Quoting Richard Wallis <richard.wal...@talis.com>:
You get the impression that the BL "chose a subset of their current bibliographic data to expose as LD" - it was kind of the other way around. Having modeled the 'things' in the British National Bibliography domain (plus those in related domain vocabularis such as VIAF, LCSH, Geonames, Bio, etc.), they then looked at the information held in their [Marc] bib records to identify what could be extracted to populate it.
Richard, I've been thinking of something along these lines myself, especially as I see the number of "translating X to RDF" projects go on. I begin to wonder what there is in library data that is *unique*, and my conclusion is: not much. Books, people, places, topics: they all exist independently of libraries, and libraries cannot take the credit for creating any of them. So we should be able to say quite a bit about the resources in libraries using shared data points -- and by that I mean, data points that are also used by others. So once you decide on a model (as BL did), then it is a matter of looking *outward* for the data to re-use.
I maintain, however, as per my LITA Forum talk [1] that the subject headings (without talking about quality thereof) and classification designations that libraries provide are an added value, and we should do more to make them useful for discovery.
I know it is only semantics (no pun intended), but we need to stop using the word 'record' when talking about the future description of 'things' or entities that are then linked together. That word has so many built in assumptions, especially in the library world.
I'll let you battle that one out with Simon :-), but I am often at a loss for a better term to describe the unit of metadata that libraries may create in the future to describe their resources. Suggestions highly welcome.
kc [1] http://kcoyle.net/presentations/lita2011.html -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet
