The National Library of Spain (BNE) and the Ontology Engineering Group are glad to announce the new datos.bne.es Linked Data service (in Spanish). This new service represents a milestone of the Linked Data project started by the end of 2011 and that already published Linked Open Data under a Public Domain license (Creative Commons CC0). We have been working to improve many aspects of the service and would like to share with you some key features.

A new way to search, discover and explore

The new (beta) portal exploits linked data to create better experiences for the user. A graph with millions of new connections allows the user to explore the collections comprehensively and across three core entities: authors, works and topics. The search engine (e.g., http://datos.bne.es/find?s=joyce) also uses this graph to retrieve and rank entities, presenting relevant information to the user and allowing for simple, easy-to-use faceting. Besides, we continue to offer a public SPARQL endpoint (http://datos.bne.es/sparql) for people to query and use the data for their own applications, content negotiation, and we also provide schema.org descriptions of authors and works using JSON-LD.

More data, more links

• We have published the full catalogue comprising more than 9 million records and around 150.000 digitalized materials that generate more than 140 million RDF triples. These linked data resources describe and give access to authors, organizations, topics, modern and ancient books, photographs, cartographic materials, drawings, manuscripts, or printed and manuscript music.
• We provide around 1.4 million sameAs links and add links to new datasets such as ISNI, data.bnf.fr, id.loc.gov, and geo.linkeddata.es. More importantly, we have significantly increased the internal links between authors, bibliographic resources and digital materials.

The BNE data model

The BNE vocabulary, inspired by the FRBR data model, reuses and integrates several vocabularies such as IFLA FRBR, ISBD, or RDA, among others. The vocabulary is available for both humans and machines at http://datos.bne.es/def/, it is documented in English and Spanish. We will soon provide alignments to the aforementioned vocabularies.

Help us to improve

We would very much appreciate receiving feedback from the community. If you have any ideas/comments on how to improve the service, you encounter issues/problems, you want to collaborate, etc. please get in touch. But first of all, we invite you to visit: http://datos.bne.es

Thanks and our best wishes.

Daniel Vila Suero, Asunción Gómez Pérez, Ricardo Santos and Ana Manchado, on behalf of the OEG and BNE teams.