Tuesday 23 September 2008

Swedish UDC online moved to a new URL

The Swedish abridged edition of the UDC: "UNIVERSELLA DECIMALKLASSIFIKATIONEN: SVENSK ELEKTRONISK UTGÅVA", containing over 6,000 classes, has been available on the Web for free since 2001.

The edition was translated, prepared and maintained by Miguel Benito and his assistants/students from the Library School in Boras (Högskolan i Borås), Sweden.

The UDC database has now been moved to a new server and the new address is http://www.taranco.eu/udk/.

7 comments:

  1. It is indeed true, that this site can be regarded as Swedish.
    But the tabels are presented in Swedish,Finnish and Spanish.
    Kind of multilingual...
    And it is still free. In fact, the only classification that´s free

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  2. (3rd attempt to leave a comment; sorry if the others made it thru as well)

    This sounds really great, although I can't get through to the page (or even the top level page) for the site currently.

    Do you know if anyone is working on a SKOS version?

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  3. Hi,

    This is an answer to both comments, many thanks.

    Lars is correct and I will add this information about languages. This database and its online interface provides access to over 1000 classes in Finnish and a little less in Spanish I think.

    This is not the only free UDC data online. There is complete edition of UDC (over 60,000 classes) available for free online from http://aip.nkp.cz/mdt/,
    There is also an abridged old Italian UDC available at http://biocfarm.unibo.it/~spinelli/cdu/.

    But most importantly, in October 2008 there will be a summary of UDC in 1000 numbers available on the UDC Consortium webpage (http://www.udcc.org/outline/outline.htm). At the moment we have at this site around 700 classes in the plain and awkward html format which is not very good in providing an informative and instructive view of the system. The new summary approved by UDC Consortium is in the MySQL database and will be presented in the form of a proper online schedule to serve as a proper demonstrator of the UDC system.

    I will post an announcement as soon as this is available. The selection is going to be free for use. But most importantly this 1000 number summary will gradually be made available in all languages in which we will be able to collect data. Initially this will be in English, then in German, Dutch, Spanish and French.

    We plan to make these 1000 numbers data available not only for browsing but also as structured text exports or XML and SKOS.

    We hope to make a free translation tool available to all interested to add their national languages to this multilingual UDC set. This may be some time in January 2009.

    I really hope that I will have news here on the UDC blog very soon.

    If you have more questions or suggestions, or if you would be interested to add data in your language to this set please feel free to contact me directly (aida.slavic AT udcc.org)

    regards

    Aida

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  4. In relation to danbri's comment on not being able to access http://www.taranco.eu/udk/.

    I have checked the site (using Firefox and IE) and I have no problem browsing schedules.
    As for SKOS export for this specific database maybe - you have to contact directly Miguel Benito (email address is on the above website).

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  5. Aida, thanks for the quick reply. The first URL works for me now, cheers.

    Great news re the 1000 release. I look forward to seeing what you publish next month. In particular, I hope you'll find a way to publish URIs for these individual concepts and perhaps some arrangement of RDF/XML and RDFa along the lines of the http://lcsh.info/ site.

    This has got me curious about how the compositional grammar used in UDC might be (partially) re-expressed in OWL. Do you know if anyone's worked on this?

    Questions, questions :)

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  6. In response to the question about RDF/XML export - I haven't had chance to look into OWL and handling of inference rules. There are still so many very basic problem that ought to be sorted out with UDC data and its exports.

    When it comes to what you call 'compositional grammar' and we call it pre-combination or pre-coordination of UDC concepts - this one can be reduced to a set of rules. So there is no doubts that OWL should be able to express this. It is the matter of agreeing about this rules i.e. to reducing all possible to a set of most useful ones.
    We thought that it may be good approach to work on 'skosification' of the UDC first. But this turned to be more complex than it may appear - because of SKOS limitation when it comes to expressing classification data. But this is another problem.

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  7. 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

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