Resource description and access for the digital world

Resource description and access for the digital world Gordon Dunsire Centre for Digital Library Research University of Strathclyde Scotland

Resource description and access (1. 1) ² RDA ²Content standard for metadata for bibliographic description and access ²Based on 100+ years of experience with the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) and its predecessors ²AACR is currently the world’s most used content standard

Resource description and access (1. 2) ² RDA is addressing today’s needs ²Wider range of information carriers, physical and digital, with a greater depth and complexity of content ²Metadata creation, maintenance and use by a wider range of personnel in a wider range of roles and domains ²Many new metadata formats/structures in use ²Utility of the online digital environment ²Internationalisation and globalisation of information services

Resource description and access (1. 3) ² RDA components include: ²Metadata attributes (fields) of bibliographic resources ²Guidance on creating metadata content ²Including transcription from the described resource ²Value vocabularies for specified attributes ²Including carrier type (e. g. “online resource”) and content type (e. g. “performed music”) ² To be published as an online product in early 2009

Resource description and access (2) ² The wider environment ²International Standard for Bibliographic Description (ISBD) and Statement of International Cataloguing Principles ²(Mostly) harmonious with RDA ²Wider set of related standards developments which are becoming increasingly interlinked

RDA and related standards (1) ² RDA attributes are based on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) ²Developed by IFLA (FRAD in draft) ² FRBR recently extended to Object-oriented FRBR (FRBRoo) ²Based on CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) ² Project to define appropriate namespaces for FRBR entities and relationships in Resource Description Framework (RDF) and other appropriate syntaxes

RDA and related standards (2) ² RDA/ONIX framework ²An ontology developed by RDA and the publishing community to improve metadata interoperability ²Set of low-level attributes for describing the content and carrier of a bibliographic resource ²Controlled vocabularies for some attributes ²Attributes combined to form high-level content and carrier types for RDA

RDA and related standards (3) ² DCMI/RDA Task Group ²Enabling broader use of RDA by DCMI and other Semantic Web groups ²Including SKOS, IEEE-LOM ²Define RDA modelling entities as an RDF vocabulary ²Identify value vocabularies as candidates for publication in RDF Schema or Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) ²Develop a DC Application Profile for RDA based on FRBR and FRAD

Some links ONIX FRBR DC RDA RDA MARC FRBRoo CRM FRBRoo FRBR ISBD RDA

The chain(s) CRM FRBRoo FRBR ISBD ONIX RDA MARC DC

Foundations ² Semantic Web ² RDF (Resource Description Framework) ² Statements about Web resources in the form of subjectpredicate-object expressions, called triples ² E. g. “This presentation” – “has creator” – “Gordon Dunsire” ² SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) ² Expresses the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri and other types of controlled vocabularies ² An RDF application ² OWL (Web Ontology Language) ² Explicitly represents the meaning of terms in vocabularies and the relationships between them

Building blocks ² Each component of an RDF statement (triple) is a “resource” ² RDF is about making machine-processable statements, requiring ²A machine-processable language for representing RDF statements ²Extensible Markup Language (XML) ²A system of machine-processable identifiers for resources (subjects, predicates, objects) ²Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) ² For full machine-processing, an RDF statement is a set of three URIs

Identifiers ² Things requiring identification: ² Object “This presentation” ² e. g. its electronic location (URL): ² http: //cdlr. strath. ac. uk/pubs/dunsireg/idf 080617 RDA. pps ² Predicate “has creator” ² e. g. http: //purl. org/dc/terms/creator ² Object “Gordon Dunsire” ² e. g. URI of entry in Library of Congress Name Authority File ² Declaring vocabularies/values in SKOS and OWL provides URIs ² DOI and URI are compatible ² Without such identifiers, the Web will never become Semantic

Identifying the future ² The DOI model shares the same underlying ontology approach as the RDA/ONIX framework ² A funding bid, supported by IDF, has been submitted to the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee/Publishers and Library/Learning Solutions (JISC/PALS) partnership, to extend the framework by: ²Creating a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, to provide: ²A mapping to support metadata crosswalks and transformations ²A definitive reference set to support further standards work

Thank you ² Questions? ² Another identifier: g. dunsire@strath. ac. uk