No apologies required — your dissection of the (very important) differences between MODS and DCTERMS, both in concept and format, was extremely enlightening and helpful; as was all the other input.

Any misunderstandings are much more my fault for not being clearer when Ross asked what my use case was.  I also made the mistake of referencing RDF, which I (now better) understand incorporates a whole universe of world-views that unnecessarily complicated things.

Much learned, and as always, much obliged.

MJ

On 2010-05-04, at 3:48 PM, Corey Harper wrote:

> Thank you for this clarification, MJ. I apologize for my initial reaction that there was little value here. Knowing the use-case you define below, I think there's a great deal of value.
> 
> Beyond just the pragmatic short-term gains, I think a development like this would help pin-point those areas where said schema functionally requires semantics beyond those in the DCTERMS. All the better if some of those terms just happen to be available in Bibliontology or some other namespace...
> 
> Thanks again,
> -Corey
> 
> MJ Suhonos wrote:
>>>> Let me give another example: the Open Library API returns a JSON  tree, eg. http://openlibrary.org/books/OL1M.json
>>>> 
>>>> But what schema is this?  And if it doesn't conform to a standard  schema, does that make it useless? If it were based on DCTERMS, at  least I'd have a reference at  http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ to define the semantics  being used (and an RDF namespace at http://purl.org/dc/terms/ to  boot).
>>> Ah, after my own heart! I have tried to convince the OL folks to translate their data to dcterms, even did a crosswalk for them. Right now they're in panic mode over a major milestone, but once that's over I may ping you to make this request directly to them on one of their lists. If they only hear it from me, it might just be a personal quirk of mine, right?
>> See, we're on the same page after all.  :-)
>> Considering one of my primary use cases is direct interoperation with Open Library then yes, I'm all over it.  I'll at least harass Edward and the OL list that DC output is important to others beyond just you alone.
>> I was starting to get discouraged, but now I realize that many of you thought I was proposing DCTERMS as a replacement for MARC; not at all.
>> Imagine Open Library's internal data schema being an easily-serializable model based on DCTERMS.  Now imagine every library has a queryable API exactly like theirs.  That's where I'm going, and I think (answering my own question above) that it *is* potentially useful.
>>> p.s. The JSON API output doesn't require any programming when it uses their data elements; it does do crosswalk to dcterms.... that's been the hangup. Then again... their code is open source, the crosswalk I did is linked from the launchpad entry here [1] so if anyone wants to contribute�
>> Unfortunately I'm not adept at Python, so writing the code by hand is probably a bit beyond me at this point.  But it might make a fun learn-Python-in-a-rainy-weekend project.
>> MJ
> 
> -- 
> Corey A Harper
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> New York University Libraries
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