[openbiblio-dev] The Genero project

Wed Apr 6 14:05:57 UTC 2011

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Primavera De Filippi
<pdefilippi at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
> I personally think it would be great to open up a discussion on
> establishing a standard that best represents metadata in a database.
> I understand that Bibliographica currently uses rdf / Dublin Core, together
> with the BIBO ontology for works and the FOAF ontology for physical or legal
> entities.. is that right ?
> It could be interesting to check whether and how we can represent all the
> information needed by the various projects that could benefit from such a
> common standard.
>

Yes, RDF is the emerging standard of choice for linked open data. I know
JSON is easy to use and RDF can be complicated, but RDF is very solid and I
would recommend building a standard upon RDF. IT is entirely possible to set
up translators though, if that is required.

>
> Different projects might have some specific requirements which are
> currently not necessarily taken into account by Bibliographica current data
> model,
> e.g. for the public domain calculator, we need a lot of metadata such as:
> the type of work, the birth/death date of the authors, its nationality, the
> publisher, the date of creation, the degree of originality, the date of
> creation, last modification, etc ...
> whereas the genero project might also be interested in licensing terms and
> in the format of the different instances of a work, etc...
>

I think the scope of the project and its links more to open data than to
conventional bibliographic models merits a "reset". Once we have defined the
outlines, we start "dressing the skeleton" layer by layer using existing
models and naming.

>
> Obviously this is a lot of information and we most likely do not have all
> of this information at the moment, but creating a proper datatype that
> properly organizes all the relevant information could be really helpful to
> find out the kind of information we are (still) missing so as to focus our
> efforts in obtaining the right kind of information.
>
> Do you think it would be possible to set up a small task-force to work on
> this kind of issues?
>

I would love that. I would be a part of it (naturally), and I would try and
get some Norwegian librarians and/or metadata professionals and Wiki folks
to participate. First order of business would be recruiting a team that
could create a model that would be accepted by the various environments.

Øystein
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