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(a)oclc.org>wrote;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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