My recent LITA article is now available at the UC eScholarship Repository.
SUGGESTED CITATION:
Martha M. Yee, "Can Bibliographic Data Be Put Directly Onto the
Semantic Web?" (2009). Information Technology and Libraries. 28 (2),
pp. 55-80. Postprint available free at:
http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/3369
ABSTRACT:
This paper is a think piece about the possible future of bibliographic
control; provides a brief introduction to the semantic web and defines
terms pertaining to the it.; discusses granularity and structure
issues and the lack of standards for the efficient display and
indexing of bibliographic data. It is also a report on a work in
progress, an experiment in building an RDF model of more FRBRized
cataloging rules than those about to be introduced to the library
community (Resource Description and Access or RDA) and the creation of
an RDF data model for the rules. I am now in the process of trying to
model my cataloging rules in the form of an RDF model; this model can
also be inspected at http://myee.bol.ucla.edu. In the process of doing
this, I have discovered a number of areas in which I am not sure that
RDF is sophisticated enough yet to deal with our data. This article is
an attempt to identify some of those areas and explore whether or not
the problems I have encountered are soluble, in other words, whether
or not our data might be able to live on the semantic web. In this
paper, I am focusing on raising the questions about the suitability of
RDF to our data that have come up in the course of my work.