Multilingual UDC Summary update - 40 languages to date

UDC Summary (udcS) translations continue with great intensity, using our online, web-based tool and multilingual spreadsheets for offline work. We now have 40 languages online in over 10 different scripts: Armenian, Basque, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

We expect the top classes in Irish, Punjabi and Vietnamese shortly and we are reaching out to other colleagues interested in collaboration. There are over 100 volunteers, librarians, library school lecturers and researchers currently working on translations in their national language. Database statistics showing the translation progress can be viewed at the translation statistics page. Acknowledgments to contributors are currently noted in a translation tracking table.

There seems to be great interest in using the online schedules even in this present form. Average access to the website in March was over 22,000 hits per day.

Because of the intensity of the translation activity, and in order not to lose momentum, we devoted all of 2010 to encouraging, acquiring, uploading and supporting translations, improving the online translation interface and export tools. You can view a more detailed report in the Extensions & Correction, 31(2009). We are now in the process of designing our web content management system (Drupal) to support management and access to downloading exports, mappings and various useful content we will attach to udcS. Our plan for providing data dumps for download, various kinds of exports, and for publishing udcS as linked data is scheduled for 2011. We have created an alphabetical index of around 10,000 terms in English and we are now looking at creating an interface to this. Both mappings to other systems and natural language access will be our focus in the following months.

Report on the ongoing translation in Italian was provided by Chiara Zara at the ISKO Italy meeting in Venice (1 April 2011) "Il progetto di traduzione multilingue online della CDU".

Announcement: Classification & Ontology: International UDC Seminar 2011

Classification & Ontology:
Formal Approaches and Access to Knowledge
The Hague, 19-20 September 2011

Following the success of the 2009 conference we are very pleased to announce the next in the series of biennial conferences devoted to the advancement of bibliographic classification research, organized by the UDC Consortium and hosted by Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

The difference between bibliographic knowledge classification schemes and ontologies resides in their particular purpose and levels of formality. However, they are both based on observation and reasoning and share some structural principles and elements: categories, concepts, properties, class relationships, roles.

The objective of this conference is to promote collaboration and exchange of expertise between different fields dealing with knowledge classifications: bibliographic, web and AI. We hope to learn more about methods in ontology modelling and whether these may be used to improve and formalise data models of bibliographic classifications and enhance their value in information discovery.

Papers are now invited covering the following topics:

1. Modelling and representation of knowledge classifications
2. Standards and solutions for innovative and high-quality classification data processing
3. Applications and implementations of classification structures as ontologies
4. Theoretical considerations of the role of knowledge classifications

The proposals should be of interest to academic and research communities dealing with conceptual modelling, information systems design, knowledge organization, knowledge engineering, semantic interoperability & information integration, and natural-language processing.

To read more about the invited topics and to submit contribution go to the conference website.

Paper proposal submission deadline: 30 January 2011.

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."