I should probably try to explain (again, I think, so sorry if this is a 
duplicate) what "work" means in the particular context that OL has 
chosen. It comes from FRBR [1]. The Work "record" should represent the 
original publication and all of its versions. So a translation of "Lord 
of the Rings" should be connected to the Work record for "Lord of the 
Rings", not a separate work record for the translation. And thus the 
works of Thomas Mann have a (or should have a) single work record for 
the original, under which you will see editions, some of which are 
translations:

http://openlibrary.org/works/OL16246083W/Tod_in_Venedig

This is an international library practice, and I'm sure you can see that 
it creates some difficulties for users who search in one language and 
then see a work in a language that they do not understand. But this is 
the current standard. I'm hoping that it will in the future become easy 
for a user to indicate one or more language choices and to see the work 
titles in those languages in the short display, with the rest available 
elsewhere on the screen.

kc

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRBR

On 5/24/12 10:22 AM, Ben Companjen wrote:
> Hi Pascal,
>
> That is great! Linking to Open Library makes Open Library more visible
> in the Linked Data world, I guess.
>
> I read your blog post, and would like to raise a couple of questions with you.
> First of all: where are the links? I see no link to the OL website (or
> a Work URI) on the page that is said to be an example...
>
> Did you only link to Works, or to Editions too? ISBNs are associated
> with Editions, so I'd expect that would be the first stop. Editions
> contain TOCs too, Works don't. Or are there too many Editions with the
> same ISBN?
>
> And regarding your remarkable example: that German version of Lord of
> the Rings should not be linked to a German work, but to The One Work
> called "The Lord of the Rings" (I consider the separate publications
> of the three parts one work each). The German work is a duplicate.
> I recently published [1] a list of works that appear to be duplicates
> (based on title, subtitle and author) which unfortunately showed that
> a lot of cleaning up of edition-less works and duplicate works has to
> be done.
> That brings up another question: will you do the linking process again
> in the future?
> I imagine that eventually many works (and authors, and probably
> editions too) will be merged so that the Work URI you get back (in the
> Edition data) when you lookup the same ISBN again may change in the
> future. I don't think it will be a problem to have old URIs in your
> data, as they will redirect to the new URI(s) when you look them up.
> However, if you leave the old URIs in your dataset, you don't know for
> sure how many distinct works are linked. And since Open Library data
> changes regularly anyway, I don't suppose this was an one-time only
> experiment?
>
> Is the code you used to convert the datadump to RDF available online
> (and is it Free software)? Since my proposed changes to OL's "native"
> RDF output [2] haven't been accepted yet, perhaps other approaches can
> be promoted somehow. Talis's approach works well, but I'm interested
> to see others too.
>
> Ben
>
> [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00613.html
> [2] https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/pull/136 (comments
> still welcome, naturally)
>
> On 23 May 2012 15:51, Pascal Christoph<[email protected]>  wrote:
>> Hi *,
>>
>> today we achieved to link 1.2 M lobid.org resources to Open Library work
>> resources, simply using isbn 10.
>> It seems that no commonly used identifier (that would be: viaf or GND or ...
>> and not an extra minted openlibrary identifier[1]) for creators in ol is 
>> given.
>> Identifier (among other things) help to disambiguate data so if you want to 
>> you
>> can enrich your data using our newly generated links. How to do that and a
>> little bit more of background at our blog:
>>
>> https://wiki1.hbz-nrw.de/display/SEM/2012/05/23/1.2+M+links+to+Open+Library
>>
>> Yes, and let me say "thank you" for your amazing work - this is just one more
>> fine example of what is achivable with LOD!
>>
>> -o
>>
>> [1]it may be that there is already a concordance out there between i.e. viaf
>> and ol-Person-URIs, I don't know , just saw whats already there in the RDF
>>
>> --
>> Pascal Christoph
>> - Linked Open Data: http://lobid.org/ -
>> hbz - Hochschulbibliothekszentrum NRW
>> Telefon +49-221-40075-139
>> http://www.hbz-nrw.de/
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-- 
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
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