Libraries have cataloged the world's published record for over a century, but that description sits as text inside records rather than as identifiable things. We have spent the past several years rebuilding it as a knowledge graph. WorldCat Entities publishes descriptions of people, events, places, organizations, and works as persistent, resolvable URIs. The Dewey Decimal Classification is published on the same basis, which turns a familiar classification scheme into a machine-navigable hierarchy of human knowledge.
These identifiers have been integrated across OCLC data to improve our products and services and are also widely used by libraries and other cultural heritage organizations around the world.
Two decisions mattered most in the effort to build out our knowledge graph.
- First, we centralized entity management so that two libraries describing the same person land on the same URI.
- Second, we never asked anyone to adopt a new workflow: identifiers are written into records automatically as catalogers do the job they already do, which is why adoption has grown steadily rather than stalling.
An important lesson we learned that can help every organisation working to build a graph is that a graph delivers its value at the point of linkage, so getting identifiers into the systems people already use is critical to success and adoption.