David Dorman wrote:
> The only important issue not raised regarding MARC vs XML that I have
> seen discussed before is the idea that MARC does a better job of
> expressing relationships among records than XML is capable of
> doing. I don't know the validity of this assertion, and I would be
> interested in reading what others have to say.
At best, MARC and an XML format (because let it be clear that XML is
kind of a super-format, a standard for formats; there individual
particular formats within the XML umbrella) are equally capable of
expressing relationships. At worse, I'd say this is exactly backwards. I
am very curious where people are getting this idea from.
Certainly our _current_ MARC cooperative cataloging environment is
particular poor at actually capturing relationships, is it not?
The way we express relationships between computer records is by using
identifiers. One record has an identifier, the record that wishes to
reference it references that identifier in some standard way that
indicate a relationship between records. Certainly XML is capable of
doing this, and many many existing XML formats express relationships
(RDF is practically based entirely on expressing relationships!).
There's cetainly nothing barring MARC from expressing relationships in
this way too, although for reasons I'll let someone else write the essay
on, our current environment is often particularly poor at doing so
effectively.
In fact, if anything, one could argue the reverse, but talking about
entities contained within a single record, rather than relationships
between records: MARC is particularly poor at expressing a hierarchy
_within_ a record, while an XML format (such as MODS, for instance) has
no trouble at all with that.
Jonathan
>
> David
>
>
>> --
>> Eric Lease Morgan
>> University Libraries of Notre Dame
>
> David Dorman
> US Marketing Manager, Index Data
> 52 Whitman Ave.
> West Hartford, Connecticut 06107
> dorman_at_indexdata.com
> 860-389-1568 or toll free 866-489-1568
> fax: 860-561-5613
>
> INDEX DATA Means Business
> for Open Source and Open Standards
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> www.indexdata.com
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Fri Sep 21 2007 - 07:46:55 EDT