New York Times Releases First Collection of Subject Descriptors as Linked Open Data
If you're not a cataloger, a metadata pro, semantic web expert, etc. the following post from the NY Times Open Blog is still worthy of your attention. It's an interesting and educational read (perhaps a refresher)? It's obviously written for developers and subject experts but we think everyone will take away a few or more facts after reading it. It also contains a very interesting 2001 NY Times article on the origins of the NY Times index.
If you're a metadata expert or developer it contains info about more open data that the New York Times continues to make available on a regular basis and how to use it.
Today we’re releasing our latest batch of subject headings to the Linked Data Cloud. We’re especially excited about this release because it’s the first to contain subject descriptors. Our previous releases contained only subject headings for people, places and organizations. While these subject headings are really useful, they only allow you to explore our archive in terms of “who” and “where.” Our descriptors allow you to query the archive in terms of “what” — and that allows you to find articles based on the subject they discuss. Examples of descriptors include Law and Legislation, Dark Matter (Astronomy) and Ponzi Schemes.
The post continues with brief but useful explanations of scope notes, broad versus narrow tags (with an illustration), and term combinations.
As we move the terms from print to digital, this format translates to term combinations:
+ Accidents and Safety + Airlines and Airplanes = Plane Crash
+ Accidents and Safety + Boats and Boating = Boating Accident
+ Accidents and Safety + Railroads = Train Crash
+ Accidents and Safety + Roads and Traffic = Car Crash
The scope notes include indications about which terms frequently appear in term combinations.
Numbers
+ 498, the number of the most frequently used descriptors now available
+ NY Times plans on releasing all 3500 in the "coming months."
+ Appox. 10,500 tags (of all types are currently available)
To Review All Tags/Descriptors/Subject Headings released to this point, visit this page.
Experts can download and view the SKOS Files (Simple Knowledge Organization System)
The rest of us can browse the vocabulary by letter. In the "R" section you'll see that Recession and Depression is a descriptor. If you click on the URI you'll see the first time the term was used, the last time the term was used, a scope note, and links to the term "in action" on DBPedia and Freebase.
Here's a subject heading for location. Specifically, Red Square in Moscow. Clicking the URI leads you here.
Much of the same as you saw above. Two things we didn't see with the descriptor are:
+ Where the first column reads: owl:same as and has a URL that includes geonames.org (another database you might want to know about. Click and your taken directly to a Google aerial image of Red Square.
+ Further down the page you'll spot:prefLabel - en. This is the preferred label of the location. In this case it's Red Square (Moscow).
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