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This is an experimental service that provides the RAMEAU subject headings as open linked data. This site, a result of the TELplus project, aims at encouraging experimentation with Rameau on the semantic web.
RDF/SKOS Data
RAMEAU Concepts are described here according to the SKOS model to represent knowledge organization systems on the semantic web. Each concept comes with labelling information (either preferred or alternative labels) but also semantic relations to other concepts (broader, related) and various kind of notes.
What does the data look like?
You can search and browse across the RAMEAU vocabulary using the interface of the vocabulary repository this service is based upon. Here are also some example concepts, and some linked data viewers to get you started. Beware, there might be problems with older versions of Internet Explorer:
| Concept | URI | Linked Data Viewers |
|---|---|---|
| Oiseaux (Birds) | http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/vocabularies/rameau/ark:/12148/cb11932889r | Zitgist DISCO Openlink |
| Culture | http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/vocabularies/rameau/ark:/12148/cb11931827z | Zitgist DISCO Openlink |
| Web sémantique | http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/vocabularies/rameau/ark:/12148/cb14521343b | Zitgist DISCO Openlink |
| Ulysse | http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/vocabularies/rameau/ark:/12148/cb11937621s | Zitgist DISCO Openlink |
| France | http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/vocabularies/rameau/ark:/12148/cb119314762 | Zitgist DISCO Openlink |
URIs
Concepts are referred to using URIs that contain the ARK identifier for the original BnF subject record, as in http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/vocabularies/rameau/ark:/12148/cb11932889r, which is in fact used as a semantic web-enabled version of BnF's http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb11932889r. We remind potential users that as this service is experimental, the URIs come with no persistence warranty. Rather, it is hoped that they will be replaced if BnF and the RAMEAU organization decide to implement a production version of the service.
RDF/HTML content negociation
This service follows receipe 6 of the Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. Depending a web agent's preference, it can serve RDF/XML (see here for an example) or HTML descriptions of concepts. Note that the HTML pages contain RDFa markup, making RDF triples about the concepts accessible for RDFa-aware engines.
Semantic alignment to LCSH
A part of the concepts served here are semantically connected to the Library of Congress Subject Headings linked data available at http://id.loc.gov. This is done by using thanks to 60,000 manual mappings provided by the MACS project. Thanks to them, you will be able to "follow your nose" between one vocabulary and the other, in a typical Linked Data fashion.
A snapshot of RAMEAU
The data available through this experimental service is only a snapshot of the RAMEAU vocabulary, obtained in April 2008 for the TElplus project. There are therefore minor discrepancies with the most recent version of the vocabulary, as accessible from the BnF websites.
Metrics
The RAMEAU version served here contains 157,280 concepts, of which 96,825 correspond to common nouns, 51,646 to geographic names, 2976 to persons, 3419 to collective bodies, 2296 to titles and 123 to chronological subdivisions.
Contact
Please send any remark or questions to Antoine Isaac
Credits
The background SKOS service this sites relies on, as well as the redirection mechanisms, are the work of Lourens van der Meij. The SKOS conversion of RAMEAU was produced by Antoine Isaac, with the help of an enthusiast BnF team including Françoise Bourdon, Anila Angjeli, Thierry Bouchet, Emmanuelle Bermès and Michel Minguam -- the latter two playing also a key role in having this experimental site blessed by BnF and the RAMEAU Executive Committee. We are immensely thankful to Patrice Landry, Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers and Geneviève Clavel, from the MACS team, to have contributed the MACS mappings to this service.
Last but not least, this site, even though based on a completely different infrastructure, owes much to the groundbreaking http://lcsh.info/, the first attempt (a work lead by Ed Summers) to make the LCSH available as linked data, as described in this paper presented at the Dublin Core 2008 conference. We would like to thanks Ed, but also Clay Redding and Barbara Tillett for the fruitful discussions that have taken place during our parallel efforts on LCSH and RAMEAU.