LCSH.info shutdown
december 26, 2008 Martin
Unfortunately the Library of Congress has asked Ed Summers to take down LCSH.info. Apparently because it was ”confusing”. This is a shame since the Swedish Subject Headings were linked to LCSH through LCSH.info URIs.
Even though Ed hints that an official LC service might become available later on a better approach would have been to let LCSH.info exist until then and then redirect (both in an HTTP and SemWeb sense) the old URIs to the new ones. Or just let them coexist Or just leave the RDF and SPARQL-endpoint available.
Anyway, LCSH.info was a great service while it lasted.
Filed under: Metadata
Martin, Anders — many apologies for the way lcsh.info was shut down. If I could’ve done things differently I would have. Fortunately I can say that a very similar service is now running at id.loc.gov ; and in fact the lcsh.info identifiers for concepts now do a permanent redirect to id.loc.gov. I feel like I learned something about the semantic web and linked data efforts here. As Tom Gruber famously said ”Every ontology is a treaty – a social agreement – among people with some common motive in sharing”. I want to foster that agreement better in the future