The Nuovo soggettario as a service for the linked data world

Nuovo soggettario (NS), edited by the National Central Library of Flo-rence, is the Italian subject indexing tool for various types of resources. It has been JLIS.it. Vol.4, n.1 (Gennaio/January 2013). Art. #5474 p. 225 G. Bergamin, The Nuovo soggettario as a service for the linked data world developed in compliance with the IFLA recommendations, and other internationalstandards in the field of subject indexing. This tool has been created for generaland specialized Italian libraries, and for museums, multimedia libraries, archivesand documentation centres. The main component of the NS is a general thesaurusavailable on the web since 2007 (http://thes.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/ricerca.php). Thethesaurus comprises nowadays approximately 46.000 terms and is updated. It sup-ports the new subject indexing practices and manages terminology deriving fromcollaboration between the BNCF and other libraries. The project is evolving in manydirections and supporting interoperability. The main goal of the availability – sinceNovember 2010 – of the NS dataset in SKOS/RDF format, is to promote the useof this tool also beyond the traditional library environment. In this context threeworking areas have been taken into account: 1) improve accessibility and usability ofthe NS in the linked data environment: SPARQL endpoint, mapping to other datasets(including LCSH, RAMEAU, AGROVOC, EUROVOC, DBpedia); address the costs ofbibliographic control starting from a project of automatic indexing (quality controlled)using NS in SKOS /RDF format and open source software tools; 3) cooperate withother institutions that are publishing linked open data.