BibDib is an open source project produced by the team behind The Book Depository. It aims to use semantic web technology to probe the links between books, people and places and provides a framework for everyone to explore that data.

BibDib extends further than solely cataloguing books; it is a bibliographic database of any work found in the public domain. A work can be many things; a book, an article or review, whether published or unpublished, sold or freely available. BibDib holds all known information about that work, its versions, creators and analyses how the work itself interlinks with the others around it. A highly complex domain needs to be modelled to keep account of the assertations made by each work, subsequent facts inferred and the variability of relationships between them. Building BibDib using Semantic Web technologies provides such domain modelling capabilities while promoting openness, reusability and contributes to the effort of stepping closer to a web of meaning: the web of tomorrow.

BibDib's domain is modelled within the BibDib ontology, which through reuse builds upon existing domain definitions to mould a BibDib perspective of a Work and its relationships. It defines all of the relationships between the eventual objects in BibDib, for example the relationship that every Work has a Creator or that a single Work may have many ISBNs. Once BibDib becomes aware of a work, it is triggered to find all known information about it by crawling various sources of public domain data. It keeps continuous account of new information as it becomes available. The information is then analysed. BibDib employs techniques such as textual analysis, entity extraction and semantic mapping among others to produce the BibDib data for each known Work. Live reasoning is harnessed to find hidden relationships from the overall domain definition and to provide logical closure between what has been asserted over millions of facts.

All BibDib data is stored in Triples and can be fetched in RDF, N3 or JSON. You can browse our BibDib data for a specific subject by using the BibDib Linked Data browser. In order to harness the full functionality of BibDib data in your application, sign up for the API.