The Nuovo soggettario as a service for the linked data world

Abstract

Nuovo soggettario (NS), edited by the National Central Library of Florence, is the Italian subject indexing tool for various types of resources. It has been developed in compliance with the IFLA recommendations, and other international standards in the field of subject indexing. This tool has been created for general and specialized Italian libraries, and for museums, multimedia libraries, archives and documentation centres. The main component of the NS is a general thesaurus available on the web since 2007 (http://thes.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/ricerca.php). The thesaurus comprises nowadays approximately 46.000 terms and is updated. It supports the new subject indexing practices and manages terminology deriving from collaboration between the BNCF and other libraries. The project is evolving in many directions and supporting interoperability. The main goal of the availability – since November 2010 – of the NS dataset in SKOS/RDF format, is to promote the use of this tool also beyond the traditional library environment. In this context three working areas have been taken into account: 1) improve accessibility and usability of the NS in the linked data environment: SPARQL endpoint, mapping to other datasets (including LCSH, RAMEAU, AGROVOC, EUROVOC, DBpedia); address the costs of bibliographic control starting from a project of automatic indexing (quality controlled) using NS in SKOS /RDF format and open source software tools; 3) cooperate with other institutions that are publishing linked open data.