DDC 23 released as linked data at dewey.info
From the post:
As announced on Monday at the seminar “Global Interoperability and Linked Data in Libraries” in beautiful Florence, an exciting new set of linked data has been added to dewey.info. All assignable classes from DDC 23, the current full edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification, have been released as Dewey linked data. As was the case for the Abridged Edition 14 data, we define “assignable” as including every schedule number that is not a span or a centered entry, bracketed or optional, with the hierarchical relationships adjusted accordingly. In short, these are numbers that you find attached to many WorldCat records as standard Dewey numbers (in 082 fields), as additional Dewey numbers (in 083 fields), or as number components (in 085 fields).
The classes are exposed with full number and caption information and semantic relationships expressed in SKOS, which makes the information easily accessible and parsable by a wide variety of semantic web applications.
This recent addition massively expands the data set by over 38.000 Dewey classes (or, for the linked data geeks out there, by over 1 million triples), increasing the number of classes available almost tenfold. If you like, take some time to explore the hierarchies; you might be surprised to find numbers for Maya calendar or transits of Venus (loyal blog readers will recognize these numbers).
All the old goodies are still there, of course. Depending on which type of user agent is accessing the data (e.g., a browser) a different representation is negotiated (HTML or various flavors of RDF). The HTML pages still include RDFa markup, which can be distilled into RDF by browser plug-ins and other applications without the user ever having to deal with the RDF data directly.
More details follow but that should be enough to capture your interest.
Good thing there is a pointer for the Maya calendar. Would hate for interstellar archaeologists to think we were too slow to invent a classification number for the disaster that is supposed to befall us this coming December.
I have renewed my ACM and various SIG memberships to run beyond December 2012. In the event of an actual disaster refunds will not be an issue. 😉