Thank you for this clarification, MJ. I apologize for my initial
reaction that there was little value here. Knowing the use-case you
define below, I think there's a great deal of value.
Beyond just the pragmatic short-term gains, I think a development like
this would help pin-point those areas where said schema functionally
requires semantics beyond those in the DCTERMS. All the better if some
of those terms just happen to be available in Bibliontology or some
other namespace...
Thanks again,
-Corey
MJ Suhonos wrote:
Let me give another example: the Open Library API returns a JSON tree, eg.
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL1M.json
But what schema is this? And if it doesn't conform to a standard schema, does
that make it useless? If it were based on DCTERMS, at least I'd have a
reference at http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ to define the
semantics being used (and an RDF namespace at http://purl.org/dc/terms/ to
boot).
Ah, after my own heart! I have tried to convince the OL folks to translate
their data to dcterms, even did a crosswalk for them. Right now they're in
panic mode over a major milestone, but once that's over I may ping you to make
this request directly to them on one of their lists. If they only hear it from
me, it might just be a personal quirk of mine, right?
See, we're on the same page after all. :-)
Considering one of my primary use cases is direct interoperation with Open
Library then yes, I'm all over it. I'll at least harass Edward and the OL list
that DC output is important to others beyond just you alone.
I was starting to get discouraged, but now I realize that many of you thought I
was proposing DCTERMS as a replacement for MARC; not at all.
Imagine Open Library's internal data schema being an easily-serializable model
based on DCTERMS. Now imagine every library has a queryable API exactly like
theirs. That's where I'm going, and I think (answering my own question above)
that it *is* potentially useful.
p.s. The JSON API output doesn't require any programming when it uses their
data elements; it does do crosswalk to dcterms.... that's been the hangup. Then
again... their code is open source, the crosswalk I did is linked from the
launchpad entry here [1] so if anyone wants to contribute�
Unfortunately I'm not adept at Python, so writing the code by hand is probably
a bit beyond me at this point. But it might make a fun
learn-Python-in-a-rainy-weekend project.
MJ
--
Corey A Harper
Metadata Services Librarian
New York University Libraries
20 Cooper Square, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10003-7112
212.998.2479
[email protected]
