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.

On Lonclass, UDC and RDF

An interesting read about sharing and linking data on Dan Brickley's blog "danbri’s foaf stories: the web, the world, us, you and them" explaining some of the ideas behind the NoTube 'semantic television' project.

Snippets:

"Lonclass is one of the BBC’s in-house classification systems – the “London classification”. I’ve had the privilege of investigating Lonclass within the NoTube project. It’s not currently public, but much of what I say here is also applicable to the UDC classification system upon which it was based. UDC is also not fully public yet; I’ve made a case elsewhere that it should be, and I hope we’ll see that within my lifetime. UDC and Lonclass have a fascinating history and are rich cultural heritage artifacts in their own right, but I’m concerned here only with their role as the keys to many of our digital and real-world archives.

Why would we want to map Lonclass or UDC subject classification codes into RDF?

[....] The work needs to be shared, and RDF is currently our best bet on how to create such work sharing, meaning sharing, information-linking systems in the Web. The hierarchies in UDC and Lonclass don’t attempt to represent all of objective reality; they instead show paths through information.

[...] Classification systems with compositional semantics can be enriched when we map their basic terms using identifiers from other shared data sets. And those in the UDC/Lonclass tradition, while in some ways they’re showing their age (weird numeric codes, huge monolithic, hard-to-maintain databases), … are also amongst the most interesting systems we have today for navigating information, especially when combined with Linked Data techniques and companion datasets."