Multilingual UDC Summary - available

The UDC Summary of around 2,000 classes has been online since October 2009 and can now be browsed in 13 languages here (select language in the drop down menu top).

The UDC summary is fully aligned with the UDC MRF 2009 which is going to be released in the following months. This set is made available for free use under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license (CC-BY-SA).

BSI, AENOR, CEFAL and VINITI (UDC Consortium members) have supplied their UDC abridged edition data in English, French, Spanish and Russian - which served as a basis for translation work. GFDC "Global Forest Decimal Classification" has given their permission to include their top classes under 630 as an extension to the UDC.

We are adding language data and updates as we speak and changes will be visible on a daily basis. In addition to the above 13 languages, we expect Portuguese and Czech shortly.

Captions in all languages appear first and then scope notes, application notes and example of combinations are added as updates progress.

The following functionalities will be added in the near future: search and ABC relative index browsing (at the moment we edit around 16,000 entries) and a chain index in English will be made available in January.

We will start providing various exports for download as soon as we have three complete and proofread languages.

The effort put into this project by colleagues worldwide is admirable. The entire work put into the UDC Summary so far is entirely voluntary including the programming support, the work of our language editors and translators for which we are most grateful.

As soon as we catch our breath we are going to create our 'hall of fame' page to properly acknowledge all contributors whose names are currently listed on our translation tracking page.

Conference outputs - Classification at a Crossroads

The International UDC Seminar 2009 entitled "Classification at a Crossroads: multiple directions to usability" took place in The Hague on 29-30 October 2009.

The conference was very successful in bringing together speakers and audience from different communities interested in, and working with, classification schemes. There were 135 delegates in attendance from 32 countries and from various kinds of information services and institutions, libraries, museums, academia and research institutes. The focus of the conference was on technical and technological issues on how to make classification work in a networked environment.

Talks provoked interesting discussions and left us all with the feeling that we need more events of this kind which would give opportunities to technical, software and standards specialists to interact with classificationists, classification owners and practitioners. The panel discussion at the end of the conference stressed again how the application environment for classification has changed significantly for both those who publish and distribute classification and for those who apply it. The commitment to open sharing and linking of data is a shared responsibility.

It transpires that many issues that deal with classification use are not entirely to do with funding or programming expertise as much as a matter of 'know how' and there is a great responsibility on gatekeepers of this knowledge and expertise to share it and make it accessible.

We have now published talk slides and mp3 recordings. The proceedigns of the conference will be published in the Extensions & Corrections ot the UDC, issue 31 (2009) and the selections of papers will be published in the Knowledge Organization journal.

Last call for registration: Classification at a Crossroads

International UDC Seminar
Classification at a Crossroad: Multiple Directions to Usability
The Hague, 29-30 October 2009.

The final Programme with abstracts and speakers' biographies containing a selection of 22 talks is now available.

This conference will cover a variety of topics: classification of web resources, automatic classification, relationships between thesaurus and classification, terminology services, web ontology standards, new approaches in using or presenting classification and classification use in library networks.

The programme highlights are talks by our keynote speakers Dagobert Soergel "Illuminating the Chaos: Using Classification to Harness the Web" and Dan Brickley "Open Web Standards and Classification: Foundations for a Hybrid Approach".

A recent addition to the programme is a presentation by Stella Dextre Clarke "Providing for interoperability between thesauri and classification schemes in ISO 25964" on the new ISO standard for structured vocabularies and its approach to classification.

Ergon Verlag will exhibit and sell books from its series Advances in Knowledge Organization at a special 50% discount. All delegates are given 20% discount to Facet Publishing Titles. Both publishers contributed a number of books for a lottery draw and delegates will have a chance to win a book.

The registration for the conference will close on 20th October. To register, with an option to pay online go to http://www.udcc.org/seminar2009/php/registration.php.

CFP: Colloquium in Mundaneum - May 2010 Mons (Belgium)

Colleagues doing research on the history of knowledge organization at the beginning of 20th century, including seminal work in the field of documentation by Paul Otlet and Henry Lafontaine, may be interested in the call for papers for the following event:

Colloquium: Transcending Boundaries in Europe in the Period of the Belle Epoque: Organizing Knowledge, Mobilizing Networks, and Effecting Social Change - 20-21 May 2010, Mons (Belgium)

VENUE: Mundaneum
[to learn more about Mudaneum, the origin of UDC and documentation as general see "Paul Otlet - Man who wanted to organize the world" a documentary narrated by W. Boyd Rayward]

The colloquium will explore aspects of network development, information creation, organization and exchange, and related "boundary spanning" activities of individuals and institutions and the scholarly tools and techniques that this enabled them to develop during the period of the "Belle Epoque" in which the Western European world underwent extensive social, political and "epistemic" change from approximately 1880 to 1914 [read more].

Abstracts (in English or French) of not more than 500 words should be sent by January 31, 2010 to Porf. W Boyd Rayward (wrayward@illinois.edu).

Notification of acceptance 28 February 2010.

Accepted papers must be delivered at the Colloquium in English.

Proposal to extend class 004 Computer science by K. P. Singh

We have just received an interesting proposal for the extension of the UDC class 004 Computer science by Kunwar P Singh and Manisha Singh (Department of Library and Information Sceince, University of Delhi) - which we are looking forward to working on.

We have been annually updating class 004 ever since its major revision and publication in 1994, adding a couple of the most urgently needed concepts almost every year. Class 004, has over 850 records in the database. Some areas of 004, however, certainly need attention. Kunwar's proposal may be very helpful in updating the 004.4 Software part of the schedule, especially programming languages. What is also an excellent contribution is the subject-alphabetical index that we can also add to the UDC Master Reference File to improve searching.

I have recently looked into the BCS Taxonomy developed by Judi Vernau and I find the main separation of the field into academic and professional topics rather interesting albeit impossible to align with document indexing requirements. Anyway, UDC allows any other field of knowledge/application area to be related to 004 which obviously influences the basic structure and difference between a general knowledge classification and special classifications.

It is useful to note that we have selected the following subdivision of 004 to be published in the UDC summary:

004 COMPUTER SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. COMPUTING. DATA PROCESSING

004.2 Computer architecture
004.22 Data representation
004.23 Instruction set architecture
004.25 Memory system
004.27 Advanced architectures. Non-Von Neumann architectures
004.3 Computer hardware
004.31 Processing units. Processing circuits
004.32 Computer pathways
004.33 Memory units. Storage units
004.35 Peripherals. Input-output units
004.38 Computers. Kinds of computer
004.4 Software
004.41 Software engineering
004.42 Computer programming. Computer programs
004.43 Computer languages. INCL: Programming languages
004.45 System software: INCL: Operating systems
004.49 Computer infections
004.5 Human-computer interaction. Man-machine interface. User interface. User environment
004.51 Display interface
004.52 Sound interface
004.55 Hypermedia. Hypertext
004.58 User help
004.6 Data
004.62 Data handling
004.63 Files
004.65 Databases and their structures
004.67 Systems for numeric data
004.7 Computer communication. Computer networks
004.71 Computer communication hardware
004.72 Network architecture
004.73 Networks according to area covered
004.738 Network interconnection. Internetworking. INCL: Internet (WWW)
004.75 Distributed processing systems
004.77 General networking applications and services. INCL: Internet applications
004.78 Online computing systems for specific use
004.8 Artificial intelligence
004.9 Application-oriented computer-based techniques
004.91 Document processing and production. INCL: Word, text processing. Desktop publishing
004.92 Computer graphics. INCL: Geometric modelling. Animation
004.93 Pattern information processing
004.94 Simulation by computer. Virtual reality

Articles from E&C 30 (2008) online

Articles published in the "Extensions & Corrections to the UDC" journal, issue 30 (2008) are now available in DLIST:

• McIlwaine, Ia C. & Williamson, Nancy (2008) Medicine and the UDC: the process of restructuring Class 61. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 9-16.
• Gnoli, Claudio; Mazzocchi, Fulvio & Slavic, Aida (2008) The UDC Philosophy revision project. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 17-19.
• Chovanova, Katarina (2008) Archaeology and the structure of class 9. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 21-22.
• Gilbert, Mark & Lane, Heather (2008) Forty-five numbers for snow: a brief introduction to the UDC for Polar libraries. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 23-25
• Balikova, Marie (2008) Conspectus categorization scheme based on UDC classification used in subject gateways in Czechia. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 27-33.
• San Segundo Manuel, Rosa (2008) Some arguments against the suitability of Library of Congress Classification for Spanish libraries. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 35-43.
• Fandino, Marta (2008) UDC or DDC: a note about the suitable choice for the National Library of Liechtenstein. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 45-47.
• Arskiy, Yurij M. (2008) UDC activities in Russia: a VINITI report. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 49-50.
• Akhverdova, Marina (2008) Present state of the UDC in Ukraine. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 51-52.
• Norekiene, Dalia (2008) UDC in Lithuania. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 53-54.
• Rozman, Darija (2008) UDC in 2008 – Brief news from Slovenia. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 55-56.
• Satija, Mohinder P. (2008) UDC in India: use and problems. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 57-58.
• Singh, K. P. (2008) UDC and its use: a case study of libraries and information centres in Delhi. Extensions and Corrections to the UDC 30 : pp. 59-65.

UDC Philosophy Revision: report 1

Earlier this year (see our blog item philosophy) we have announced the start of the work on the revision of class 1 Philosophy by Italian working group on UDC (see discussion list Italia - Gruppo di lavoro italiano sulla Universal Decimal Classification).

Claudio Gnoli has now published the report on the work done so far at http://italia.udcc.org/report1.html

UDC Twitter

UDC is now on Twitter. You can follow us at http://twitter.com/UDCC

June 2009 Classification and Indexing Section Newsletter

The June 2009 issue of the Classification and Indexing Section Newsletter is now available at
http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/newsletter-1.

The contents include:

A Few Words from the Chair
Greetings from the Information Coordinator
Section Activities, WLIC Milan 2009
Progress on FRSAR

Reports
Dewey Decimal Classification News
Dewey - Let's Do It!
European Dewey Users' Group (EDUG)
LCSH-ES Update
Open Shelves Classification Project
UDC News

News from: Czechia, Estonia, France, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States

Other News:
ISKO conference: Rome 2010
Mapping Library Classification Systems
UDC Discussion List en español
International UDC Seminar 2009

UDC Update Session at IFLA 2009

UDC Update Session at World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly "Libraries create futures: Building on cultural heritage", 23-27 August 2009, Milan, Italy - will take place on Tuesday, 25 August 2009, 12:00-13.00 in Room Turquoise 2.

Colleagues attending IFLA in Milan are welcome to attend.

Registration open

CLASSIFICATION AT A CROSSROADS
Multiple Directions to Usability
International UDC Seminar 2009
29-30 October 2009, The Hague

VENUE: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
URL: http://www.udcc.org/seminar2009/index.htm
FEE: €110 (student discount: €90)

The conference programme includes a selection of over twenty papers representing classification research in 14 countries. Speakers will address the potential of classification, in supporting information organization, management and resource discovery in the networked environment and will explore solutions for better subject access control and vocabulary sharing services.

Two eminent keynote speakers will address the conference: Prof. Dagobert Soergel, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland (USA) and Dan Brickley, an advocate and developer of W3C Semantic Web technologies (UK).

The conference is the second in a series of International UDC Seminars organized by the UDC Consortium and hosted by The National Library of The Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek). The UDCC is a self-funded, non-commercial organization, based in The Hague, established to maintain and distribute the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and supports its use and development.

To take advantage of the early bird discount, you can register and pay online at the conference website.

Simple Knowledge Organization System - Candidate Recommendation

From Alistair Miles and Antoine Isaac on behalf of the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group ...

The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group is pleased to announce the publication of a Candidate Recommendation for the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) Reference: http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-skos-reference-20090317/

A new Working Draft of the accompanying SKOS Primer has also been published:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-skos-primer-20090317/

The Working Group now *calls for implementations.*

We would like to hear of any vocabulary (thesaurus, classification system, subject heading system, taxonomy or other KOS) or mapping between vocabularies that has been published in the Web as machine-readable data using SKOS, and/or has been made available via programmatic services using SKOS.

We would also like to hear of any software that has the capability to read and/or write SKOS data, and/or can check whether a given SKOS dataset is consistent with the SKOS data model.

If you would like to notify us of a vocabulary, vocabulary mapping, and/or software as a SKOS implementation, *please send an email to public-swd-wg@w3.org before 30 April 2009*, providing the information described below. Please also begin the subject line with "SKOS Implementation".

== Vocabulary Implementations ==

If you are notifying us of one or more vocabularies or vocabulary mappings as an implementation, please provide *at least* the following information:

* vocabulary title(s) (e.g. Library of Congress Subject Headings)

* name of person and/or organisation responsible for the implementation

* a list of the SKOS constructs used (e.g. skos:Concept, skos:ConceptScheme, skos:inScheme, skos:broader, skos:prefLabel, skos:closeMatch ... etc.)

* URL(s) where the published SKOS data may be obtained, if the data are publicly available

We would also welcome any further information you care to provide, however this is *not mandatory*. For example, we would be interested to know the scope and size of the vocabulary, what it is primarily used for, in what languages the vocabulary is provided, any other URLs describing the vocabulary or providing further information.

== Software Implementations ==

If you are notifying us of software as an implementation, please provide *at least* the following information:

* name of the software (e.g. SKOSEd)

* name of person and/or organisation responsible for the implementation

* URLs for software home page and/or download location if publicly downloadable

* can the software read SKOS data?

* can the software write SKOS data?

* can the software check consistency of SKOS data with respect to the SKOS data model?

For more information on what we mean by reading, writing or checking SKOS data, see: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SKOSImplementationReport

We would also welcome any further information you care to provide, however this is *not mandatory*. For example, we would be interested in the main purpose and functionality of the software, the programming language and/or software frameworks used, details of the SKOS constructs which are supported, any other URLs describing the software or providing further information.

Moscow: 4th Seminar on UDC organized by VINITI

The 4th in the series of VINITI's seminars on UDC methods "The conceptual approach to describing resources in pure sciences using Universal Decimal Classification" will take place on 8-10 April 2009.

Russian speaking users can find more information about this seminar at http://forum.udcc.ru/

About VINITI

Vserossiisky Institut Nauchnoi i Tekhnicheskoi Informatsii (VINITI) - All-Russian Scientific and Technical Information Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences is the leading information centre in Russia and CIS.

VINITI gathers and processes information from natural sciences and technology from 130 countries in 66 languages and prepares about one million records per year, presenting them both as printed publications and computer-readable databases.

The unique feature of VINITI bibliographic service is that it collects, creates abstracts, stores and make available significant amount of scientific and technical materials that are not published (deposited manuscripts, dissertations, etc).

VINITI also develops tools and software for advanced information processing: search engines, automatic translation systems, intellectual indexing and abstracting systems, etc. As the owner of UDC data in Russian language, VINITI is the only publisher within the UDC Consortium that still maintains and publishes full edition of the UDC (over 200,000 records).

UDC Discussion List in Spanish

A Spanish UDC discussion list cdu-es is now opened.

Spanish speaking colleagues using or interested in the Universal Decimal Classification can join the list at http://lists.udcc.org/mailman/listinfo/cdu-es

CDU-ES is a public mailing list for users and researchers of the Universal Decimal Classification in Spanish speaking countries. It is an open list to share information and discuss practical UDC questions regardless of the field of its application: libraries, museum, archives, Internet gateways or metadata.

Online UDC courses - in Spanish and Swedish

Of interest to Spanish and Swedish speaking colleagues...

Miguel Benito, the driving force behind and the editor of the Swedish/Spanish/Finish UDC schedules online has now also created an online UDC and Dewey course using Moodle.

This is certainly a very welcome development. I wonder, however, how do potential participants find out about the content and course programme, goals, duration and targeted audience prior to requesting login/pw?

I am also looking forward to hear from Benito whether he finds Moodle a suitable course management system for this kind of training.

New UDC Licence Scheme

In February 2009, a new UDC licence scheme and new prices have been approved by the UDC Consortium.

There are two main categories of licences: publishing and licences for UDC MRF use.

For many existing and prospective UDC users it is important to understand that they do not need licence if they

• apply UDC schedule content for information and knowledge organization from a copy of a publication (printed or CD-ROM) or by accessing an authorised UDC online service
• manually apply the UDC (i.e. there is no use of the UDC MRF) for organizing and indexing of resources for the purpose of document/shelf arrangement, organization of information gateways and library catalogue and in information retrieval where UDC numbers may appear as a part of your document labels or resource description.

In other words, if your collection (printed or digital) is classified by UDC you do not need a licence to show your collection and to browse and search you UDC metadata on the Web. The presence of UDC numbers on documents/books (information objects) or in bibliographic records (and their listing) in libraries, OPACs, bibliographies, web pages do not require licence.

Licences are needed only for publishing of UDC schedules and to use of UDC MRF data in various scenarios. One of the new licences is for using the UDC MRF for educational purposes (e.g. in library schools).

Following a licence application, licences can be:

• purchased according to the license pricing scheme
• negotiated as non-standard licences for cases when this may be of benefit to users and the UDC development
• granted for free (in exceptional cases)

Read more about licence policy, terms and prices here.

UDC SKOSification

danbri wrote (22/03/2009)

"How are things going with SKOSification? If some SKOS extensions (SKOS is designed to be independently extended) are needed to do justice to UDC, it would be great to begin that discussion... particularly as SKOS has just entered "candidate recommendation" stage at W3C - http://www.w3.org/News/2009#item35"

Dan, this is certainly on our current agenda. We thought it would be easier to have a SKOS discussion if we were able to publish a 1000 number outline as a real demonstrator on the web. We could have published the simple text selection of the outline in October - but when I looked into it I realized that classes on this level (i.e. 1000 numbers out of 70,000) do not normally have all details necessary to demonstrate the number synthesis rules. For instance on the top 1000 subdivisions in the UDC we do not have examples of synthesis such as

33:32 Relationships between politics and economy

or more precisely

33-042.3:32 Influence of politics on economy

Phase relationships make sense in detailed indexing and not on the top level disciplines/knowledge areas. But in order to demonstrate this functionality we had to add such examples of combinations in the 1000 number outline.

In addition to this editing we also decided to add multilingual data (and mappings), and to allow editing of translations online. This added a bit of complexity to the interface etc.

We hope that in a couple of weeks we are going to have this up. We would then look into making these data available in various schemas, SKOS being one of them.

Italian UDC Working Group

In January 2009 Claudio Gnoli and Fulvio Mazzochi formed a UDC Italian working group. In the next two years the group will be looking into the UDC
class 1 Philosophy.

The study group will be able to use the contributions of a seminar on the very topic of the classification of philosophy, recently organized at the University of Padua Department of Philosophy by Cristiana Bettella of ISKO Italy. Several Italian librarians discussed the issue of classifying philosophy, both from theoretical viewpoints and for practical application on the shelves of philosophy libraries. The proceedings of this seminar are in preparation.

Well known problems with this class of Philsophy in UDC (similar to the same class in Dewey), include a strong bias towards western philosophy, the sequence of philosophy subdivision being interrupted with 159.9 Psychology and lack of contemporary terminology.

Besides the general revision of concepts and terminology, aimed at making them more aligned with the uses of current philosophical literature, one major objective of the study is to explore the possibilities for restructuring class 1 Philosophy in the direction of facet analysis. This would allow for philosophical concepts to be organized into separate arrays, which could then be used to build compound concepts by synthesis of their notation. Looking into the Philosophy class in UDC will be an opportunity to discuss wider issues and problems in indexing and classification of information resources from this field in general.

Italian classification specialists interested in UDC can join the discussion: Italia — Gruppo di lavoro italiano sulla Universal Decimal Classification. All Italian speaking colleagues interested in the topic are also welcome.

The group also has their own website which is planned to contain the outputs and information on their work: http://italia.udcc.org/.