Good news from OCLC regarding its Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) project:
The release of FAST as Linked Data provides FAST headings in both machine-readable and human-friendly presentations. Each FAST heading is assigned a specific URI (Universal Resource Identifier). For a given URI, users accessing the individual FAST heading with a web browser will be presented a convenient, labeled display of the authority record data for the heading, while computer programs accessing FAST at the same URI may use widely-adopted methods to negotiate for the same information in a choice of several machine-readable formats.
The Linked Data representations of FAST are formatted using the SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) web standard. The Linked Data version of the FAST authorities also incorporates links to equivalent LCSH authorities. In addition, many of the geographic headings have links to the GeoNames geographic database.
See yesterday’s press release for links to the FAST search page (id.worldcat.org/fast/), a LCSH to FAST converter, and a FAST-maps mash-up.
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