The New York Times and Its 30,000 Tags (You Can Call Them Subject Headings)
A few weeks ago we posted about a new prototype from the New York Times named "Custom Feeds." It allows users, for free, to create "custom built" RSS feeds of NY Times content that make use of the actual tags (aka descriptors, subject headings) that humans use when meta-tagging (aka indexing). At the end of the post we even made special note that The Times took the time to point out they still uses human "meta-taggers."
Today, the wonderful Tara Calashain has an excellent post about how The NY Times making all of the their controlled vocabulary (subject headings) available to the public. Eventually 30,000 of them will be available. As of today, approximately 5,000 personal name headings (aka tags) are online.
Tara also points out that each of the 5,000 names have direct links to RDF and XML data at DBPedia* and Freebase. She also explains that you can download the complete file of names (something a developer is likely to do) or browse and view each recrord one at a time.
Given that we're not developers we're going to browse them (in HTML format) online. You can view the 5000 names here. Just like the LC Authorities file has reference value by sometimes providing birthdates, when a name was first used, or a snippet about a heading the NY Times files do much the same thing.
+ Anne Rice
Not much info here. *But for this and all other entries looking in the record and clicking the link that goes to dbpedia.org can show you the content along with the structure of an entry in the dbpedia knowledgebase. Here's theentry for Anne Rice.
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