On 7 December 2011 16:29, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> (As an aside, there is some concern that the use of FRBR will make linking
> from library bibliographic data to non-library bibliographic data
> difficult, if not impossible. Having had some contact with members of the
> FRBR review group, they seem impervious to that concern.)
>
> kc
>

I somehow missed out on this thread and it's predecessor, until a major
fail in the British rail system resulted in an unexpected coffee with Owen
yesterday - I hope he got home OK.    However the benefit of being late to
a conversation is that you can see where the points of friction are.  So a
few thoughts on those:

Why bother?
Transforming Marc in to RDF is an interesting and challenging exercise, but
there is little point in doing it without having some potential benefits in
mind beyond the "it would be great to have our stuff in a new format"


RDF is a means to an end
We shouldn't loose sight of the RDF TLA, Resource Description Framework -
it is a framework for describing [our] resources.   It is the, de facto,
standard for publishing Linked Data.   Publishing descriptions of our
resources as Linked Data does fall in to the potential benefits arena -
reuse, mixing, merging, lowering barriers to use of data across, and from
outside of, the library community.


If it waddles and quacks, it is probably still a duck
Transforming a Marc record to XMLMarc just created the same record in in a
different wrapper.  Apart from the technical benefit (of being able to use
generic tools to work with it), it did not move us much further forward
towards opening up our data to wider use. Transforming Marc, of any flavor,
into an RDF representation of a record still leaves us with a record per
item - a digital card catalogue equivalent.


A record is a silo within a silo
A record within a catalogue duplicates the publisher/author/subject/etc.
information stored in adjacent records describing items by the same
author/publisher/etc.  This community spends much of it's effort on the
best ways to index and represent this duplication to make records
accessible.   Ideally an author, for instance, should be described
[preferably only once] and then related to all the items they produced


Linked Data should be the goal
At the event mentioned by Mike, Linked Data and Libraries[1], the British
Library launched their initial data model for the British National
Bibliography[2].  "One of the key concepts of Linked Data is to represent
data as a set of interlinked things. These things are referred to as
objects of interest, they are things about which we can make statements."
In this model you get statements about things (eg. books, authors,
publishers, publishing events, subjects, places, etc.) and the links
between them - not a record per item.


Storing Marc in an RDF triple, or link to it?
The question I would ask is, which consumer of your data would this be
useful for?  Secondly, whatever your answer, it does not make sense to say
that this item, or author, or publisher 'thing' was derived from a
particular Marc record - you could perhaps at data set, or graph, level
(using the provenance vocabulary) define that it was transformed from a
particular source, at a time, using a method, by a person/process.


Who's Ontology
Do we only use library domain ontologies/vocabularies or do we employ dc,
foaf, bibo, etc. ?  Do we use dc:creator which most of the [non-library]
world will understand, or some esoteric [to them] rda properties to
describe corporate and many other nuance of authorship?   If you want to
enable general application developers/data consumers to use your data, you
need to apply the well known [if possibly course-grained or lossy] terms.
If you want to preserve the rich detail extracted from the source Marc, you
need to delve deeper in to bibliographically oriented properties.   Can you
do both? Yes.  Should you do both? Probably.

~Richard.

I think I better stop now and contemplate a blog post to further these
thoughts.


[1]
http://consulting.talis.com/resources/presentations-from-linked-data-and-libraries-2011/
[2]http://consulting.talis.com/2011/07/british-library-data-model-overview/



-- 
Richard Wallis
Technology Evangelist, Talis
http://consulting.talis.com
Tel: +44 (0)7767 886 005

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