Hi Charles-Antoine, I can't be terribly specific about timing, but ranging anywhere between "eventually" and "in the near future", we here at LC will have an alpha offering of LCSH data as SKOS RDF that should be available to the public. The SKOS data should be able to help with your thesaurus hierarchy needs. Several offices in LC are trying to work out the delivery mechanism details right now.
Ed Summers, who is doing the lion's share of the development work, can speak about how he crafted the expression of LCSH->SKOS. Clay On Feb 7, 2008, at 5:49 PM, Charles Antoine Julien, Mr wrote:
A kind fellow on NGC4Lib suggested I mention this here. I'm developing a 3D "fly-through" interface for an LCSH organized collection but I'm having difficulty finding a library willing to "give" me a subset of their data (i.e., subject headings (broad to narrow terms) and the bib records to which they have been assigned). They just don't see why they should help me. Their value added isn't clear to them since this is experimental and I have no wish turn this into a business (I like to build and test solutions...selling them isn't my piece of pie). I'm planning to import the data into Access or SQL Server (depending how much I get) and partly normalize the bib records so subject terms for each item are in a separate one-to-many table. I also need the authority data to establish where each subject term (and its associated bib records) resides in the broad to narrow term hierarchy...this is more useful in the sciences which seems to have 4-6 levels deep. Jonathan Rochkind (kind fellow in question) suggested the following -I could access data directly through Z39.5... -I could "take" LC subject authority data in MARC format from a certain grey-area-legal source -I could take bib records (and their associated LCSH terms) from http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Dataset_Collection Particularly: http://simile.mit.edu/rdf-test-data/barton/compressed/ In particular, the "Barton" collection. That will be in the MODS format, which will actually be easier to work with than library standard MARC. Or http://www.archive.org/details/marc_records_scriblio_net Obviously I'm not looking forward to parsing MARC data although I've heard there are scripts for this. Additional suggestions and/or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a bunch, Charles-Antoine Julien Ph.D Candidate School of Information Studies McGill University
