Library of Congress classification

Clif,

They were influenced by Dewey who wanted to share knowledge for practical purposes.  To give tools to society to “get the job done”.

As for various classifications, there are quite a few, and the terms do match exactly in some cases, and not so well in others. But in terms of linking to information stored in books, if you do not have the ISBN, but know the title and author, if it also good to know the library classification if you have to ask a Librarian.

Your main goal is to have a way to link knowledge and shorten the search time.  If LC has useful information and it is accessible in machine form, then using it makes sense for some things,

Under “ontologies” and “RDF” and “triples” there are many efforts. Mostly because those lists and classifications were compile and sort of made open and online. But not very well in many cases.

The context of a person’s life is books, tools, sources, jobs, tasks, interests, and things that are accessible.

Get something working and if it is useful, people will use it, perhaps.

Libraries are pretty much useless and expensive monuments now.  You cannot check out most of the books, the classification does NOT tell you the details of what is in it – not even a table of contents and index.

How many and what books use “Fourier transforms”?  That is NOT “owned” by any discipline or group. And should not be. But it suffers because the books about it are ignored, and the references to it are untraceable and cannot be “checked out”.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation