Quoting Benjamin A Abrahamse <babra...@mit.edu>:
This is perhaps only tangentially RDA-related.
...
But if it was possible to convert MARC data into RDF-like
statements, we could move away from what I see as a lot of the
unnecessary work of thinking about and comparing *records* instead
of thinking about data points. Instead of building and maintaining
large stores of records, or trying to perform the Sisyphysian task
of making a single standard for the one "best" record in each and
every circumstance is, we could focus on building networks of
cataloging institutions who have shared needs or interests (similar
userbases, collections, etc.) and getting the best (that is, most
appropriate to the particular needs of our institutions) data
available.
YES YES YES! It should make our data more re-usable/exchangeable
because individual statements can be used as needed, even if the whole
"record" isn't wanted. AS an example, libraries and publishers could
share those data elements that they do have in common, while ignoring
all of the things they don't. Libraries only care about the height of
a book, but publishers need all three dimensions plus weight because
they have to ship them out in large quantities. That fact shouldn't
mean that we can't pull in the ISBN and publication year from the
publishers' records.
This is not so tangential to RDA, in my mind. Because we do need to
create RDA "data", and RDA has based itself on FRBR, and FRBR is based
on an entity-relation model, which is much closer to the semantic web
model than the unit-record model of AACR and MARC. The upshot being
that RDA defines relationships between entites, and those
relationships could become the basis for a thing/relationship-based
data carrier, rather than the unit-record that we have now. The
difference between Scenario 1 and Scenario 0 is that in scenario 1 the
relationships are only between entities (and the entities look like
complex records), while in scenario 0 the relationships are at a more
granular level, between all of the elements of the bibliographic
description. So rather than just having a Work that relates to an
Expression, you have relationships between all of the attributes of
the work: author, title, subjects, form. It just takes the model down
a level. And it means that the relationships, like "author of" are
explicit.
Which I think is how this thread got started, if I look up to the
subject line: RDA relationships.
Now my head is swimming, so I better take a break.
Oh, BTW: http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm defines the RDA
elements in a semantic web-compatible way. But we still need tools to
create the data.
kc
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Karen Coyle
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