Library of Congress Linked Data Service


The LC Linked Data Service is an initiative of the Library of Congress that publishes authority data as linked data.
It is commonly referred to by its URI: id.loc.gov.
The first offering of the LC Linked Data Service was the Library of Congress Subject Headings dataset, which was released in April 2009.

Datasets

The service presents data in MADS/RDF and SKOS where appropriate, but also uses its own ontology to describe classification resources and relationships more accurately. All records are available individually via content negotiation as XHTML/RDFa, RDF/XML, N-Triples, and JSON.
Each vocabulary is also available to download in its entirety. Id.loc.gov does not currently provide a SPARQL endpoint.

Uses

All of LCSH are cross linked with RAMEAU, an authority file from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Technical aspects

The id.loc.gov site initially used a fairly lightweight Python program to serve linked data.