[okfn-discuss] LCSH site is taken down

Mon Dec 22 17:54:11 UTC 2008

Ed Summers' site LCSH - which explored how Library of Congress Subject
Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application - has been
taken down.

  http://lcsh.info/2008/12/19/uncool-uris/

J.

---

On December 18th I was asked to shut off lcsh.info by the Library of
Congress. As an LC employee I really did not have much choice other
than to comply.

The lcsh.info domain was registered by me in order to demonstrate how
the Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a
Semantic Web application using SKOS . In particular I was eager to get
feedback on how the data was being published with respect to Linked
Data best practices. I got lots of great feedback, wrote a paper which
I presented at DC2008, and learned that other institutions like the
W3C and the Royal Library of Sweden were beginning to use URIs for
concepts from lcsh.info in their metadata.

It was always my intention for concept URIs at lcsh.info to be cool. I
advertised the service as 'experimental' and indicated it was going to
hopefully inform the development of a similar continually updated
service at LC. I had the good fortune to have a shared server with
Kevin Clarke, and others from the code4lib community where I could
spend $5.00/month on making the service available.

My thought was I could leave the service running until there was
something similar at LC that I could redirect the concept URIs to.
After a year or two when people had rewritten their data to point at
loc.gov I could retire lcsh.info. I never imagined I would be asked by
LC to take it down. Some people who have been around the block a few
more times than me saw this coming (you know who you are) and I
apologize for not taking your concerns more seriously.

So here's this blog. I put it here so you could leave your comments
and thoughts. Feel free to comment on this post, or start a new post
by registering with the site. It should accept your OpenID if you have
one. Your input and criticism are most welcome.

LC is still considering running a service like lcsh.info at loc.gov,
but it's not there for me to link to yet. Please accept my apologies,
and leave your comments (however brief) here.