Report on the exchange formats applicable to the Registry Service for Libraries and Related Organizations

[Apologies for duplicates]

The Office of Library Co-ordination of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport has published in its institutional repository http://travesia.mcu.es the next report:

“Good practices and strategic recommendations on exchange formats applicable to the Registry Service for Libraries and Related Organizations (SERBER) in a context of open and linked data” 

 http://hdl.handle.net/10421/6561 (English)

 http://hdl.handle.net/10421/6501 (Spanish)


Written by:
Miquel Térmens Graells, Miquel Centelles Velilla (Dept. Biblioteconomía y Documentación. Universidad de Barcelona)

Coordinated by::
Elisa García-Morales  (Infor@rea)
Domingo Arroyo Fernández (Spanish Office of Library Co-ordination)

 

Abstract:

The Office of Library Co-ordination of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (MECD) commissioned the company Infor@rea to draw up a study of the current situation and best practices regarding exchange formats for data to be published in the Registry Service for Libraries and Related Organizations (hereinafter SERBER). This study falls within the framework of the design and implementation of a strategic model for SERBER based on the ISO 2146:2010 standard. 


Section 1 presents the conditions that the project imposes on the data publishing formats and the sources of information used for the study. The conditions include the need to deal in the long term with the data related to the five types of object of the ISO 2146:2010 conceptual model: in addition to the main class “Registry Object”, the subclasses Parties (persons and organizations), Activities, Collections, and Services. The data publishing formats are also limited to those within the open data framework. This section also outlines the three basic questions that the study seeks to answer: what are open standards, what specific formats meet the definition of open standards, and what open formats are suitable for the SERBER project? 


Section 2 defines and delimits the open standard concept according to the European and national regulations on interoperability and reutilization of data in the public sector. These regulations also provide details of the circumstances in which non-open standards can be applied and the criteria for selecting standards.

 
Based on recommendations of national and international specialists, Section 3 considers the specific formats that meet the definition of open standards and the open formats that are suitable for the SERBER project. The three reference formats selected for the SERBER project are CSV, XML and RDF (with its various forms of serialization). RDF allows the incorporation of linked data formats, which requires thorough preliminary planning, including analysis and selection of appropriate vocabularies to describe data.

 
Section 4 presents the results of an exhaustive search and analysis of registry services and directories of libraries and related organizations worldwide that publish data using exchange formats. Ten cases of different types were identified and classified into three groups: registries of libraries and related organizations that apply ISO 2146:2010 and whose main object of description in the conceptual model are parties (persons and organizations); fully operational collection service registries that apply ISO 2146:2010 and whose main object of description in the conceptual model are collections; and finally directories that are designed on the basis of models different to ISO 2146:2010 and therefore do not apply its conceptual model.

 
The last two sections outline the recommendations for publishing open data of the SERBER project, expressed in two successive stages: Stage 1 (Section 5), in which the data will be published in two structured formats, CSV and XML; and the Stage 2 (Section 6), marked by the strategic transition to linked data in the context of the Semantic Web. Section 6 presents the specific steps to be carried out and the immediate benefits that would be obtained by the MECD.

 
Regards,
_________

Domingo Arroyo-Fernández

Office of Library Co-ordination

Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport

Plaza del Rey ,1

28071 Madrid (Spain)

+34 91 701 74 63

domingo.arroyo@mecd.es

Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 08:25:30 UTC