Quoting Richard Wallis <richard.wal...@talis.com>:
I agree with your sentiment here but, from what you imply at
http://futurelib.pbworks.com/w/page/29114548/MARC%20elements,
transformation in to something that would be recognisable by the
originators of the source Marc will be difficult - and yes ugly.
The refreshing thing about the work done by the BL is that they stepped
away from the 'record', modeled the things that make up the BnB domain.
Then they implemented processes to extract rich data from the source Marc,
enrich it with external links, and load it to an RDF representation of the
model.
Richard, this is an interesting statement about the BL data. Are you
saying that they chose a subset of their current bibliographic data to
expose as LD? (I haven't found anything yet that describes the process
used, so if there is a document I missed, please send link!) This
almost sounds like the FRBR process, BTW - modeling the domain, which
is also step one of the Singapore Framework/Dublin Core Application
Profile process, then selecting data elements for the domain. [1]
FRBR, unfortunately, has perceived problems as model (which I am
attempting to gather up here [2] but may move to the LLD community
wiki space to give it more visibility).
The work that I'm doing is not based on the assumption that all of
MARC will be carried forward. The reason I began my work is that I
don't think we know what is in the MARC record -- there is similar
data scattered all over, some data that changes meaning as indicators
are applied, etc. There is no implication that a future record would
have all of those data elements, but at least we should know what data
elements there are in our data. On a more practical note, before we
can link we need our data in coherent semantic chunks, not broken up
into tags, subfields, etc.
Concern shared. I would however lower my sights slightly by setting the
current objective to be 'Publishing bibliographic information as Linked
Data to become a valuable and useful part of a Web of Data'. Using the
Semantic Web as a goal introduces even more vagueness and baggage. I
firmly believe that establishing a linked web of data will eventually
underpin a Semantic Web, but there is still a few steps to go before we
get anywhere near that.
My concern is the creation of LD silos. BL data uses some known
namespaces (BIBO, FOAF, BIO), which in fact is a way to "join" the web
of data that many others are participating in, because your
"foaf:Person" can interact with anyone else's "foaf:Person." But there
are a great number of efforts that are modeling current records
(FRBRer, ISBD, MODS, RDA) and are entirely silo'd - there is nothing
that would connect the data to anyone else's data (and the ones
mentioned would not even connect to each other). So I don't know what
you mean by "part of a Web of data" but to me using non-silo'd
properties is enough to meet that criterion. Another possibility is to
create links from your properties to properties outside of your silo,
e.g. from RDA:Person to foaf:Person, for sharing and discoverability.
I'm more concerned than you are about the issue of cataloging rules. A
huge effort has gone into RDA and will now go into the "new
bibliographic framework." RDA will soon have occupied a decade of
scarce library community effort, and the new framework will be based
on it, just as RDA is based on FRBR. We've been going in this
direction for over 20 years. Meanwhile, look at how much has changed
in the world around us. We're moving much more slowly than the world
we need to be working within.
kc
[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/singapore-framework/
[2] http://futurelib.pbworks.com/w/page/48221836/FRBR%20Models%20Discussion
Unfortunately, the library cataloging world has no proposal for linked
data cataloging. I'm not sure where we could begin.
This is not surprising and I believe, at this stage, it is not a problem.
Lets eat the elephant one bite at a time - I envisage a lengthy interim
phase where publishing linked bibliographic data derived from traditional
Marc records (using processes championed by a community such as CODE4LIB),
is the norm. Cataloging processes and systems that use a Linked Data model
at the core should then emerge, to satisfy a then established need.
~Richard
--
Richard Wallis
Technology Evangelist, Talis
http://consulting.talis.com
Tel: +44 (0)7767 886 005
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis
Skype: richard.wallis1
Twitter: @rjw
IM: rjw3...@hotmail.com
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
