O'Reilly Labs: RDF For All of Our Books, Plus Bookworm Ebook Reader

by | @andrewsavikas | +Andrew Savikas | February 10, 2009

There’s more details on the Labs blog, but timed with our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, we’ve opened up RDF metadata for all of our books, and have also brought the open source Bookworm ebook reader into O’Reilly Labs. It’s a great way to read any of our ebooks (more than 400 are now available as ebook bundles from oreilly.com) online and from a mobile phone:

The experimental “O’Reilly Product Metadata Interface” (OPMI) exposes RDF for all of O’Reilly’s titles, organized by ISBN. Here’s a snippet of the RDF metadata for iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2e from the OPMI at http://opmi.labs.oreilly.com/product/9780596521677:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <om:Product xmlns:om="http://purl.oreilly.com/ns/meta/" 
              rdf:about="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596521677.BOOK" 
              xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
              xml:lang="en">
    <dc:isFormatOf rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:955988693.IP"/>
    <dc:issued>2008-08-13</dc:issued>
    <dc:creator>
      <rdf:Seq rdf:ID="creator">
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:agent:pdb:350"/>
      </rdf:Seq>
    </dc:creator>
    <dc:rightsHolder>David Pogue</dc:rightsHolder>
    <dc:description>The new iPhone 3G is here, and bestselling author David Pogue
      is back with a thoroughly updated edition of &lt;em&gt;iPhone: The Missing
      Manual&lt;/em&gt;. With its faster downloads, touch-screen iPod, and best-ever
      mobile Web browser, the new affordable iPhone is packed with possibilities.
      But without an objective guide like this one, you'll never unlock all it can
      do for you. Each custom designed page helps you accomplish specific tasks for
      everything from web browsing, to new apps, to watching videos.</dc:description>
    <dc:extent>376 pages</dc:extent>
    <dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/PhysicalObject"/>
    <dc:format>6 x 9 in</dc:format>
...

The URLs are structured by ISBN13. Once you have the ISBN13 for an O’Reilly book, you can get the full metadata via HTTP request to:

http://opmi.labs.oreilly.com/product/ISBN13

To get you started, here’s direct links to the public RDF for our current top-5 bestsellers:

You can also follow @oreillylabs on twitter.

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