- From: Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>
- Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 09:54:06 -0400
- To: "SWD Working SWD" <public-swd-wg@w3.org>, public-lod@w3.org
I'd like to announce an experimental linked-data, SKOS representation of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) [1] ... and also ask for some help. The Library of Congress has been participating in the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group, and has converted LCSH from the MARC21 data format [2] to SKOS. LCSH is a controlled vocabulary used to index materials that have been added to the collections at the Library of Congress. It has been in active development since 1898, and was first published in 1914 so that other libraries and bibliographic utilities could use and adapt it. The lcsh.info service makes 266,857 subject headings available as SKOS concepts, which amounts to 2,441,494 triples that are separately downloadable [3] (since there isn't a SPARQL endpoint just yet). At the last SWDWG telecon some questions came up about the way concepts are identified, and made available via HTTP. Since we're hoping lcsh.info can serve as an implementation of SKOS for the W3C recommendation process we want to make sure we do this right. So I was hoping interested members of the linked-data and SKOS communities could take a look and make sure the implementation looks correct. Each concept is identified with a URI like: http://lcsh.info/sh95000541#concept When responding to requests for concept URIs, the server content negotiates to determine which representation of the concept to return: - application/xhtml+xml - application/json - text/n3 - application/rdf+xml This is basically the pattern that Cool URIs for the Semantic Web discusses as the Hash URI with Content Negotiation [4]. An additional point that is worth mentioning is that the XHTML representation includes RDFa, that also describes the concept. At the moment the LCSH/SKOS data is only linked to itself, through assertions that involve skos:broader, skos:narrower, and skos:related. But the hope is that minting URIs for LCSH will allow it to be mapped and/or linked to concepts in other vocabularies: dbpedia, geonames, etc. Any feedback, criticisms, ideas are welcome either on either the public-lod [5] or public-swd-wg [6] discussion lists. Thanks for reading this far! //Ed [1] http://lcsh.info [2] http://www.loc.gov/marc/ [3] http://lcsh.info/static/lcsh.nt [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/#hashuri [5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/ [6] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/
Received on Monday, 9 June 2008 13:54:41 UTC