Re: Top three levels of Dewey Decimal Classification published as linked data

(+cc: Lorcan Dempsey, Stefan Decker, who might remember this old stuff)


FWIW I've been trying to update some old (1998) PURLs to point to this. 
This is really just for fun, historical interest and a sense of closure, 
but in

	http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp/queryservice.html

We had example SKOS-precursor RDF markup for DDC and UDC:

synonym("http://purl.org/net/rdf/ddcsubset/c658.8","http://purl.org/net/rdf/udcsubset/c658.8").
broader_term("http://purl.org/net/rdf/ddcsubset/c338.7","http://purl.org/net/rdf/udcsubset/c65").

(there were also some case/capitalization variants, unfortunately).

Backstory:
The use case was real: we had back then, subject-based Internet 
catalogues with real librarians and subject experts, paid and volunteer, 
who were locating and cataloguing the best of the Web for 
academic/research use.

SOSIG, for social sciences, used UDC. Biz/ed (where I worked) used Dewey 
Decimal, since it was at the time updating it's business section more 
rapidly; this was important since business education is quite prone to 
shifts in terminology. For SOSIG to serve their users well, they used 
UDC classification; for Biz/ed to do likewise, they used Dewey. And in 
UK/European efforts to explore portals to many such gateways, we needed 
a way to create integrated navigation.

Hence the above use case: exploit simple mappings between the 
classification systems. The reality of such mappings is of course much 
more complex, but fortunately our sites were all using simple subsets.

Details at http://www.desire.org/docs/research/deliverables/D3.6/d36b.html


So - many years later, I'm happy to see that the URIs I used in the '98 
demo can now, almost, resolve. There is work on the UDC side too, 
towards SKOSification - see 
http://universaldecimalclassification.blogspot.com/2009/03/udc-skosification.html

Here's what I've done with the PURLs (below).  I am sure there is no 
running code or data with the old PURLs so the 404s here don't matter 
too much. (It might be nice if the 404 page had some RDFa pointing to 
near matches, though?). Ideally I'd like 
http://purl.org/net/rdf/ddcsubset/{anything} to just redirect to the 
front page, since I can't see how PURL could figure out which bits of 
the subset won't 404 in the new site.

cheers,

Dan


  curl http://purl.org/net/rdf/ddcsubset/c658.8
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML>
     <HEAD>
         <TITLE>302 Found</TITLE>
     </HEAD>
     <BODY>
     <H1>Found</H1>
          The resource requested is available <A 
HREF="http://dewey.info/c658.8">here</A>.<P>
     </BODY>
</HTML>

$ curl http://purl.org/net/rdf/ddcsubset/
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML>
     <HEAD>
         <TITLE>302 Found</TITLE>
     </HEAD>
     <BODY>
     <H1>Found</H1>
          The resource requested is available <A 
HREF="http://dewey.info/">here</A>.<P>
     </BODY>
</HTML>

Received on Thursday, 20 August 2009 10:13:48 UTC