ISBN's are hierarchical, what do you mean? Like Gaul, ISBNs are divided into multiple parts, where one part is for the language, another is for the publisher, and the last is for the title. The last part is a checksum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN#Overview
Yes, but this internal hierarchy for an issued number doesn't tell anything beyond those facts about a specific edition of a specific text.
One can't use ISBNs alone to create a hierarchical listing of texts which is useful for anything beyond browsing by language/publisher/order in which the ISBN was generated.
A visual and interactive representation of books by LoC or some other cataloging system would actually be useful.
I got into an argument with the manager of South End Press back in '94 about whether 'Futuresplash' (soon to be Macromedia Flash) had a future, he thought it did and he was right.
Years later I was working at the library and got a little bit steamed because South End Press was reusing ISBN's after books went out of print which was allowed but, I think, lame.
One of my strategies for researching a topic is looking a few up in the OPAC, finding them in the stacks, and finding more books on the topic in those areas. (In the Library of Congress system, machine vision could be under QA56 with the rest of computer science or around TA1630, thus "areas".)
From time to time I've thought about trying to replicate the feel of this with some kind of UI given that our library moved a lot of the collection into deep archives and we have a very fast 'Borrow Direct' service with other peers)
totally agree, but thats not in the data. however, since blocks are assigned to agencies associated with countries and publishers, you might find some utility in showing coverage by likely language and/or country of origin and date.
