Cornell is one of my favorite universities, did you know that? Here’s one reason why: early this week it announced the Classical Works Knowledge Base (CWKB), a relational database to link citations of ancient texts to online versions of those texts (Ancient in this case is about eight century BC to mid-eighth century AD.) From Cornell’s announcement: “CWKB works by parsing OpenURL links (commonly used in libraries to help patrons retrieve scholarly articles) once a citation has been clicked on. OpenURL metadata is sent to the link resolver, which ‘creates several links — because you can have several versions for the same citation, in the original language and in translation,’ Rebillard said.”

The fully-functional version of CWKB will be available in about two years, but there’s a working prototype at http://cwkb.org/. There are two examples of how the database would work, a link to project description and summary (both PDFs) and a link to a blog.