Thanks for all the useful feedback!
I summarized my and your findings at
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Library_Ontology
feel free to add your thoughts there.
Ross Singer wrote:
> 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)?
If most existing library registries have an "URL-of-OPAC" field and if I
assume that the people that collected all the data have something common
in mind, I can simply map this to RDF. If someone complains that a
concept like "URL of catalog" is too fuzzy than welcome him to reality
or let him stay alone in unicorn-land. The fuzzyness comes from how our
reality is (or how we structure our reality). The naive view of some
Semantic Web enthusiasts about clearly defined concepts makes me laugh.
> 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.
I don't see this as a big problem. I collected some sources of
information about libraries:
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Library_Ontology#Existing_library_registries
and some ontologies (including all the explicit or implicit data formats
and data models used in the registries):
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Library_Ontology#Relevant_formats_and_models
Now we only need to write wrappers that extract the data, map it to RDF
and combine it to Linked Data. That's no rocket science.
Cheers,
Jakob
--
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 Wed Dec 09 2009 - 08:16:43 EST