Entity Management Using RDA and Wikibase: A Case Study at the National Library of Greece

The force driving the implementation of Linked Data (LD) technologies in libraries is the aspiration for widespread interoperability of library data and for advanced information services. Toward these goals, libraries change their data models, update their communication formats, and develop prototype applications that use new models and formats and enable entity-based cataloguing. The National Library of Greece (NLG) has been actively adapting its policies, workflows, and tools to make its data LD-ready. Within this context, NLG has developed -in cooperation with Open Knowledge Greece- an entity management prototype using RDA/RDF in a Wikibase instance. The vision is to build a shared entity management system used by all memory institutions in Greece to describe entities of Greek interest. Data is to be stored as a knowledge graph that can be exported in RDF serializations, and in legacy MARC format. This paper first examines related efforts from other National Libraries, and then outlines the steps involved in the publication of the NLG Authority File as linked data; namely dataset selection, modeling, data curation, mapping, and publication. The development of the NLG entity management prototype is also presented. The paper concludes with challenges, lessons learned, and next steps.