Jakob,
I'm not sure how much of what you're looking for is library-specific
(with one notable exception).
For the hours and building stuff, it seems like GoodRelations
(http://purl.org/goodrelations/) could actually serve that purpose
fairly effectively. So for hours, you could use something like:
http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/goodrelations/v1#OpeningHoursSpecification
and location:
http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/goodrelations/v1#LocationOfSalesOrServiceProvisioning
This has the added advantage of being recognizable to Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey:
http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/smguide/gr.html
For hierarchy (i.e., library is part of organization x), this could
fit into AIISO:
http://vocab.org/aiiso/schema
Although this is, admittedly, academic-centric. It might fit into
Good Relations, as well.
The NISO i2 WG is trying to address some of this, too:
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/i2
Which, ideally, would provide some controlled vocabularies around
"types" of libraries and relationships between libraries and their
parent organizations and their subordinate organizations, etc.
The Talis directory is intended to be a service registry (similar to
IndexData's IRSpy or the OCKHAM registry) and there is *some* of what
you're talking about:
http://api.talis.com/1/dir/sparql?query=describe+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fdirectory.talis.com%2Fres%2Fcollections%2FBI%23self%3E
but, sadly, it has yet to gain a lot of traction (although it comes up
a lot in discussions internally - eating our own dogfood would
probably help this along, certainly).
It defines a couple of vocabularies:
http://schemas.talis.com/2005/dir/schema
and the very concise:
http://schemas.talis.com/2005/library/schema
Toby Inkster's RDF Book Vocab can address your ownership question
(it's not limited to "books"):
http://ontologi.es/book/vocab
The sticky point I see is your idea of "URL of catalog": what does
this mean? What if you have multiple "catalogs" that serve different
purposes? Which is more important the URL of the catalog? Or the
library homepage (foaf:homepage)?
The problem isn't so much that there aren't RDF vocabularies for these
sorts of things, it's that libraries haven't done much around
structured data in this regard /at all/. Given that you could fit the
sum of all RDF-related library data more or less in a thimble (at
least, compared to MARC or XML schemas), this probably explains the
absence of data and vocabularies in the arena.
-Ross.
On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 5:58 AM, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss_at_gbv.de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> For not to reinvent the wheel I am looking for any RDF ontologies that
> describe information about libraries. There are many formats and some
> ontologies (Dublin Core, FRBR, Bibliographic Ontology [Bibo]) for
> bibliographic data but no library-specific ontologies that I know of.
>
> For instance how do you state that something is a library building that
> belongs to a given institution? How do you express opening times in RDF? How
> do you point to the URL of the OPAC? How do you say that a given collection
> is held by one library but owned by another person? I think we could reuse
> some parts of Bibo and from other general Ontologies like vCard, but I bet
> that there are concepts and relationships which only make sense for
> libraries - so they should be defined in RDFS/OWL!
>
> I wonder why the Talis Directory does not include such library-specific
> information http://directory.talis.com/ui/ - they support vCard and their
> Address Schema in RDF [1] but not opening hours, ISIL identifier, library
> type, links to collections, URL of the OPAC and such (at least not in RDF).
>
> By the way it would be a big step forward to have an URI representation of
> the "International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related
> Organizations" (ISIL) to refer to libraries.
>
> Oh, there is not even a defined class to state that something is a libray,
> isn't it? It should be a subclass of foaf:Organization or bibo:Collection,
> depending on what you mean.
>
> Are there any projects to bring information about libraries into the
> Semantic Web?
>
> Jakob
>
> [1] http://www.talis.com/tdn/platform/reference/schemas/address
>
> --
> Jakob Voß <jakob.voss_at_gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
> Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
> Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
> +49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de
>
Received on Thu Dec 03 2009 - 16:51:06 EST