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culi • today at 3:15 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

I find WikiData to be perfect for aggregating identifiers. I mostly work with species names and it's perfect for getting the iNaturalist, GBIF, Open Tree of Life, Catalogue of Life, etc identities all in one query

I haven't tried it for books. I imagine it's not sufficiently complete to serve as a backbone but a quick look at an example book gives me the ids for OpenLibrary, Librarything, Goodreads, Bing, and even niche stuff like the National Library of Poland MMS ID.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q108922801

Replies

bbor • today at 8:31 AM

Cracks me up that OP is trying Anna's Archive before Wikidata, NGL! Both great sources, though.

I recently (a year ago... wow) dipped my toe into the world of library science through Wikidata, and was shocked at just how complex it is. OP's work looks really solid, but I hope they're aware of how mature the field is!

For illustration, here are just the book-relevant ID sources I focused on from Wikidata:

  ARCHIVERS: 
  Library of Congress Control Number    `P1144` (173M)
  Open Library                          `P648`  (39M)
  Online Computer Library Center        `P10832` (10M)
  German National Library               `P227`  (44M)
  Smithsonian Institute                 `P7851` (155M)
  Smitsonian Digital Ark                `P9473` (3M)
  U.S. Office of Sci. & Tech. Info.     `P3894`

  PUBLISHERS:
  Google Books                          `P675`  (1M)
  Project Gutenberg                     `P2034` (70K)
  Amazon                                `P5749`

  CATALOGUERS:
  International Standard Book Number    `P212`
  Wikidata                              `P8379` (115B)
  EU Knowledge Graph                    `P11012`
  Factgrid Database                     `P10787` (0.4M)
  Google Knowledge Graph                `P2671` (500B)
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