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On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Walker, David <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Your criticisms of MARC-XML all seem to presume that MARC-XML is the > goal, the end point in the process. But MARC-XML is really better seen as a > utility, a middle step between binary MARC and the real goal, which is some > other "useful and interesting" XML schema. How do you create an ontological commitment in a community to an expanding and useful set of tools and vocabularies? I think I need to remind people of what MARCXML is supposed to be ; "a framework for working with MARC data in a XML environment. This framework is intended to be flexible and extensible to allow users to work with MARC data in ways specific to their needs. The framework itself includes many components such as schemas, stylesheets, and software tools." I'm not assuming MARCXML is a goal, no matter how we define that. I'm poo-pooing MARCXML for the semantics we, as a community, have been given by a process I suspect had goals very different from reality. Very few people would "work with MARC through MARCXML", they would use it to convert it, filter it, hack around it to something else entirely. And I'm afraid lots of people are missing the point of stubbing the developments in a community by embracing tools that pushes a packet that inhibits innovation. So, here's the point, in paraphrased point; "Here's our new thing. And we did it by simply converting all our MARC into MARCXML that runs on a cron job every midnight, and a bit of horrendous XSLT that's impossible to maintain." "But it looks just like the old thing using MARC and some templates?" "Ah yes, but now we're doing it in XML!" (Yeah, yeah, your mileage will vary) I'm sorry if I'm overly pessimistic about the XML goodness in the world, not for the XML itself, but the consequences of the named entities involved. I've been a die-hard XML wonk for far too many years, and the tools in that tool-chest doesn't automatically solve hard problems better by wrapping stuff up in angle brackets, and - dare I say it? - perhaps introduces a whole fleet of other problems rarely talked about when XML is the latest buzz-word, like using a document model on what's a traditional records model, character encodings, whitespace issues, unicode, size and efficiencies (the other part of this thread), and so on. But let me also be a bit more specific about that hard semantic problem I'm talking about; Lots of people around the library world infra-structure will think that since your data is now in XML it has taken some important step towards being inter-operable with the rest of the world, that library data now is part of the real world in *any* meaningful way, but this is simply demonstrably deceivingly not true. By having our data in XML has killed a few good projects where people have gone "A new project to convert our MARC into useful XML? Aha! LoC has already solved that problem for us." Btw, to those who find me so obnoxious, at no point do I say it was intentionally evil, just evil none the same. The road to hell is, as always, paved with good intentions. Alex -- Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps --- http://shelter.nu/blog/ ---------------------------------------------- ------------------ http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen ---