Category: Metadata

A cooperative project, the Vocabulary Mapping Framework, is mapping major metadata standards (CIDOC CRM, DCMI, DDEX, DOI, FRBR, MARC21, LOM, ONIX, and RDA).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The new vocabulary is not intended as a replacement for any existing standards, but as an aid to interoperability, whether automatic or human-mediated. The expanded Framework will include mappings of terms from code lists or allowed value sets in the existing standards to the RDA/ONIX vocabulary, enabling the computation of "best fit" mappings between any pairing of standards. . . .

The work will result in:

• a mapping of vocabularies from the source standards to support the building of crosswalks and transformations between any of them;
• a definitive reference set which editors can draw on when creating and developing standards;
• a downloadable RDF/OWL ontology to support the interchange of metadata content between these major standards, which will be useful to enable automated reuse of metadata from different sources and schemas, to improve the quality and access and reduce the cost of metadata;
• a governance scheme to oversee further development.

The Research Information Network has released Creating Catalogues: Bibliographic Records in a Networked World .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Against this background the RIN report: Creating Catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world, is a very timely overview of the whole process of bibliographic record production for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles. This report follows the production of these data from publisher through a range of intermediaries to the end user. Whilst there are pressures to make these data more freely available, each player in the process has its own motivations and business models in creating, adding to, using or re-using bibliographic data, all of which need to be considered.

We find that there would be considerable benefits if libraries, along with other organisations in the supply chain, were to operate more at the network level but that there are significant barriers in the way of making significant moves in that direction.

Creating Catalogues cannot attempt to solve all the problems in the way of making bibliographic data more freely available for re-use and innovation, or of eliminating wasteful duplication of effort. Our objective is to clarify the key issues and to stimulate debate on possible ways forward. Creating Catalogues provides a number of key recommendations and the RIN will work with the academic library community and other key stakeholders in the supply chain to raise awareness and understanding of the issues raised in this report, of the benefits to be achieved by moving to new models, and of how we might overcome the barriers to achieving them.

The Library of Congress has released the FRBR: Things You Should Know. . . Webcast presented by Barbara Tillett.

Here's an excerpt from the description:

This presentation for non-catalogers is intended to present basic concepts and benefits of using the FRBR conceptual model (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) in resource discovery systems.

The Library of Congress has made its ID.LOC.GOV authorities and vocabularies service publicly available.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Library of Congress has opened its ID.LOC.GOV web service, Authorities and Vocabularies, with the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as the initial offering. The primary goal of this service is to enable machines to programmatically access data at the Library of Congress but the web interface also provides simple user access. We view this service as a step toward exposing and interconnecting vocabulary and thesaurus data via URLs. For LCSH, we are fortunate to have been able to link terms to a similar service provided in Europe for RAMEAU, a French subject heading vocabulary closely coordinated with LCSH.

Gobbledygook has interviewed CrossRef's Geoffrey Bilder about author identifiers.

Here's an excerpt:

Of course, lots of the same issues can be raised with CrossRef, right? What guarantees that CrossRef won’t become evil and co-opt all of our identities? This, of course is the big fear underlining the knee-jerk reaction against "centralized systems" in favor of "distributed systems". The problem with this, as I mentioned in the FriendFeed thread is that my personal and unfashionable observation is that "distributed" begets "centralized." For every distributed service created, we’ve then had to create a centralized service to make it useable again (ICANN, Google, Pirate Bay, CrossRef, DOAJ, ticTocs, WorldCat, etc.). This gets us back to square one and makes me think the real issue is- how do you make the centralized system that eventually emerges accountable? This is, of course, a social issue more than a technical issue and involves making sure that whatever entity emerges has clearly defined data portability policies and a "living will" that attempts to guarantee that the service can be run in perpetuity- even if by another organization. For the record, I don’t think adopting the slogan "don’t be evil" is enough ;).

Moritz Riede, Rico Schueppel, Kristian O. Sylvester-Hvid, et al. have self-archived "On the Communication of Scientific Results: The Full-Metadata Format" in arXiv.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper, we introduce a scientific format for text-based data files, which facilitates storing and communicating tabular data sets. The so-called Full-Metadata Format builds on the widely used INI-standard and is based on four principles: readable self-documentation, flexible structure, fail-safe compatibility, and searchability. As a consequence, all metadata required to interpret the tabular data are stored in the same file, allowing for the automated generation of publication-ready tables and graphs and the semantic searchability of data file collections. The Full-Metadata Format is introduced on the basis of three comprehensive examples. The complete format and syntax is given in the appendix.