Announcement: MADS/RDF - Final Public Review

The Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office would like announce a final public review period - until 8 April 2011 - for a revised MADS/RDF ontology.  Changes in the present version of the MADS/RDF ontology are the result of community feedback and collaboration from the first call for review.

The MADS/RDF (Metadata Authority Description Schema in RDF) is designed as a data model for authority and vocabulary data used within the library and information science (LIS) community, which is inclusive of museums, archives, and other cultural institutions.  It is intended to be used for controlled values for names (personal, corporate, geographic, etc.), thesauri, taxonomies, subject heading systems, and other controlled value lists.

Documentation and the ontology are available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/

Based on review feedback, a number of modifications were made, both to the documentation and the ontology.  These include, but are not limited to:

	1) the introduction of a new class – DeprecatedAuthority – to clearly identify a resource that was once authoritative [1]
	2) the introduction of a new class – RWO – and associated properties.  RWO is a resource that describes a Real World Object identified by the label of an Authority or DeprecatedAuthority [2]
	3) the introduction of new properties, such as useFor and useInstead, that cover the traditional USE and USEFOR cases in library data and provide directional hints to superseded (or preceding) concepts [3]

The documentation has been updated to clarify design concepts and principles, and terminology [4].  It also discusses any additions and changes to the ontology.

We look forward to your thoughtful reviews of this revised version of the ontology by April 8. We encourage community feedback, as it is important to the process and feel fortunate to work with such an engaged group of professionals.  Many of the changes, in fact, are the result of community feedback, for which we're grateful.  Thank you.

The MODS listserv - MADS/XML is maintained as part of the community work on MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) - is the preferred forum for feedback: http://listserv.loc.gov/listarch/mods.html (send mail to: [log in to unmask]).  Kevin Ford, the primary architect of the model, will be responding on that forum in order to have an open discussion.

[1] http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/#t21
[2] http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/#t23
[3] http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/#t34
[4] http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/#t13


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Kevin M. Ford
Digital Project Coordinator
Network Development & MARC Standards Office
Library of Congress
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20540-4402

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