I just saw Diane Vizine-Goetz demo OCLC’s Terminology Services at the CENDI/SKOS meeting and was excited to see various things out on the public web. For example, the LCSH concept “World Wide Web” is over here:

http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004

At the moment it’s not the most friendly human readable display, but that’s just a XSLT stylesheet away (assuming TS follows the patterns of other OCLC Services). I’m not quite sure what the default namespace urn:uuid:D30A7E67-31BF-40A3-9956-9668674FCD84 is. But the response looks like it indicates what resources are related to a given conceptual resource.

  1. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.html
  2. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.json
  3. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.marcxml
  4. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.meta
  5. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.skos
  6. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.stats
  7. http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004.zthes

And LCSH is just one of the vocabularies available through the pilot service, if you examine the XML you’ll see references to FAST, TGM and MESH + SRU services for each.

I think this is way cool, and a step in the right direction…particulary because they are going to make vocabularies available for free as long as the original publisher has no problem with it. My only complaint is that the URIs for the concepts don’t appear to do content-negotiation for application/rdf+xml. It looks like text/html and application/javascript (isn’t it application/json?) work just fine though. Try them out:

curl --header "Accept: application/javascript" http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004
curl --header "Accept: text/html" http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004

But not application/rdf+xml:

curl --header "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://tspilot.oclc.org/lcsh/sh2008114004

It seems like it would be a pretty easy fix, and pretty important for being able to follow your nose on the semantic web.