British Library released images and information from the 17th, 
18th and 19th century books under a title "A million first 
steps" [1]. The information was released as a series of tabulator 
separated text files placed at the GITHUB [2]. The images were
stored into the Flickr [3]. License of the images and the 
information is public domain.

This file collection contains topic map [4] serializations 
created from the information of the British Library's release. 
The TSV files were converted to topic maps using the Wandora 
application [5] and it's extractor tool written specifically 
for this task. Both the Wandora application and the extractor 
tool are licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL [6].

Topic map serializations in this collection are XTM 2.0 [7] 
formatted and can be viewed/edited in many topic map 
applications such as Wandora and Ontopia [8]. Information has 
been divided into separate files each containing information 
about books published during one year. Filename reflects the 
publishing year. License of the topic map conversions is 
same as the license of original data files i.e. public domain.
Topic map files doesn't contain actual images or image files
but links to images in Flickr. 

Information about the used topic map data model:

* Each book topic has a basename that is a combination of book's
  title and identifier.
* Each book topic has a subject identifier that is derived from 
  book's identifier. Identifiers doesn't resolve.
* Each book topic has an English display name that is book's
  title.
* If book has a Digital Service Library identifier, it is 
  attached to the book topic as an occurrence. Also, PDF link 
  to the book is attached to the book topic as a separate 
  occurrence.
* If book has an Ark id, it is attached to the book as an 
  occurrence.
* Author topic is associated with the book topic.
* Publication date topic is associated with the book topic.
* Image topics are associated with the book topic.
* Place of publishing topic is associated with the book topic.
* Image topic has a subject identifier and a subject locator 
  that resolve original image file in Flickr.
* Image topic has a basename that is image's identifier.
* Image topic has occurrences for the image number, the page 
  number and the volume number.


What can be done with the topic map conversions of the "Million 
first steps"? Next chapters describe some ideas.

Wandora and other topic map applications can provide a nice
viewer for the book data and especially images. Topic map 
applications can also provide alternative publishing options 
that create a WWW site or a specific visualization out of 
the topic maps.

The user can easily enrich the information captured into the 
topic map, either manually or semiautomatically. A topic map is 
fundamentally a graph and topic map applications contain powerful 
tools to alter and modify the graph. Also, topic maps are 
incremental and two or more different topic maps can be merged.
This enables linked data type merging of book information with 
some other information sources. Wandora has over 50 different
information extractors.

Kind Regards,
Aki Kivela
akivela@gripstudios.com
Wandora Team
www.wandora.org


history: 2014-01-01, first release.



[1] http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
    2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html
[2] https://github.com/BL-Labs/imagedirectory
[3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_Maps
[5] http://www.wandora.org
[6] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt
[7] http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-xtm/
[8] http://www.ontopia.net