ID.LOC.GOV web service, Authorities and Vocabularies

The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the enhancement of its ID.LOC.GOV web service, Authorities and Vocabularies, which provides access to Library of Congress standards and vocabularies as Linked Data. In addition to technological refinements aimed at improving the user experience, we now offer additional vocabularies: *Thesaurus of Graphic Materials *MARC Code List for Relators *Cryptographic Hash Functions *Preservation Events *Preservation Level RoleThe latter three are in support of preservation and technical metadata schemes. The vocabulary data are available for bulk download. Additional vocabularies will be added in the future, including (among others) the MARC code lists for geographic areas, countries and languages and additional PREMIS controlled vocabularies. The Authorities and Vocabularies web service was first made available in May 2009 and offered the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), the Library's initial entry into the Linked Data movement. In part by assigning each vocabulary and each data value within it a unique resource identifier (URI), the service provides a means for machines to semantically access, use, and harvest authority and vocabulary data that adheres to W3C recommendations, such as Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). In this way, the Authorities and Vocabularies web service also makes government data publicly and freely available in the spirit of the Open Government directive. Although the primary goal of the service is to enable machine access to Library of Congress data, a web interface serves human users searching and browsing the vocabularies. We are very interested to get feedback on the uses and usefulness of the service to inform ways that we might enhance it. (There is a comment form at the site.).
Please explore it for yourself at http://id.loc.gov/ .


Rebecca S. Guenther rgue@loc.govSenior Networking & Standards Specialist
Network Development & MARC Standards Office- Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave SE- Washington, DC 20540- voice: +1.202.707.5092- fax: +1.202.707.0115