UDC as linked data

The Multilingual UDC Summary has been available as SKOS (XML/RDF) since November 2011. UDC Summary has over 2,500 UDC subdivisions including common auxiliaries (language, place, form, materials, properties etc.). UDC records in this selection contain notes, examples, references and are available in 48 languages. 

In addition to the static export download, the UDC SKOS export is also available for browsing via an html interface which displays each UDC class as a single page with an option for language selection. Both the linked data browsing interface and a single download are available from the UDC linked data webpage. The mapping between UDC and SKOS classes is also available from the same page.

The complete UDC are planned to be made available for machine-to-machine access on the web following the 2012 UDC update. This is planned to include not only 70,000 valid UDC numbers but also 11,000 cancelled classes - which will enable linking and redirecting of library catalogues containing deprecated notations. 

The UDC Summary is now being updated and expanded with UDC MRF 2011 data to include more records in the place auxiliaries and biology areas.

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).

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.

CFP: International UDC Seminar 2009 "Classification at a Crossroads", The Hague, 29-30 October 2009

Following the success of the first International Seminar on UDC, the second in a series of biennial conferences entitled Classification at a Crossroads: Multiple Directions to Usability will take place on 29-30 October 2009 in the UDC headquarters at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague.

The 2009 Seminar aims at exploring how new developments in information standards and technology influence and affect applications and services using classification, Universal Decimal Classification in particular, and its relationships to other systems.

The Seminar programme will highlight many ways in which the use classification can be improved. Attention will be paid to the applications of classification in supporting multilingual access, user-friendly representations of classification in resource discovery and semantic searching expansion and classification application across distributed systems.

Papers are now invited on the following topics:

Classification and semantic technologies, e.g. experiences with vocabulary standards for expressing and porting classification data into the Semantic Web, vocabulary registries, terminology services
Classification in supporting information integration, e.g. classification use in alignment of vocabularies, classification as a common subject language in co-operative systems, experiences in multi-database systems, classification mapping to other subject languages, classification enhancement with social tagging
Verbal and multilingual access to classification, e.g. textual searching and display, management of subject-alphabetical indexes, extraction of thesauri from classification schemes
Classification authority control and library systems, e.g. issues with MARC formats, authority file development, maintenance and sharing of data
Visual representations/interface to classification, e.g. issues in classification browsing and faceted representation in classification tools and information systems
Experiences with classification outside the traditional library environment, e.g. use in different types of digital repositories (eprints, VLE), resource discovery on the Web, alerting services, specialised bibliographic services and databases (images, sound), organization of physical objects (museums, archives)

To read more about conference theme and to submit your abstract visit the event's website.

New UDC tool from MagnaView

At the UDC seminar 2007 in The Hague, MagnaView presented an innovative visual application which gives you the possibility to view the UDC Master Reference File in novel ways, and to interact with it visually.

From MagnaView UDC Viewer brochure:

"UDC Viewer offers you an instant and visual access to the complete content of the Master Reference File (MRF), i.e. to all records and all tags. UDC-viewer makes use of a pre-processed and extended version of MRF and gives you more than 20 different views, each including the complete MRF or part of the MRF like the Main Table.

MagnaView visulizes the data of the MRF in various views and allows users to use the MRF interactively. The user can, for example:

- Zoom in/out to a specific part of the data by double-clicking
- Filter: user can exclude part of the data
- Hide or show details
- Make a selection of the data by dragging the mouse
- Select by search for values of specific tags and by simple string search
- Link Google, allowing Internet search of all terms in MRF"

You can read more information about features, price and purchase in the product brochure.