Introduction

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Hi all
I am Gordon Dunsire, currently working at the Centre for Digital Library
Research at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland – but expecting
to become freelance as of 1 September 2010.
I am a co-Chair of the DCMI RDA Task Group [1] which has the charter "To define
components of the draft standard "RDA - Resource Description and Access" as an
RDF vocabulary for use in developing a Dublin Core application profile." The
Task Group has developed SKOS representations of all the controlled terms used
in RDA for bibliographic metadata description, and RDF/S representations of the
RDA metadata element sets [2]; all are awaiting approval for release by the
Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA. Although RDA has not been used
for any substantive sets of instance data ("records"), it has a lot of backwards
compatibility with the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) and the RDF
representation of the element sets may be a significant tool in parsing the many
millions of instance records created with the application of AACR and Machine
Readable Cataloguing (MARC).
I chair the IFLA Namespaces Task Group which is advising IFLA on Semantic Web
infrastructure and services to support IFLA bibliographic standards, including
dereferencing.
I am a member of IFLA's FRBR Review Group, and am specifically involved in
developing RDF representations of the original FRBR entity-relationship model
[3] and the recently-published FRAD model [4]. The work will also encompass
FRSAD when it is published. This initiative is being used to inform a future
task of the Review Group to develop a consolidated "FR family" model from FRBR,
FRAD, and FRSAD.
I am a member of IFLA's ISBD/XML Task Group which is developing an XML
representation of the consolidated edition of the International Standard
Bibliographic Description (currently undergoing world-wide review). The Group
has decided to develop an RDF/XML representation of the ISBD element set [5] and
controlled vocabularies for resource content and carrier types [6]. Again, this
may be a significant tool in parsing instance records created using ISBD,
particularly in national bibliographies and the catalogues of national
libraries.
I am involved with the Vocabulary Mapping Framework project which has produced a
TTL file which exhausts all classes and properties for modelling bibliographic
products and roles [7]. The VMF matrix is intended as a hub-spoke black box to
which specific community vocabularies can be linked. Yet-to-be-developed
algorithms for processing triples within the matrix could then compute the
"shortest distance" or best-fit between terms in any two vocabularies, avoiding
the need for one2one mappings between products and roles in each pair of
vocabularies.
I was also involved in the High-Level Thesaurus (HILT) project which developed
web services for mapping subject vocabularies in a hub-spoke architecture using
the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as the hub [8]. We have recently
attempted to re-engineer the HILT approach in a linked data environment, with
some limited success (the main problem is the lack of DDC or Universal Decimal
Classification, which is also suitable as a hub, as linked data below the broad
top levels of classification).
I have been cataloguing library materials of all types since 1973, starting with
a manual typewriter and 5x3 cards (and a backlog) ... I am a member of the
CILIP-BL Committee on RDA, the CILIP Committee on DDC, the European RDA Interest
Group, and the European DDC Users Group.
I am motivated by this Incubator Group because I see the Semantic Web and linked
data as the (only) way forward for bibliographic metadata management, which must
encompass metadata generated by end-users, non-library professionals, and
machines, and needs to shift focus from the record to the statement (triple).
 [1] http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/
[2] http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm
[3] http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/5.html
[4] http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/24.html
[5] http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/25.html
[6] http://metadataregistry.org/vocabulary/show/id/113.htmland related
[7] http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/VMF/documents.htm
[8] http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/
Cheers
Gordon