 PM, Proffitt,Merrilee <proffitm@oclc.org> wrote:

Hi all,

Some of you have known about this project which has been in the works for some time – works IDs. For those of you who did know about it, they have been released. Huzzah!

http://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/linked-data/worldcat-entities.en.html

For those of you who are scratching your heads and wondering why this is important or how it might be useful, I offer you a great example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance

Right now, the convention in InfoBox Book, etc. is to note the ISBN and other IDs associated with the first edition of a work. Although this is useful, in an information retrieval context it is not as useful as it might be – adding one or more work IDs to the mix would be useful because the work ID can bring back more information about editions published in different locations, on different dates, etc.

http://experiment.worldcat.org/entity/work/data/12477503.html

I’m curious to hear what you think. Are these identifiers useful in the Wikimedia world? Right now OCLC numbers are used, as are VIAF ids, and Dewey numbers.

Best,

Merrilee

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