LoC-UCSD Mapping

Attempt to map Library of Congress Subject Headings onto UCSD Map of Science Subdisciplines.

This is motivated by work with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). Many HTRC volumes contain Library of Congress subject heading metadata, so by mapping a correspondence between the UCSD subdisciplines and LoC subject headings, one can plot HTRC volumes on the Map of Science. Additionally, as the Library of Congress is a central authority for many digital library projects, publishing this correspondence using SKOS will further adoption of the UCSD map.

Methodology

All subdiscipline names were first matched along the skos:prefLabel field. Those remaining were then matched against the skos:altLabel field. If this naive match does not work, I will attempt to look up the journals composing a UCSD subdiscipline and see if I can find any LoC classification for them, and assign the subdiscipline the plurality LoC journal classification.

A preliminary verification on a matched discipline "Circulation" (under Medical Specialties in UCSD) shows that the best match is "blood - circulation", but there are 96 subject headings with "circulation" in the title, including "circulation" (referring to periodicals). Matches will need to be reviewed, particularly in cases where multiple matches may exist.

Execution

1. Run fetch-data.sh to retrieve the datasets necessary to run the script.
2. Run python match.py to match based on skos:prefLabel, using the known-label retrieval API. Pipe output to a file, if so desired: python match.py > matches.txt

Datasets

• LoC Subject Headings SKOS/RDF data NT rdfxml
• UCSD Data Network .net file MS Excel file

Output

Final project output will be two alignment files:

1. loc-ucsd.csv containing disc_id, disc_name, loc_id, loc_label.
2. loc-ucsd.skos containing the skos:exactMatch and skos:closeMatch relations indicating the provenance of automatic vs. manual alignment, respectively. As the UCSD Map of Science does not currently have any semantic data, a URI scheme for subdisciplines must be determined.