RDA element vocabularies

[Haffner, Alexander]

Hello everyone,

my name is Alexander Haffner and I started working at German National
Library in September 2009. I am involved as a research fellow in the
competence centre for interoperable metadata and I am responsible for
investigations regarding a fitting integration of RDA compliant metadata
for the Semantic Web in the German National Library landscape.

Last week I gave a presentation about RDA and the Semantic Web in the
Library Community Session at DC-2009 (slides online soon). During my
preparation I ran into some trouble and misunderstandings regarding the
RDA Element Sets. In the presentation I  tried to bridge the idea out of
RDA Element Analysis (www.rda-jsc.org/docs/5rda-elementanalysisrev3.pdf)
and the registered elements in the NSDL Registry. 
For example, I cannot understand why
rda:publicationStatementManifestation and
rda:publishersNameManifestation are specified as properties (property
and its sub-property) with domain manifestation. Because out of my point
of view rda:publicationStatementManifestation has to be of type class
and has to offer a property rda:publishersNameManifestation. Because the
RDA Element Analysis clarifies that these element sub-element
relationships reflect composite patterns and so we have to find
mechanisms to describe these aggregations in our schema too.

Together with Alistair Miles I discussed my concerns and he shard my
doubts. So I would appreciate to get some feedback regarding your
decision making. Furthermore, I want to offer my contribution for the
finalization of the RDA Element Vocabularies. So don't hesitate to
involve me. 

Additionally, I'd like to mention that we intend the development of a
transformation from MARC to RDA metadata (in the beginning as proof of
concept). Alistair already created an account to code4rda. In this
context I'd like to know if there are any parallel efforts in this field
I don't know yet.

Thanks in advance for your support and best regards from Frankfurt,
Alexander



--
Alexander Haffner
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek 
Informationstechnik
Adickesallee 1
D-60322 Frankfurt am Main
Telefon: +49-69-1525-1766
Telefax: +49-69-1525-1799
mailto:a.haff...@d-nb.de
http://www.d-nb.de