Houghton,Andrew wrote:
>
> Personally, I believe that FRBR and RDA will be more useful to the
> Semantic Web since they are both based on a domain model which can
> be expressed as an RDFS/OWL ontology. People can argue whether the
> domain model is correct, but having a domain model is important to
> understanding the data and its relationships within the domain model
> and outside the domain model, e.g., linked data.
>
>
I think we've gotten to the point in these discussions where we have to
define our terms. In the same way that "MARC" means both a structure and
data elements and a content standard, the terms FRBR and RDA are now
taking on multiple meanings.
As produced by the JSC, RDA is a huge text with rules for how to decide
the elements of a catalog entry to describe an resource and its access
points (except for subjects). That huge text has been turned into an
interlinked XML document that will be offered through an online system,
RDAonline. The observed data elements from the RDA text have been
registered as RDF-compatible properties in the Metadata Registry.
(http://metadataregistry.org) The controlled vocabularies are also
registered there, under the "Vocabularies" tab. This means that all of
the data elements and the various lists (Colour of Moving Image, Groove
Width) are there and exportable in a machine-readable form. Note,
however, that there isn't at this time an actual record format for RDA,
although if one develops I sure hope it uses the RDF properties and not
some older technology.
There is no particular reason why one couldn't create a set of
RDF-compatible properties for AACR2, or even for the MARC fields and
subfields -- although RDA conceptually seems closer to the semantic web
goals than AACR2 or MARC. I think things turned out the way they did
mainly because RDA, as conceived by JSC, is promoted as a "new" set of
rules, so there was a nice void into which one could try to introduce
some additional changes in thinking. RDA does have a lot of legacy from
previous rules and appears to have conceded in some areas to concerns
that it will have to fit into the basic MARC structure. This is why,
AFAIK, we have things like "publication statement" defined as an element
in RDA, even though you could imagine using place or date of publication
as simple data elements under some circumstances. Because of these
legacy concepts, RDA as defined in the Metadata Registry is a bit kludgy
-- a "pure" semantic web representation of bibliographic metadata would
probably be cleaner.
FRBR is in a similar situation, although lagging a bit behind RDA. IFLA
has committed to creating an RDF-compatible version of FRBR and FRAD
(and any other FR's that come along, presumably) and adding these to the
Metadata Registry. This would then allow one to apply FRBR structure to
RDA properties, and create bibliographic information that adheres to
FRBR and is compatible with semantic web data structures.
We need some handy and clear terms to refer to RDA and FRBR in their
machine-actionable, RDF-ized forms as opposed to the original text
documents where the concepts were explained. The RDA elements are
registered under the domain "RDVocab", which could be one way of
distinguishing those elements from the JSC RDA text.
kc
--
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Tue Oct 20 2009 - 11:15:49 EDT