Jim:
I'm not sure exactly why we're not getting through to folks that what
you're asking for below is exactly what we're doing with the RDA
elements and vocabularies. The way we've proceeded is designed to make
the elements and vocabularies usable by library applications as well as
semantic web applications. I've posted about this to the point that
I've started to feel like a broken record.
The eXtensible Catalog project has been working on services to transform
MARC records to RDA/FRBR records, and they've written about that too.
But yet we're not getting through. I wish someone could explain to me
why this is, other than that the group handling this (the DCMI/RDA Task
Group), isn't either LC or OCLC.
Diane Hillmann
co-chair, DCMI/RDA Task Group
James Weinheimer wrote:
>
> Yet, while a big part of me still believes this, and I certainly fear a
> general dumbing down, reality demands other modes of thinking. I think that
> it is absolutely vital for us to enter into the world of the Semantic Web,
> as described by Berners-Lee so well. For that to happen, we must provide
> others with a format that does not put tremendous obstacles in their way,
> which makes MARC just too complicated, no matter what format (XML, RDF...)
> it may take. While libraries need their formats for their own, internal
> purposes, non-librarians need their data too, but in other formats.
>
> What should that format (or those formats) be? That is not my area of
> expertise, but I think that if we were to do so, it would be relatively
> inexpensive; it would make our bibliographic data much more accessible and
> much far useful to our users and the rest of the information world than
> almost anything else we could do. I think that if we did find a format that
> others could use, we might be amazed at how quickly our records would be
> reworked and used in all kinds of systems and in all kinds of ways. Finally,
> with a general sharing, we would become more important in the semantic web
> and not less important.
>
> Jim Weinheimer
>
>
Received on Mon Oct 19 2009 - 12:01:02 EDT