Just today I had the pleasure to talk to Peter Werling, our Special Dewey Sports Correspondent in London. In his day job he is running Pansoft GmbH in Karlsruhe, Germany, a software company with ties to Deweyland that can be traced way back to the dark ages (i.e., ca. 2002) of the first German translation of the DDC. His company developed the first DDC translation system for this specific translation project (the current incarnation of the software is now used by many translation teams for other languages as well) and has worked on DDC-related software projects ever since.
At the moment, he and his team are working on a major enhacement to WebDewey 2.0: an assistant to make number building easier and also streamline the process of contributing these user-built numbers back to WebDewey for everybody's use.
He and his family are currently on vacation in London, which gave us a chance to talk about various topics ranging from the Olympic spirit in the air to the difficulties of obtaining tickets to a specific event. They were going to see the football/soccer game between Great Britain and Brazil today, and since it ended with a 1-0 win for the hosts in front of 70,000 fans in Wembley it certainly turned out to have been a great choice.
Of course, everything has to have a Dewey twist somehow. It turns out that Peter has been using the number for the history of Wembley stadium in the 1960s (the site of the infamous “Wembley goal” against Germany in the World Cup 1966) for testing out the new number building feature. The number he is trying to built (it may be a little hard to understand in the video) is 725.82709421809046. I leave it to the gentle reader (at least for now) to pull apart this number and decide whether it is the best number for the topic, but a warning might be appropriate before anyone goes out and starts assigning this number right away: “Professional software developer on closed course; do not attempt.”
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