Relationships, spaces, and the two faces of Dewey
This post is from my colleague Michael Panzer, who is OCLC's Global Product Manager for Taxonomy Services. Michael builds technical and business cases for the use of Dewey and other OCLC terminology resources in a wide variety of web applications. That means, while analyzing the traditional use cases and user base for knowledge organization systems, rethinking their role in a rapidly changing information landscape.
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By Michael Panzer
When dealing with a large-scale and widely-used knowledge organization system like the Dewey Decimal Classification, we often tend to focus solely on the organization aspect, which is closely intertwined with editorial work. This is perfectly understandable, since developing and updating the DDC, keeping up with current scientific developments, spotting new trends in both scholarly communication and popular publishing, and figuring out how to fit those patterns into the structure of the scheme are as intriguing as they are challenging.
From the organization perspective, the intended user of the scheme is mainly the classifier. Dewey acts very much as a number-building engine, providing richly documented concepts to help with classification decisions.
Since the Middle Ages, quasi-religious battles have been fought over the "valid" arrangement of places according to specific views of the world, as parodied by Jorge Luis Borges and others. Organizing knowledge has always been primarily an ontological activity; it is about putting the world into the classification.
However, there is another side to this coin--the discovery side. While the hierarchical organization of the DDC establishes a default set of places and neighborhoods that is also visible in the physical manifestation of library shelves, this is just one set of relationships in the DDC. A
What are those "other" relationships that Dewey possesses and that seem so important to surface? Firstly, there is the relationship of concepts to resources. Dewey has been used for a long time, and over 200,000 numbers are assigned to information resources each year and added to WorldCat by the Library of Congress and the German National Library alone.
Secondly, we have relationships between concepts in the scheme itself. Dewey provides a rich set of non-hierarchical relations, indicating other relevant and related subjects across disciplinary boundaries.
Thirdly, perhaps most importantly, there is the relationship between the same concepts across different languages. Dewey has been translated extensively, and current versions are available in French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Briefer representations of the top-three levels (the DDC Summaries) are available in several languages in the DeweyBrowser. This multilingual nature of the scheme allows searchers to access a broader range of resources or to switch the language of--and thus localize--subject metadata seamlessly. MelvilClass, a Dewey front-end developed by the German National Library for the German translation, could be used as a common interface to the DDC in any language, as it is built upon the standard DDC data format.
It is not hard to give an example of the basic terminology of a class pulled together in a multilingual way:
<class/794.8> a skos:Concept ;
skos:notation "794.8"^^ddc:notation ;
skos:prefLabel "Computer games"@en ;
skos:prefLabel "Computerspiele"@de ;
skos:prefLabel "Jeux sur ordinateur"@fr ;
skos:prefLabel "Juegos por computador"@es .
Expressed in such manner, the Dewey number provides a language-independent representation of a Dewey concept, accompanied by language-dependent assertions about the concept. This information, identified by a URI, can be easily consumed by semantic web agents and used in various metadata scenarios.
Fourthly, as we have seen, it is important to play well with others, i.e., establishing and maintaining relationships to other
Pulling those relationships together under a common surface will be the next challenge going forward. In the semantic web community the concept of Linked Data currently receives some attention, with its emphasis on exposing and connecting data using technologies like URIs, HTTP and RDF to improve information discovery on the web. With its focus on relationships and discovery, it seems that Dewey will be well prepared to become part of this big linked data set. Now it is about putting the classification back into the world!
