Interlinking of collections: the quest continues

After an excellent talk today about LibraryThing by LibraryThing's Tim, I got enthused to see how LibraryThing stacks up against other libraries for having matches in it's authority control system for entities we (the NZETC) care about.
The answer is averagely.
For copies of printed books less than a hundred years old (or reprinted in the last hundred years), and their authors, LibraryThing seems to do every well. These are the books likely to be in active circulation in personal libraries, so it stands to reason that these would be well covered.
I tried half a dozen books from our Nineteenth-Century Novels Collection, and most were missing, Erewhon, of course, was well represented. LibraryThing doesn't have the "Treaty of Waitangi" (a set of manuscripts) but it does have "Facsimiles of the Treaty of Waitangi." It's not clear to me whether these would be merged under their cataloguing rules.
Coverage of non-core bibliographic entities was lacking. Places get a little odd. Sydney is "http://www.librarything.com/place/Sydney,%20New%20South%20Wales,%20Australia" but Wellington is "http://www.librarything.com/place/Wellington" and Anzac Cove appears to be is missing altogether. This doesn't seem like a sane authority control system for places, as far as I can see. People who are the subjects rather than the authors of books didn't come out so well. I couldn't find Abel Janszoon Tasman, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero or Charles Frederick Goldie, all of which are near and dear to our hearts.

Here is the spreadsheet of how different web-enabled systems map entities we care about.

Correction: It seems that the correct URL for Wellington is http://www.librarything.com/place/Wellington,%20New%20Zealand which brings sanity back.

LoC gets semantic

This morning, the Library of Congress launched http://id.loc.gov/authorities/, their first serious entry into the semantic web.

The site makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as defererenable URLs. For example http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh90005545.

fuzzziness

I've been using topic maps in my day job, so I decided to try out http://www.fuzzzy.com/, a social bookmark engine that uses an underlying topic map engine.
I tried to approach fuzzzy with an open mind, but the increasingly stumbling on really annoying (mis-)features.

1. This is the first bookmark engine I've ever used hat doesn't let users migrate their bookmarks with them. This is perhaps the biggest single feature fuzzzy could add to attract new users, since it seems that most people who're likely to use a bookmark engine have already played with another one long enough to have dozens or hundreds of bookmarks they'd like to bring with them. I know this is non-ideal from the point of view of the social bookmark engine they're migrating too, since it makes it hard to do things completely differently, but users have baggage.
2. While it'd possible to vote up or vote down just about everything (bookmarks, tags, bookmark-tags, users, etc), very little is actually done with these votes. If I've viewed a bookmark once and voted it down, why is it added to my "most used Bookmarks"? Surely if I've indicated I don't like it the bookmark should be hidden from me, not advertised to me.
3. For all the topic map goodness on the site, there is no obvious way to link from the fuzzzy topic map to other topic maps.
4. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of interfacing with other semantic web standards (i.e. RDF).
   
5. The help isn't. Admittedly this may be partly because many of the key participants have English as a second language.
6. There's a spam problem. But then everywhere has a spam problem.
7. It's not obvious that I can export my bookmarks out of fuzzzy in a form that any other bookmark engine understands.

These (mis-)features are a pity, because at NZETC we use topic maps for authority (in the librarianship sense), and it would be great to have a compatible third party that could be used for non-authoritative stuff and which would just work seamlessly.

Tinkering with ohloh

I've been tinkering with www.ohloh.net, which is probably best described as a web 2.0 freshmeat. Rather than tracking manually-updated releases it relies on automatically detected updates to version control repositories, RSS and geo-urls. It relies on wiki like editing rather than the strict ownership rules of freshmeat. ohloh does automatic language detection and source code analysis based on the version control repository and attributes individual commits to specific developers and their ohloh user account.

I've added and am actively curating a group of go/baduk projects. The overall goal is to encourage reuse and reduce the willingness of hackers to rewrite go/baduk systems from scratch.

My next step on the technical side is to write some GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) to transform the XML returned by the API into RDF, which I can them import into simal.

My next step on the social side is to mention what I'm doing in some of the go/baduk mailing lists, but I want to wait until I've got something concrete to provide that Sensei's Library (the current repository of information about go/baduk programs) hasn't already got.