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Content

"When dealing with a large-scale and widely-used knowledge organization system like the Dewey Decimal Classification, we often tend to focus solely on the organization aspect, which is closely intertwined with editorial work. This is perfectly understandable, since developing and updating the DDC, keeping up with current scientific developments, spotting new trends in both scholarly communication and popular publishing, and figuring out how to fit those patterns into the structure of the scheme are as intriguing as they are challenging. From the organization perspective, the intended user of the scheme is mainly the classifier. Dewey acts very much as a number-building engine, providing richly documented concepts to help with classification decisions. Since the Middle Ages, quasi-religious battles have been fought over the "valid" arrangement of places according to specific views of the world, as parodied by Jorge Luis Borges and others. Organizing knowledge has always been primarily an ontological activity; it is about putting the world into the classification. However, there is another side to this coin--the discovery side. While the hierarchical organization of the DDC establishes a default set of places and neighborhoods that is also visible in the physical manifestation of library shelves, this is just one set of relationships in the DDC. A KOS (Knowledge Organization System) becomes powerful by expressing those other relationships in a manner that not only collocates items in a physical place but in a knowledge space, and exposes those other relationships in ways beneficial and congenial to the unique perspective of an information seeker.
What are those "other" relationships that Dewey possesses and that seem so important to surface? Firstly, there is the relationship of concepts to resources. Dewey has been used for a long time, and over 200,000 numbers are assigned to information resources each year and added to WorldCat by the Library of Congress and the German National Library alone. Secondly, we have relationships between concepts in the scheme itself. Dewey provides a rich set of non-hierarchical relations, indicating other relevant and related subjects across disciplinary boundaries. Thirdly, perhaps most importantly, there is the relationship between the same concepts across different languages. Dewey has been translated extensively, and current versions are available in French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Briefer representations of the top-three levels (the DDC Summaries) are available in several languages in the DeweyBrowser. This multilingual nature of the scheme allows searchers to access a broader range of resources or to switch the language of--and thus localize--subject metadata seamlessly. MelvilClass, a Dewey front-end developed by the German National Library for the German translation, could be used as a common interface to the DDC in any language, as it is built upon the standard DDC data format. It is not hard to give an example of the basic terminology of a class pulled together in a multilingual way: <class/794.8> a skos:Concept ; skos:notation "794.8"^^ddc:notation ; skos:prefLabel "Computer games"@en ; skos:prefLabel "Computerspiele"@de ; skos:prefLabel "Jeux sur ordinateur"@fr ; skos:prefLabel "Juegos por computador"@es .