Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 4, 2012

The Correct End Of Your Telescope – Viewing Schema.org Adoption

Filed under: Dewey - DDC,FAST,LCSH,Schema.org,WorldCat — Patrick Durusau @ 7:16 pm

The Correct End Of Your Telescope – Viewing Schema.org Adoption by Richard Wallis.

telescope graphic

I have been banging on about Schema.org for a while.  For those that have been lurking under a structured data rock for the last year, it is an initiative of cooperation between Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex to establish a vocabulary for embedding structured data in web pages to describe ‘things’ on the web.  Apart from the simple significance of having those four names in the same sentence as the word cooperation, this initiative is starting to have some impact.  As I reported back in June, the search engines are already seeing some 7%-10% of pages they crawl containing Schema.org markup.  Like it or not, it is clear that Schema.org is rapidly becoming a de facto way of marking up your data if you want it to be shared on the web and have it recognised by the major search engines.

It is no coincidence then, at OCLC we chose Schema.org as the way to expose linked data in WorldCat.  If you haven’t seen it, just search for any item at worldcat.org, scroll to the bottom of the page and open up the Linked Data tab and there you will see the [not very pretty, but hay it’s really designed for systems not humans] Schema.org marked up linked data for the item, with links out to other data sources such as VIAF, LCSH, FAST, and Dewey.

Schema.org has much to recommend itself but I suspect that HTML remains the “…de facto way of marking up your data if you want it to be shared on the web and have it recognised by the major search engines.”

Ten percent is no mean feat but it is still ten percent.

February 23, 2012

Downloadable Version of FAST Now Available

Filed under: FAST,LCSH,OCLC — Patrick Durusau @ 4:52 pm

Downloadable Version of FAST Now Available

Just in case you are in need of “an enumerative, faceted subject heading schema derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).”

Thought that would get your attention. Details from the announcement follow:

OCLC Research has made FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) available for bulk download, along with some minor improvements based on user feedback and routine updates. As with other FAST data, the bulk downloadable versions are available at no charge.

FAST is an enumerative, faceted subject heading schema derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). OCLC made FAST available as Linked Open Data in December 2011.

The bulk downloadable versions of FAST are offered at no charge. Like FAST content available through the FAST Experimental Linked Data Service, the downloadable versions of FAST are made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution (ODC-By) license.

FAST may be downloaded in either SKOS/RDF format or MARC XML (Authorities format). Users may download the entire FAST file including all eight facets (Personal Names, Corporate Names, Event, Uniform Titles, Chronological, Topical, Geographic, Form/Genre) or choose to download individual facets (see the download information page for more details).

OCLC has enhanced the VoID (“Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets”) dataset description for improved ease of processing of the license references. Several additions and changes to FAST headings have been made in the normal course of processing new and changed headings in LCSH. OCLC will continue to periodically update FAST based on new and changed headings in LCSH.

About FAST

The FAST authority file, which underlies the FAST Linked Data release, has been created through a multi-year collaboration of OCLC Research and the Library of Congress. Specifically, it is designed to make the rich LCSH vocabulary available as a post-coordinate system in a Web environment. For more information, see the FAST activity page.

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