I have to eat some crow, and I hope somebody here can give me some advice for
transforming MARC to RDF.
I am in the midst of writing a book describing the benefits of linked data for
archives. Archival metadata usually comes in two flavors: EAD and MARC. I found
a nifty XSL stylesheet from the Archives Hub (that’s in the United Kingdom)
transforming EAD to RDF/XML. [1] With a bit of customization I think it could
be used quite well for just about anybody with EAD files. I have retained a
resulting RDF/XML file online. [2]
Converting MARC to RDF has been more problematic. There are various tools
enabling me to convert my original MARC into MARCXML and/or MODS. After that I
can reportably use a few tools to convert to RDF:
* MARC21slim2RDFDC.xsl [3] - functions, but even for
my tastes the resulting RDF is too vanilla. [4]
* modsrdf.xsl [5] - optimal, but when I use my
transformation engine (Saxon), I do not get XML
but rather plain text
* BIBFRAME Tools [6] - sports nice ontologies, but
the online tools won’t scale for large operations
In short, I have discovered nothing that is “easy-to-use”. Can you provide me
with any other links allowing me to convert MARC to serialized RDF?
[1] ead2rdf.xsl - http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/xslt/ead2rdf.xsl
[2] transformed EAD file - http://infomotions.com/tmp/una-ano.rdf
[3] MARC21slim2RDFDC.xsl -
http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/xslt/MARC21slim2RDFDC.xsl
[4] vanilla RDF - http://infomotions.com/tmp/pamphlets.rdf
[5] modsrdf.xsl -
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/modsrdf/xsl-files/modsrdf.xsl
[6] BIBFRAME Tools - http://bibframe.org/tools/transform/start
—
Eric Lease Morgan
