Resources

BEACON origins and BEACON specification

BEACON files originated in the German Wikpedia due to the need to share links between Wikipedia articles and related resources on the web using identifiers from the authority file of the German National Library. Since then an official BEACON specification is in the making. The plan ist to eventually submit it to the Internet Engineering Task Force as a RFC. A HTML version of the specification can be found at:

http://gbv.github.io/beaconspec/beacon.html.

The Beaconizer is closely modelled to this specification. For reasons of standard compliancy it supports the structure of BEACON files and all metadata fields exactly as suggested in the specification. Variant forms of BEACON files out there in the wild can be harvested with the Beaconizer, but deviations in structure or metadata fields will be ignored.

Further information

Here are some other interesting articles about BEACON: