I found this e-mail from Margaret Mauer's TS-LIBRARIANS listserv in my mailbox recently:
I have been experimenting with the newly opened ID.LOC.GOV web service this evening as I am thinking about pointing it out to folks via TechKNOW. It’s pretty cool. LCSH is the first controlled vocabulary that LC is opening up. The goal of the service is to “enable machines to programmatically access data at the Library of Congress but the web interface also provides simple user access…” at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/. Type in a term like “retrievers” select the term “retrievers” and then go to the visual interface tab. It provides you with a data map of how the term “retrievers” connects to other terms in the controlled vocabulary. The search mechanism is sort of rudimentary, but the concept is terrifically interesting. Here’s the link to the about page for the new service: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/about.html.
I've taken a look at the service she describes and it is indeed pretty cool. The "details" tab of the results page for any given query offers a metric ton of raw data: the URI and heading type, as well as a variety of live links to related, broader and narrower search terms. Besides that it also gives you any and every source it located the query string in, and lists those for you. Finally, you get the date the item was created and last modified and the LC classification data. Most of the data is available in multiple formats (generally including RDF/XML, N-Triples and so on). The "visualize" tab for the results gives the 2-dimensional relational map for the term.
Enjoy!

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