Michael Panzer’s Dewey Blog announced on June 19th that the full DDC 23 classification set has now been released as linked data. Panzer is on the OCLC Linked Data Research Team.
According to the Dewey.info website, it is “… an experimental space for linked DDC data. The intention of the dewey.info prototype is to be a platform for Dewey data on the Web.” Yes, Dewey.info is not necessarily new to the metadata community, but just look at all the updated bells and whistles:
New:
*Access to Edition 23 (assignable numbers and captions)
*Access to the top three levels of the DDC in twelve languages
*Access to Abridged Edition 14 (assignable numbers and captions) in three languages *Actionable URIs for every class
*Classification semantics encoded in SKOS Representations for machines (RDF) and for humans (XHTML+RDFa)
*Different RDF serializations (RDF/XML, Turtle, JSON)
*Exposed SPARQL endpoint
*Data is reusable under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license
Compare Panzer’s example of a sample “old” data identifier for nuclear physicists: http://dewey.info/class/539.7/2009/07/about.en with a URI that accesses a single DDC 23 class: http://dewey.info/class/539.7/e23/2012-06-14/about.en.
And don’t forget that the LCSH URI is available for nuclear physicists: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh92006769, as is the FAST URI: http://experimental.worldcat.org/fast/1040385/
Yowza–good stuff!
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