On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Rob Styles wrote:
> Does your work draw on any of the work Devon has been doing over at
> OCLC?
>
> http://www.code4lib.org/2006/smith
>
No, this is the first I've heard of it, but thank you for the link.
I will not be including the parts of the IWF Metadata Harvester
in the GNU Metadata Exchange Utilities that were intended to take
OAI and Pica data and put them into a third
format. The task is difficult and I don't see the point. On the
other hand, a mapping among OAI, Pica, USMARC, and/or formats could be
very useful, but would require a great deal of work and some compromises.
It's simply not possible to find one-to-one correspondences
for all cases.
I believe the first task should be to make it possible to retrieve,
store, and query data in the basic formats first. OAI isn't
too difficult, because of the limited number of classifications,
but I have to deal with XML. Porting to GNU/Linux makes it
necessary to use a different approach than the one I used before.
I believe the approach I've used for Pica works well, and would
be appropriate for USMARC (and possibly other formats) as well.
Roughly speaking, the idea is to have a function for each field,
while some categories require a function, while others don't.
I'm not sure whether anyone is really interested in Pica. Pica seems
to be used primarily in Germany and the Netherlands. If no one is
interested, I think I could use my time better by switching to USMARC.
Laurence
|