[Data-modeling] Library of Congress and Dewey Classifications

[Jeff Prucher]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com 
> [mailto:data-modeling-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Ed Laurent

> I'm wondering how useful the browsing option of "All books in 
> Dewey Decimal 303" would be on a day-to-day basis compared to 
> "I'm looking for The Catcher in the Rye at my local library 
> and want to know where to find it". Is finding a book in your 
> local library an appropriate use of Freebase? It's not much 
> different than asking "I'm looking for car manufacturers in 
> my city and want to know where to find them".  That seems to 
> be appropriate.

I'd say that "I'm looking for library branches in my city" is more analogous
to "I'm looking for car manufacturers in my city". Finding a book in your
local library is more akin to querying the current stock of an auto-parts
store. Since Freebase can never hope to be as good as your local library's
actual website in terms of being able to find out what books they have, I
don't think it's an appropriate use. What would be appropriate, though, is
to have a way either to query which libraries have a particular item, or to
query a specific library for an item. We don't currently have this
capability, but it would be very, very cool.


> Freebase could be very useful for not just linking topics but 
> also for linking the ways they are categorized. As users 
> become more aware of the various ways that topics are 
> categorized and the reasons behind differences in systems 
> that define the categories (especially systems that are well 
> used and well defined) they should be able to develop more 
> and more comprehensive and mutually exclusive type properties 
> and topic attributes.

This is a very good point, and well worth keeping in mind as we deal not
only with book data, but many other types of data as well.

Jeff