This topic came up a few weeks ago on code4lib too, where were you Ed!? :)

I will echo something that Roy mentioned in the thread from a few weeks back, would the LOC be willing to create a web service where you could supply a call number and it would return the heirarchy of topic areas for that number?

Thanks
Andrew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Ed Summers
> Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 8:19 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] LC class scheme in XML or spreadsheet?
>
> It's funny this subject just came up on one of the open-library
> discussion lists this week [1]. A whiles ago now Rob Sanderson, Brian
> Rhea (University of Liverpool) and I pulled down the LC Classification
> Outline pdf files, converted them to text, wrote a python munger to
> convert the text into what ended up being a SKOS RDF file. We made the
> code available [2] and you can see the resulting SKOS (which needs
> some URI work) [3].
>
> It's kind of a work in progress (still). I wanted to get to the point
> that the rdf file was leveraged in a little python library (possibly
> as a pickled data structure) for easily validating LC numbers and
> looking them up in the outline.
>
> I'd be interested in any feedback.
>
> //Ed
>
> [1] http://mail.archive.org/pipermail/ol-lib/2007-September/000069.html
> [2] http://inkdroid.org/svn/lcco-skos/trunk/rdfizer/
> [3] http://inkdroid.org/tmp/lcco.rdf