Hi Stephen,

I believe the UCSD folks have put things in a relational database in a
spec-agnostic way (and then they can pull things out as MODS, MARC, or
whatever on the fly when needed).  There is a link below to their GitHub
repository which has some documentation (and slides from a 2013
presentation they gave at that year's Code4Lib conference).

https://github.com/ucsdlib/dams/tree/master/ontology

Hope that helps,

Kevin



On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 1:27 PM, Stephen Schor <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Hullo.
>
> I'm interested to hear about people's approaches for modeling
> repository objects in a normalized, spec-agnostic way, _relational_ way
> while
> maintaining the ability to cast objects as various specs (MODS, Dublin
> Core).
>
> People often resort to storing an object as one specification (the text of
> the MODS for example),
> and then convert it other specs using XSLT or their favorite language,
> using established
> mappings / conversions. (
> http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-conversions.html)
>
> Baking a MODS representation into a database text field can introduce
> problems with queryablity and remediation that I _feel_ would be hedged
> by factoring out information from the XML document, and modeling it
> in a relational DB.
>
> This is idea that's been knocking around in my head for a while.
> I'd like to hear if people have gone down this road...and I'm especially
> eager to hear both success and horror stories about what kind of results
> they got.
>
> Stephen
>



-- 
"There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are
two kinds of people in this world and those who know better."