NCSU Organization Name Linked Data

The NCSU Organization Name Linked Data (ONLD) is based on the NCSU Organization Name Authority, a tool maintained by the Acquisitions & Discovery department to manage the variant forms of name for journal and e-resource publishers, providers, and vendors in E-Matrix, our locally-developed electronic resource management system (ERMS). The names chosen as the authorized form reflect an acquisitions, rather than bibliographic, orientation. For example, in the Library of Congress Name Authority File, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is represented by the full name, where as in the NCSU ONLD, it appears as "IEEE," which is how it is generally known among acquisitions staff. Also, there many subsidiary units with valid headings in the LC Name Authority File but for the purpose of managing journals and electronic resources they are simply considered to be variant forms of names for the parent organization that manages acquisitions and licensing-related functions for the subsidiaries.

The information in the NCSU Organization Name Linked Data are represented as RDF triples using properties from the SKOS, RDF Schema, FOAF, and OWL vocabularies. Clicking on the name of each property will take users to the property's definition. The authorized form of name for each organization is recorded with skos:prefLabel and variant forms of name were recorded with skos:altLabel. All of the organizations are associated with relevant classes in several popular vocabularies using rdf:type. The webpage of the organization is recorded using foaf:homepage.

Where possible, Acquisitions & Discovery staff created links to descriptions of the same organization in other linked data sources, including the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF), Dbpedia, Freebase, and International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). These types of links were recorded using the owl:sameAs property and are encouraged in Tim Berners-Lee's description of 5 Star Open Data. These links will enable users of the data to easily incorporate properties from these other linked data sources in future applications.

The data is available in RDF-XML, N-Triples, N3/Turtle, and JSON-LD. RDF triples can also be extracted from the RDFa metadata embedded in the HTML page for for each organization.

The NCSU Organization Name Linked Data will also be the seed data for organizations in Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb), a freely available data repository with key publication information about electronic resources, which have will have its public release in September.

This linked data is made freely available with the Creative Commons CC0 License.