On 5/23/07, Art Rhyno <arhyno_at_uwindsor.ca> wrote:
> You can probably extend any metadata format to cover anything if you want,
> but I think that RDF has the right idea, use namespaces as a means to draw
> on the work that has already been done in resource description by the
> communities that might best understand the content.
Just be careful; just because you *can* mix and match anything you
want, it doesn't make it right to do so. :) If I started putting 245
in 1xx fields, or used (god forbid) ISO dates in MARC, what would
happen? Of course, the idea in RDF is that the URI's themselves are
identifiers for what kind of data they are, so if you want to put in
an ISO date, your URI is different from any other date format. That's
somewhat of a plus, except you need systems to understand far more
data formats than ever before. This is where a stricter standards
regime follows; a compromise between all that flexibility and what's
doable.
> If I wanted to add an
> indication of the recommended stemming algorithm for indexing the
> resource, I am not sure it belongs in MARC, but this is arguably an
> important concern if the metadata seeks to wire in the object for wider
> availability. RDF plumbing also allows for mapping between metadata sets,
> for example, using "equivalentTo" for equating "PreparerName" from Real
> Estate Metadata with "Creator" in Dublin Core. There probably isn't that
> many collections that need to work in real estate agreements, but there's
> lots of scientific datasets and other non-bibliographic materials which
> could probably benefit from this kind of mapping.
Well, the idea of representing MARC in RDF is great in that it can
free us from the MARC format itself. I'm a little bit more concerned
about what happens after we've freed it; will we all use the same
ontologies, make library specific ontologies, and have our ontologies
be the very thing in the future that the MARC format is now? Putting
these problems on the ontology layer is great if we understand and
know how to work with ontologies. Do we? Seriously, how many library
systems understand ontologies and semantic data modelling? How many
are heading that way? Should we force that direction? (And I'm all for
that, btw)
> Although I am a total fan of mapping MARC to RDF, to me the big advantage
> of RDF or Topic Maps or whatever are that they open the door to more
> flexible combinations of metadata and mappings rather than that they can
> render the same information in a different syntax.
In short, you extrapolate your data semantics to an ontology layer
instead of directly in the data / metadata itself, which is a huge
advantage. But it does require you to understand ontology work, and
you're probably more screwed if you don't.
Alex
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Received on Wed May 23 2007 - 15:20:33 EDT