We have revised our approach to linked data in VIAF. Our original approach used an unusual naming convention for the resources being described (in VIAF's case the main resources so far are personae) and exposed the information as a skos:Concept.

We wanted to retain the SKOS description (suitably revised), but also want to describe the VIAF concept as FOAF and expose more of the VIAF data in a more 'native VIAF' form. We do this by minting some new URIs that the RDF describes:

http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184 is a viaf:NameAuthorityCluster,

http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184/#skos:Concept is a SKOS Concept

and http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184/#foaf:Person is a FOAF Person.

You can retrieve several views of the VIAF clusters either through HTTP content negotiation or by explicitly asking from them. Here are the main views:

http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184 is the 'real world object', a concept. On resolution it does a 303 redirect to

http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184/ The generic document. From here you can do HTTP content negotiation for

text/html: http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184/viaf.html An HTML view of the cluster

text/xml: http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184/viaf.xml The raw XML of a VIAF cluster

application/marc21+xml: http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184/marc21.xml A MARC-21 view

application/unimarc+xml: http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184/unimarc.xml UNIMARC

application/rdf+xml: http://viaf.org/viaf/99366184/rdf.xml RDF as XML

The RDF is substantially changed. Much of it describes a viaf:NameAuthorityCluster as laid out in http://viaf.org/viaf.owl and http://viaf.org/viaf.jpg.

There is still more to be done. Some of the resources identified in the RDF do not resolve yet (in particular the AuthorityAgency's), and some of the internal RDF URI's are not legal URI's because of character issues, but we think what we have is usable, and are interested in getting reactions to it.

Thanks to Jeff Young and Ralph LeVan who did most/all the work on data modeling and implementation and Andy Houghton who tries to keep us honest.

--Th