Library of Congress Controlled Vocabularies and Their Application to the Semantic Web

This article discusses how various controlled vocabularies, classification schemes, and thesauri can serve as some of the building blocks of the Semantic Web. These vocabularies have been developed over the course of decades, and can be put to great use in the development of robust Web services and Semantic Web technologies. The article covers how initial collaboration between the Semantic Web, Library and Metadata communities are creating partnerships to complete work in this area. It then discusses some core principles of authority control before talking more specifically about subject and genre vocabularies and name authority. It is hoped that future systems for internationally shared authority data will link the world’s authority data from trusted sources to benefit users worldwide. Finally, the article looks at how encoding and markup of vocabularies can help ensure compatibility with the current and future state of Semantic Web development and provides examples of how this work can help improve the findability and navigation of information on the World Wide Web