Automatic Analysis of Dewey Decimal Classification Notations

The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) was conceived by Melvil Dewey in 1873 and published in 1876. Nowadays, DDC serves as a library classification system in about 138 countries worldwide. Recently, the German translation of the DDC was launched, and since then the interest in DDC has rapidly increased in German-speaking countries. The complex DDC system (Ed. 22) allows to synthesize (to build) a huge amount of DDC notations (numbers) with the aid of instructions. Since the meaning of built DDC numbers is not obvious especially to non-DDC experts a computer program has been written that automatically analyzes DDC numbers. Based on Songqiao Liu’s dissertation (Liu (1997)), our program decomposes DDC notations from the main class 700 (as one of the ten main classes). In addition, our program analyzes notations from all ten classes and determines the meaning of every semantic atom contained in a built DDC notation. The extracted DDC atoms can be used for information retrieval, automatic classification, or other purposes.