Re: [Refdb-users] new bibliographic data schema proposal

[Bruce D'A. <bda...@gm...>]

On 4/27/06, Markus Hoenicka <mar...@mh...> wrote:

> tHowever, as I noticed previously I have to record the distinction
> between e.g. an abstract and an article published in a journal, although =
this
> is the very same according to your model.

IIRC, I have Abstract as a subclass of article in my RDF schema . So
it does gets its own type.

> > The problem is that this level business comes from librarians, who in
> > fact a) have different metadata needs than scholera (their focus is
> > the "monographic"), and b) have moved on to more advanced modelling as
> > witnessed in MODS, and in particular, FRBR. Nowhere will you find in
> > those models hard-coded notions like part and monograph/publication.
>
> In MODS, they shamefully insert a "monographic" into the issuance element=
 of the
> origin information of a monographic item. If you have an item a "is_part_=
of"
> item b, you could not tell whether to format it as an analytical item tha=
t
> appeared in a monograph or as a monographic item that appeared in a serie=
s
> unless you mark one of the items as a monograph. And I don't see why this
> should not be done explicitly.

Yes, I agree.

To explain, I'm just using RDF -- the model and the class sytem -- to
achieve this.

So if you look at the schema (http://purl.org/net/biblio), you'lll see
Collection as a top-level class. Periodical is a subclass of
Collection, and Journal of Periodical.

Representing in XML/RDF, you then have:

<Article rdf:about=3D"info:doi/343254254556557x">
  <title>Whatever</title>
  <publishedIn rdf:resource=3D"urn:issn:2343-2314"/>
</Article>

<Journal rdf:about=3D"urn:issn:2343-2314">
  <title>Some Journal</title>
</Journal>

This is the RDF approach to data normalization, but you coulld also do:

<Article rdf:about=3D"info:doi/343254254556557x">
  <title>Whatever</title>
  <publishedIn>
    <Journal>
      <title>Some Journal</title>
   </Journal>
  </publishedIn>
</Article>

I started looking into RDF seriously after having finished my book and
going through and trying to fix a lot of my MODS data. I realized it
was hard to normalize it (in the XML), in part because MODS isn't RDF.
You can see the results of the conversion here:

<http://www.users.muohio.edu/darcusb/meta/references/>

I've now upgraded citeproc to format this stuff.

The OpenDocument group at OASIS (which I am part of now) has been
looking into using RDF to provide an extensible metadata system in the
format, something like Adobe's XMP (which is an RDF subset). The fact
that RDF has a simple and clear model makes extension trivial; it's
designed for mixing data.

Bruce