FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) Available as Linked Data

OCLC has made available FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) as Linked Data.

OCLC describes FAST as “an enumerative, faceted subject heading schema derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)”; i.e., an un-coordinated version of LCSH.

Like LCSH, FAST contains a very large collection of legal subject terms applicable to common law, civil law, mixed, and other types of jurisdictions.

Click here for a description of FAST Linked Data.

Click here for a list of legal Linked Data resources.

HT Gary Price.

Workshop on Knowledge Organization Systems

[NOTE: Updated on 24 October 2009 to link to presentation slides.]

The following event may be of interest to legal informatics researchers. Some of the knowledge representation systems to be discussed, including the Library of Congress Subject Headings in SKOS and the EPA Terminology Services, cover a substantial number of legal concepts. The registration deadline is October 16, 2009.

Knowledge Organization Systems: Managing to the Future: A Joint CENDI/NKOS Workshop, to be held October 22, 2009 at the National Agricultural Library Reading Room in Beltsville, MD, USA. The registration deadline is October 16, 2009. The program is available here. Slides from the presentations are available here. Here is the description:

“CENDI and the Networked Knowledge Organization Systems Working Group are joining together to hold a workshop on Knowledge Organization Systems. It will be hosted by The National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD on October 22, 2009. The workshop will focus on approaches to the management of knowledge organization systems that will support emerging and future requirements and use cases. It will cover aspects such as metadata for terminology and terminology resources, registries, standards, interoperability, collaborative workflows for development and expert review, and management software. The use cases will range from metadata input to search and decision support. The Knowledge Organization Systems will cover a wide range from authority files to formal ontologies. Speakers will represent government, academic and commercial organizations from a variety of disciplines including biomedicine, the environment, and earth science.”

LCSH in SKOS: Implications for Digital Law Libraries

Following up on our earlier post respecting Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) marked up in SKOS [URL corrected 10 August 2011], this post suggests the implications of LCSH in SKOS for free or low-cost digital law libraries and aggregators of metadata harvested from such libraries.

In a recent discussion of Tom Bruce’s very interesting post respecting the requirements of a public legal information system, subject indexing of primary and secondary legal resources was identified as a necessary feature of a digital law library. One marked difference between sophisticated commercial computer-assisted legal research (CALR) services, such as Westlaw and Lexis.com, on the one hand; and free or low-cost CALR services, such as those furnished by the legal information institutes (LIIs) or other providers, such as those listed on Georgetown Law Library’s Free & Low-Cost Legal Research page, or those listed on our digital law libraries page, on the other hand; is that the sophisticated commercial services provide high-quality subject indexing to primary law, featuring controlled subject vocabularies, such as Lexis.com’s Legal Topics and West’s Key Number System. Moreover, Westlaw and Lexis.com appear to have rendered their controlled subject vocabularies machine-readable, so as to enable certain kinds of automated subject search and retrieval of primary law. Machine-readable controlled vocabulary subject indexing substantially improves recall and precision and results in substantial time savings to the user, and so appears to be a critical aspect of the value added to legal information by the sophisticated CALR vendors.

The release of LCSH in SKOS raises the prospect that the LIIs and other free or low-cost CALR services can similarly enhance the value of their primary and secondary law collections. LCSH in SKOS is a public-domain, machine-readable, controlled subject vocabulary containing a very rich set of thousands of legal terms pertaining to a diversity of legal traditions and systems (including common law & civil law systems and the system of public international law) and thousands of cross references to unauthorized and related terms. When matched with automated subject indexing tools (see, e.g., here and here) LCSH in SKOS could allow free or low-cost digital law libraries to provide sophisticated subject access to their collections at an affordable expense. The free services could even collaborate on such indexing, and so realize further efficiencies. Moreover, the same controlled vocabulary can be used for primary and for secondary legal resources, enabling cross-database searching and providing substantial time and cost savings to users. Further, LCSH in SKOS can be linked to controlled subject vocabularies or ontologies in other languages (e.g., perhaps eventually through the Virtual International Authority File), to facilitate multi-lingual controlled vocabulary subject search and retrieval in digital law libraries.

In addition, LCSH in SKOS could enhance subject access to legal information across multiple services. To the extent that LCSH in SKOS is integrated into descriptive metadata for individual legal resources (for an interesting recent primary-law example, see MODS files for the Federal Register on FEDSYS, click on “More”), in OAI-PMH compliant databases, and such metadata is harvested and made publicly available, LCSH in SKOS could facilitate controlled-vocabulary subject retrieval of legal resources across multiple digital law libraries.

Public availability of LCSH in SKOS thus potentially represents a major breakthrough in improved intellectual access to law for users of free or low-cost digital law libraries.

LC Subject Headings Now Available in SKOS

The Library of Congress has released a machine-readable version of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) (URL corrected 10 August 2011], using SKOS as a data model. LCSH is important for legal knowledge representation in common law jurisdictions, because it is a very widely used controlled subject vocabulary in library catalogs in those jurisdictions. This release is an example of LC’s follow-through on plans announced last year in Deanna Marcum’s response to the Future of Bibliographic Control report.

The free public release of machine-readable LCSH is welcome news, for at least two reasons. First, it will enable developers to create applications for, among other things, automated metadata creation for legal resources. Second, its resolvable URIs, that comply with Representational State Transfer (REST) principles, for LCSH as a whole and for each individual record, enable use for Linked Data and Semantic Web purposes. Here’s an example of visualized linked data, for the heading “Security (Law)” (click on the “Visualize” tab).

One shortcoming of this release is that many, if not all, of the records lack corresponding classification numbers. As a result, this new LCSH data set can’t be used directly to derive LCSH from classification numbers (or vice versa). Hopefully class numbers will be included in a future release.

HT to Roy Tennant.

[Updated 15 November 2011 to revise links.]