Resource description and access for the digital world

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

2. Resource description and access (1.1) • RDA • Content standard for metadata for bibliographic description and access • Based on 100+ years of experience with the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) and its predecessors • AACR is currently the world’s most used content standard

3. Resource description and access (1.2) • RDA is addressing today’s needs • Wider range of information carriers, physical and digital, with a greater depth and complexity of content • Metadata creation, maintenance and use by a wider range of personnel in a wider range of roles and domains • Many new metadata formats/structures in use • Utility of the online digital environment • Internationalisation and globalisation of information services

4. Resource description and access (1.3) • RDA components include: • Metadata attributes (fields) of bibliographic resources • Guidance on creating metadata content • Including transcription from the described resource • Value vocabularies for specified attributes • Including carrier type (e.g. “online resource”) and content type (e.g. “performed music”) • To be published as an online product in early 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Identifiers • Things requiring identification: • Object “This presentation” • e.g. its electronic location (URL): • http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/pubs/dunsireg/idf080617RDA.pps • Predicate “has creator” • e.g. http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator • Object “Gordon Dunsire” • e.g. URI of entry in Library of Congress Name Authority File • Declaring vocabularies/values in SKOS and OWL provides URIs • DOI and URI are compatible • Without such identifiers, the Web will never become Semantic

14. Identifying the future • The DOI model shares the same underlying ontology approach as the RDA/ONIX framework • 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: • Creating a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, to provide: • A mapping to support metadata crosswalks and transformations • A definitive reference set to support further standards work

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