Modelling library, catalogue, record, and item

Hi,

I quickly hacked an RDF wrapper to some of our bibliographic databases. 
just a few million records. There is no SPARQL, content negotiation etc. 
because I first want to fix the model.

Maybe you can have a look at this entry (in Turtle syntax)

http://uri.gbv.de/database/opac-de-7:ppn:609060929

I found there are at least four entities to model, but the existing 
ontologies are pretty disappointing for library data:


1.) The record in a library catalog:
http://uri.gbv.de/database/opac-de-7:ppn:609060929


2.) The publication that is described by the library record. I used a 
blank node to model this, because known identifiers (such as ISBN) are 
not as unique as they seem to be. I hesitated to make this a 
bibo:Document from the Bibliographic ontology, because the latter says 
"A document (noun) is a bounded physical representation of body of 
information". But we also have non-physical publications. The right 
class could be frbr:work, frbr:expression, or frbr:manifestation, but 
also skos:Concept, depending on the record.


3.) The library catalog as whole:
http://uri.gbv.de/database/opac-de-7

The best classes I found to models library catalogues are:

cdtype:CatalogueOrIndex as described at
http://dublincore.org/groups/collections/collection-application-profile/

and void:Dataset from voiD as described at http://vocab.deri.ie/void/


4.) The library as institution:
info:isil/DE-7
http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-7

ISIL is an *international* system to uniquely identify libraries, so we 
should use this instead of local systems like the American OCLC- or 
WorldCat identifiers.


Note that the pysical holding is *not* included in this model yet - some 
people think that physical objects are the core of library data, but 
they are only the most visible part. Apparently current ontologies, that 
aim at library data, have a narrow focus on physical documents.

Jakob

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss@gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de

Received on Monday, 13 December 2010 16:23:28 UTC