there are all kinds of lists on wikipedia of various kinds of authors: linguists, philosophers, mathematicians ... In most (almost all?) cases there is a brief page about the authors biography and their work.
As you could expect some folks (isbndb.com) would come up with the great idea of selling you the air you breathe. exaly.com, worldcat, freelibrary.org ... do a minimally better job, but their web interface I find too constraining and, "of course", you don't find a "download the whole damn thing" option.
What I am looking for is an openly and collectively maintained DB a la wikipedia from which interface you could download all search hits as well-formatted, parsable lines in a text file without having to "click next", copy and paste, and all that kind of nonsense.
I could imagine someone in the corpora research community has taken the time to compile a database which IMO should include:
a) work: a.1) original name a.2) original language a.3) topical bags index a.4) received category index (a children book, book review, degree theses, article in periodical, ...) a.5) publications: a.5.1) date a.5.2) metadata RDF including: language, "co-"authors (preface, those writing back-cover blurbs), editors, translators, ISBNs, publisher, copyright notice, ... b) name(s): b.1) first/given name(s) (at Birth) b.2) last name(s) (at Birth) b.3) pen name(s) b.3) also known as c) birth place d) date of birth e) languages f) date of death
Authorship - work pairs should be prioritized. In case of compilations of various auth-work pairs in a single book, the compilation in which an article appears should be specified in the metadata.
Please, let me know where could I find such a database (even if partially) which could be downloaded. In case you don't know such a general registry of published books/texts, which other entries would you think are important?
lbrtchx