Dewey linked data: making connections with old friends and new acquaintances

This paper explores the history, uses cases, and future plans associatedwith availability of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system as linked data.Parts of DDC system have been available as linked data since 2009. Initial efforts in-cluded the DDC Summaries in eleven languages exposed as linked data in dewey.info.In 2010, the content of dewey.info was further extended by the addition of assignablenumbers and captions from the Abridged Edition 14 data files in English, Italian,and Vietnamese. During 2012, we will add assignable numbers and captions fromthe latest full edition database, DDC 23. In addition to the ”old friends” of differentDewey language versions, institutions such as the British Library and Deutsche NaJLIS.it. Vol. 4, n. 1 (Gennaio/January 2013). Art. #5467 p. 198 JLIS.it. Vol. 4, n. 1 (Gennaio/January 2013) tionalbibliothek have made use of Dewey linked data in bibliographic records andauthority files, and AGROVOC has linked to our data at a general level. We expect toextend our linked data network shortly to ”new acquaintances” such as GeoNames,ISO 639-3 language codes, and Mathematics Subject Classification. In particular, thepaper examines the linking process to GeoNames as an example of cross-domainvocabulary alignment. In addition to linking plans, the paper reports on use casesthat facilitate machine-assisted categorization and support discovery in the semanticweb environment.