Today we’re pleased to announce the addition of approximately 5,000 new subject headings to data.nytimes.com. These subjects include organizations, publicly traded companies and geographic identifiers, ranging from Apple Inc to Kansas to Williams College. Like the 5,000 person-name subject headings released last October, we have mapped our latest crop of subject headings to DBpedia, Freebase and — in the case of our geographic subject headings — GeoNames.

So why are we so excited about this?

With the addition of organizations, publicly traded companies and geographic identifiers to data.nytimes.com, you can now quickly build the kind of complex data-driven applications that used to take weeks to develop. Want to see all the articles about folks from your hometown? Or alumni from your alma mater? Or all the articles that discuss retired politicians who now serve on the board of publicly traded companies? Just take our linked open data; mix in some Freebase, DBpedia and GeoNames; pop it all into your favorite Web framework and let the world know about your application.

On a more technical note, this release is our first to include subject headings that were automatically mapped to DBpedia and Freebase. Using our knowledge of company ticker symbols, we automatically mapped about 1,500 of our subject headings for publicly traded companies. We indicate the mapping strategy (automatic or manual) in the RDF documents that describe our subject headings.

Also, for all you client-side developers, we are now publishing our resources in JSON as well as RDF/XML and HTML. We’ve even added JSONP callback support.

Lastly, just a reminder that yesterday we announced the incorporation of DBpedia identifiers into our Article Search API. So now you have even more ways of bringing semantic goodness to your applications.

If you’re a data geek itching to build the next great linked data application, head on over to data.nytimes.com to download the data. Be sure to also join our community and let us know when you’re ready to share your work with the world