Basic schema.org / RDFa Lite library catalog for your amusement / derision

Hey folks: 

One of my action items, if I recall correctly, was to provide a publicly accessible catalog publishing schema.org microdata and RDFa Lite based on in-the-wild library data. 

Therefore, see the following: 

* schema.org: http://laurentian-test.concat.ca (this is pretty much what you get from Evergreen for schema.org out-of-the-box - such as it is) 
* RDFa Lite: http://rdfa_lite_test.concat.ca (this is a naive, fast as possible variation on the Evergreen schema.org microdata that uses the schema.org vocabulary and nothing more) 

The microdata is not exposed at any level other than the record details page, so you can search for your favourite kind of record and drill down from there to compare. For example: 

Book: http://laurentian-test.concat.ca/eg/opac/record/858351 vs. http://rdfa_lite_test.concat.ca/eg/opac/record/858351 
MusicRecording: http://laurentian-test.concat.ca/eg/opac/record/854855 vs. http://rdfa_lite_test.concat.ca/eg/opac/record/854855 

Oh, that's actually it for mappings from MARC to schema.org CreativeWorks at this point. I'd be happy to model more for notated music, etc, based on the group's suggestions, but I'm starting basic and working up from there. 

I've done some tests with Google's rich snippets testing tool ( http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets ), the w3c Nu validator ( http://validator.w3.org/nu ), and the RDFa extractor ( http://getschema.org/index.php/Main_Page ). The Nu validator, as you would expect, is grumpy about violations of even the HTML5 markup but doesn't seem to complain about the RDFa Lite implementation; the other tools seem quite happy with both the schema.org and RDFa Lite versions. 

Some notes about the underlying data: 
* Most of the records were copy catalogued from a variety of sources, but there is some original cataloguing in the mix. 
* The data is from a mid-sized bilingual academic institution and reflects a fairly broad range of subjects and materials. Yes, we have catalogued realia (puppets for our education school). 

I've stored the RDFa Lite implementation for Evergreen in git at http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/dbs/rdfa_lite - currently the top commit is all that I needed to get the (very basic) version rolling, as it's a light customization layer on top of the base Evergreen skin. We use Perl's Template::Toolkit as the basis of our catalogue web UI, in case anyone wants to take a shot at taking this further. The Open-ILS/src/templates/opac directory contains the base layer for the catalogue, and the Open-ILS/src/templates_rdfa directory overlays its templates when you visit rdfa_lite_test.concat.ca. If I had more time, I could & would have abstracted things out a bit so that switching from schema.org to RDFa Lite was just a matter of throwing a config switch rather than touching a handful of templates. Oh well! 

Apologies overall for the hastiness of the implementation and just throwing this semi-structured email onto the list; this week I'm in lockdown for 12 hours a day at a documentation sprint (thanks, Google and FLOSS Manuals) which isn't leaving much time or brainpower for anything else. 

Thanks, 
Dan